Reviewing this quickly because it doesn’t have a review.
I’ve linked this post to several people in the last year. I think it’s valuable for people (especially junior researchers or researchers outside of major AIS hubs) to be able to have a “practical sense” of what doing independent alignment research can be like, how the LTFF grant application process works, and some of the tradeoffs of doing this kind of work.
This seems especially important for independent conceptual work, since this is the path that is least well-paved (relative to empirical work, which is generally more straightforward to learn, or working at an organization, where one has colleagues and managers to work with).
I also appreciate John’s emphasis of focusing on core problems & his advice to new researchers:
Probably the most common mistake people make when first attempting to enter the alignment/agency research field is to not have any model at all of the main bottlenecks to alignment, or how their work will address those bottlenecks. The standard (and strongly recommended) exercise to alleviate that problem is to start from the Hamming Questions:
What are the most important problems in your field (i.e. alignment/agency)?
How are you going to solve them?
I expect I’ll continue to send this to people interested in independent alignment work & it’ll continue to help people go from “what the heck does it mean to get a grant to do conceptual AIS work?” to “oh, gotcha… I can kinda see what that might look like, at least in this one case… but seeing even just one case of this makes the idea feel much more real.”
Reviewing this quickly because it doesn’t have a review.
I’ve linked this post to several people in the last year. I think it’s valuable for people (especially junior researchers or researchers outside of major AIS hubs) to be able to have a “practical sense” of what doing independent alignment research can be like, how the LTFF grant application process works, and some of the tradeoffs of doing this kind of work.
This seems especially important for independent conceptual work, since this is the path that is least well-paved (relative to empirical work, which is generally more straightforward to learn, or working at an organization, where one has colleagues and managers to work with).
I also appreciate John’s emphasis of focusing on core problems & his advice to new researchers:
I expect I’ll continue to send this to people interested in independent alignment work & it’ll continue to help people go from “what the heck does it mean to get a grant to do conceptual AIS work?” to “oh, gotcha… I can kinda see what that might look like, at least in this one case… but seeing even just one case of this makes the idea feel much more real.”