Based on your comment, I’m more motivated to just sit down and (actually) try to solve AI Safety for X weeks, write up my results and do an application. What is your 95% confidence interval for what X needs to be to reduce the odds of a false negative (i.e. my grant gets rejected but shouldn’t have been) to a single digit?
I’m thinking of doing maybe 8 weeks. Maybe more if I can fall back on research engineering so that I haven’t wasted my time completely.
My main modification to that plan would be “writing up your process is more important than writing up your results”; I think that makes a false negative much less likely.
8 weeks seems like it’s on the short end to do anything at all, especially considering that there will be some ramp-up time. A lot of that will just be making your background frames/approach more legible. I guess viability depends on exactly what you want to test:
If your goal is write up your background models and strategy well enough to see if grantmakers want to fund your work based on them, 8 weeks is probably sufficient
If your goal is to see whether you have any large insights or make any significant progress, that usually happens for me on a timescale of ~3 months
It sounds like you want to do something closer to the latter, so 12-16 weeks is probably more appropriate?
Based on your comment, I’m more motivated to just sit down and (actually) try to solve AI Safety for X weeks, write up my results and do an application. What is your 95% confidence interval for what X needs to be to reduce the odds of a false negative (i.e. my grant gets rejected but shouldn’t have been) to a single digit?
I’m thinking of doing maybe 8 weeks. Maybe more if I can fall back on research engineering so that I haven’t wasted my time completely.
My main modification to that plan would be “writing up your process is more important than writing up your results”; I think that makes a false negative much less likely.
8 weeks seems like it’s on the short end to do anything at all, especially considering that there will be some ramp-up time. A lot of that will just be making your background frames/approach more legible. I guess viability depends on exactly what you want to test:
If your goal is write up your background models and strategy well enough to see if grantmakers want to fund your work based on them, 8 weeks is probably sufficient
If your goal is to see whether you have any large insights or make any significant progress, that usually happens for me on a timescale of ~3 months
It sounds like you want to do something closer to the latter, so 12-16 weeks is probably more appropriate?