This is great thanks. It seems like someone wanting a large team of existing people with technical talent is a reason to not work somewhere like Yale. But what are the chances that the presence of lots of money and smart people would make this possible in the future? Is Yale working on strengthening its cs department? One of my ideas behind this post is that being the first person doing certain work in a department that has potential might have some advantages compared to being the 5th in a department that has already realized it’s potential. An ai safety professor at Yale might get invited to a lot of things, have little competition for advisees, be more uniquely known within Yale, and provide advocacy for ai safety in a way that counterfactually would not happen otherwise at the university.
I think this is all true, but also since Yale CS is ranked poorly the graduate students are not very strong for the most part. You certainly have less competition for them if you are a professor, but my impression is few top graduate students want to go to Yale. In fact, my general impression is often the undergraduates are stronger researchers than the graduate students (and then they go on to PhDs at higher ranked places than Yale).
Yale is working on strengthening its CS department and it certainly has a lot of money to do that. But there are a lot of reasons that I am not that optimistic. There is essentially no tech scene in New Haven, New Haven is not that great in general, the Yale CS building is extremely dingy (I think this has an actual effect on people), and it’s really hard to affect the status quo. However, I’m more optimistic that Yale will successfully forge a niche of interdisciplinary research, which is really a strength of the university.
This is great thanks. It seems like someone wanting a large team of existing people with technical talent is a reason to not work somewhere like Yale. But what are the chances that the presence of lots of money and smart people would make this possible in the future? Is Yale working on strengthening its cs department? One of my ideas behind this post is that being the first person doing certain work in a department that has potential might have some advantages compared to being the 5th in a department that has already realized it’s potential. An ai safety professor at Yale might get invited to a lot of things, have little competition for advisees, be more uniquely known within Yale, and provide advocacy for ai safety in a way that counterfactually would not happen otherwise at the university.
I think this is all true, but also since Yale CS is ranked poorly the graduate students are not very strong for the most part. You certainly have less competition for them if you are a professor, but my impression is few top graduate students want to go to Yale. In fact, my general impression is often the undergraduates are stronger researchers than the graduate students (and then they go on to PhDs at higher ranked places than Yale).
Yale is working on strengthening its CS department and it certainly has a lot of money to do that. But there are a lot of reasons that I am not that optimistic. There is essentially no tech scene in New Haven, New Haven is not that great in general, the Yale CS building is extremely dingy (I think this has an actual effect on people), and it’s really hard to affect the status quo. However, I’m more optimistic that Yale will successfully forge a niche of interdisciplinary research, which is really a strength of the university.