Having read this post, I am still not sure what “the Middle Child Phenomenon” actually is, nor why it’s called that.
The name suggests something rather general. But most of the post seems like maybe the definition is something like “the fact that there isn’t a vigorous effort to get law students informed about artificial intelligence”.
Except that there’s also all the stuff about the distribution of talent and interests among law students, and another thing I don’t understand is what that actually has to do with it. If (as I’m maybe 75% confident) the main point of the post is that it would be valuable to have law students learn something about AI because public policy tends to be strongly influenced by lawyers, then it seems like this point would be equally strong regardless of how your cohort of 1000 lawyers is distributed between dropouts, nobodies, all-rounders, CV-chasers, and “golden children”. (I am deeply unconvinced by this classification, by the way, but I am not a lawyer myself and maybe it’s more accurate than it sounds.)
Alignment researchers are the youngest child, and programmers/Open AI computer scientists are the eldest child. Law students/lawyers are the middle child, pretty simple.
It doesn’t matter whether you use 10,000 students, or 100, the percentage being embarrassingly small remains the same. I’ve simply used the categorisation to illustrate quickly to non-lawyers what the general environment looks like currently.
“golden children” is a parody of the Golden Circle, a running joke that you need to be perfect, God’s gift to earth sort of perfect, to get into a Big 5 law firm in the UK.
Yes , I know what the middle-child phenomenon is in the more literal context. I just don’t have any idea why you’re using the term here. I don’t see any similarities between the oldest / middle / youngest child relationships in a family and whatever relationships there might be between programmers / lawyers / alignment researchers.
(I think maybe all you actually mean is “these people are more important than we’re treating them as”. Might be true, but that isn’t a phenomenon, it’s just a one-off judgement that a particular group of people are being neglected.)
I still don’t understand why the distribution of talent/success/whatever among law students is relevant. If your point is that very few of them are going to be in a position to make a difference to AI policy then surely that actually argues against your main claim that law students should be getting more attention from people who care about AI.
Having read this post, I am still not sure what “the Middle Child Phenomenon” actually is, nor why it’s called that.
The name suggests something rather general. But most of the post seems like maybe the definition is something like “the fact that there isn’t a vigorous effort to get law students informed about artificial intelligence”.
Except that there’s also all the stuff about the distribution of talent and interests among law students, and another thing I don’t understand is what that actually has to do with it. If (as I’m maybe 75% confident) the main point of the post is that it would be valuable to have law students learn something about AI because public policy tends to be strongly influenced by lawyers, then it seems like this point would be equally strong regardless of how your cohort of 1000 lawyers is distributed between dropouts, nobodies, all-rounders, CV-chasers, and “golden children”. (I am deeply unconvinced by this classification, by the way, but I am not a lawyer myself and maybe it’s more accurate than it sounds.)
Alignment researchers are the youngest child, and programmers/Open AI computer scientists are the eldest child. Law students/lawyers are the middle child, pretty simple.
It doesn’t matter whether you use 10,000 students, or 100, the percentage being embarrassingly small remains the same. I’ve simply used the categorisation to illustrate quickly to non-lawyers what the general environment looks like currently.
“golden children” is a parody of the Golden Circle, a running joke that you need to be perfect, God’s gift to earth sort of perfect, to get into a Big 5 law firm in the UK.
Yes , I know what the middle-child phenomenon is in the more literal context. I just don’t have any idea why you’re using the term here. I don’t see any similarities between the oldest / middle / youngest child relationships in a family and whatever relationships there might be between programmers / lawyers / alignment researchers.
(I think maybe all you actually mean is “these people are more important than we’re treating them as”. Might be true, but that isn’t a phenomenon, it’s just a one-off judgement that a particular group of people are being neglected.)
I still don’t understand why the distribution of talent/success/whatever among law students is relevant. If your point is that very few of them are going to be in a position to make a difference to AI policy then surely that actually argues against your main claim that law students should be getting more attention from people who care about AI.