Great question! I agree that the mentorship bottleneck is important & any new programs will have to have a plan for how to deal with it. I have four specific thoughts:
First, I’d be excited to see more programs that experiment with different styles of mentorship/training. MATS has an apprenticeship model (each mentee gets assigned to a mentor). There are lots of other models out there (e.g., Refine), and some of these involve a lower need for mentors.
Second, I would be surprised if any single program was able to fully tap into the pool of possible mentors. My impression is that there are a lot of “medium-experience” alignment researchers who could already take mentees. (In graduate school, it’s common for experienced graduate students to mentor undergraduates, for instance).
Fourth, I (tentatively/not with a ton of confidence) think that it’s desirable to have more competition. I’m generally worried about people thinking “oh X program exists, so I shouldn’t do anything in that space.” It’s trickier with mentorship programs (because of the mentor bottleneck), but I wouldn’t be too surprised if some mentors were open to experimenting with new programs. I also wouldn’t be surprised if, say, 5 years from now, there was an entirely different program that was the dominant player in the alignment mentorship space. (Or if MATS was still the dominant player but it looked extremely different).
(Thanks for your comment by the way. I think this nudged me to be more specific with what I meant, and point #4 is the only one that’s explicitly about direct competition).
Great question! I agree that the mentorship bottleneck is important & any new programs will have to have a plan for how to deal with it. I have four specific thoughts:
First, I’d be excited to see more programs that experiment with different styles of mentorship/training. MATS has an apprenticeship model (each mentee gets assigned to a mentor). There are lots of other models out there (e.g., Refine), and some of these involve a lower need for mentors.
Second, I would be surprised if any single program was able to fully tap into the pool of possible mentors. My impression is that there are a lot of “medium-experience” alignment researchers who could already take mentees. (In graduate school, it’s common for experienced graduate students to mentor undergraduates, for instance).
Third, different programs can tap into different target audiences. Ex: PIBBSS and Philosophy Fellowship.
Fourth, I (tentatively/not with a ton of confidence) think that it’s desirable to have more competition. I’m generally worried about people thinking “oh X program exists, so I shouldn’t do anything in that space.” It’s trickier with mentorship programs (because of the mentor bottleneck), but I wouldn’t be too surprised if some mentors were open to experimenting with new programs. I also wouldn’t be surprised if, say, 5 years from now, there was an entirely different program that was the dominant player in the alignment mentorship space. (Or if MATS was still the dominant player but it looked extremely different).
(Thanks for your comment by the way. I think this nudged me to be more specific with what I meant, and point #4 is the only one that’s explicitly about direct competition).