Appreciate the recommendation. Around April 1st I decided that the “work remotely for an alignment org” thing probably wouldn’t work out the way I wanted it to, and switched to investigating “on-site” options—I’ll write up a full post on that when I’ve either succeeded or failed on that score.
On a mostly unrelated note, every time I see an EA job posting that pays at best something like 40-50% of what qualified candidates would get in the industry, I feel that collide with the “we are not funding constrained” messaging. I understand that there are reasons why EA orgs may not want to advertise themselves as paying top-of-market, but nobody’s outright said that’s what’s going on, and there could be other less-visible bottlenecks that I haven’t observed yet.
For what it’s worth I was in a similar boat, I’ve long wanted to work on applied alignment, but also stay in Australia for family reasons. Each time I changed job I’ve made the same search as you, and ended up just getting a job where I can apply some ML to industry. Just so that I can remain close to the field.
For all the call for alignment researchers, most org’s seem hesitant to do the obvious thing which would really expand their talent pool. Which is open up to remote work.
Obviously they struggle to manage and communicate remotely, which prevents them from accessing a larger and cheaper pool of global talent. However they could accelerate alignment by merely supplementing with remote contractors or learning to manage remote work.
For what it’s worth, I’ve updated somewhat against the viability of remote work here (mostly for contingent reasons—the less “shovel-ready” work is, the more of a penalty I think you end up paying for trying to do it remotely, due to communication overhead). See here for the latest update :)
Appreciate the recommendation. Around April 1st I decided that the “work remotely for an alignment org” thing probably wouldn’t work out the way I wanted it to, and switched to investigating “on-site” options—I’ll write up a full post on that when I’ve either succeeded or failed on that score.
On a mostly unrelated note, every time I see an EA job posting that pays at best something like 40-50% of what qualified candidates would get in the industry, I feel that collide with the “we are not funding constrained” messaging. I understand that there are reasons why EA orgs may not want to advertise themselves as paying top-of-market, but nobody’s outright said that’s what’s going on, and there could be other less-visible bottlenecks that I haven’t observed yet.
For what it’s worth I was in a similar boat, I’ve long wanted to work on applied alignment, but also stay in Australia for family reasons. Each time I changed job I’ve made the same search as you, and ended up just getting a job where I can apply some ML to industry. Just so that I can remain close to the field.
For all the call for alignment researchers, most org’s seem hesitant to do the obvious thing which would really expand their talent pool. Which is open up to remote work.
Obviously they struggle to manage and communicate remotely, which prevents them from accessing a larger and cheaper pool of global talent. However they could accelerate alignment by merely supplementing with remote contractors or learning to manage remote work.
For what it’s worth, I’ve updated somewhat against the viability of remote work here (mostly for contingent reasons—the less “shovel-ready” work is, the more of a penalty I think you end up paying for trying to do it remotely, due to communication overhead). See here for the latest update :)