For practical purposes, I’d say the pandemic is already over. MIRI isn’t doing much hiring, though it’s doing a little. The two big things we feel bottlenecked on are:
(1) people who can generate promising new alignment ideas. (By far the top priority, but seems empirically rare.)
(2) competent executives who are unusually good at understanding the kinds of things MIRI is trying to do, and who can run their own large alignment projects mostly-independently.
For 2, I think the best way to get hired by MIRI is to prove your abilities via the Visible Thoughts Project. The post there says a bit more about the kind of skills we’re looking for:
Eliezer has a handful of ideas that seem to me worth pursuing, but for all of them to be pursued, we need people who can not only lead those projects themselves, but who can understand the hope-containing heart of the idea with relatively little Eliezer-interaction, and develop a vision around it that retains the shred of hope and doesn’t require constant interaction and course-correction on our part. (This is, as far as I can tell, a version of the Hard Problem of finding good founders, but with an additional constraint of filtering for people who have affinity for a particular project, rather than people who have affinity for some project of their own devising.)
For 1, I suggest initially posting your research ideas to LessWrong, in line with John Wentworth’s advice. New ideas and approaches are desperately needed, and we would consider it crazy to not fund anyone whose ideas or ways-of-thinking-about-the-problem we think have a shred of hope in them. We may fund them via working at MIRI, or via putting them in touch with external funders; the important thing is just that the research happens.
If you want to work on alignment but you don’t fall under category 1 or 2, you might consider applying to work at Redwood Research (https://www.redwoodresearch.org/jobs), which is a group doing alignment research we like. They’re much more hungry for engineers right now than we are.
For practical purposes, I’d say the pandemic is already over. MIRI isn’t doing much hiring, though it’s doing a little. The two big things we feel bottlenecked on are:
(1) people who can generate promising new alignment ideas. (By far the top priority, but seems empirically rare.)
(2) competent executives who are unusually good at understanding the kinds of things MIRI is trying to do, and who can run their own large alignment projects mostly-independently.
For 2, I think the best way to get hired by MIRI is to prove your abilities via the Visible Thoughts Project. The post there says a bit more about the kind of skills we’re looking for:
For 1, I suggest initially posting your research ideas to LessWrong, in line with John Wentworth’s advice. New ideas and approaches are desperately needed, and we would consider it crazy to not fund anyone whose ideas or ways-of-thinking-about-the-problem we think have a shred of hope in them. We may fund them via working at MIRI, or via putting them in touch with external funders; the important thing is just that the research happens.
If you want to work on alignment but you don’t fall under category 1 or 2, you might consider applying to work at Redwood Research (https://www.redwoodresearch.org/jobs), which is a group doing alignment research we like. They’re much more hungry for engineers right now than we are.
Thank you. Did you know that the software engineer job posting is still accessible on your website, from the https://intelligence.org/research-guide/ page, though not from the https://intelligence.org/get-involved/#careers page? And your careers page says the pandemic is still on.
I did not! Thanks for letting me know. :) Those pages are updated now.