MIRI Call for Volunteers
Are you interested in reducing existential risk? Are you a student who wants to donate to existential risk reduction, but doesn’t have any money? Are you a past or present Visiting Fellow applicant? Do you want to apply to the Visiting Fellows program, but can’t take time off work or school? If the answer to any one of these questions is yes, you should join the Singularity Institute Volunteer Program. The Singularity Institute is looking for volunteers to do things like:
- Review and proofread MIRI publications.
- Promote MIRI sites like singinst.org and lesswrong.com.
- Contribute content to the MIRI Blog.
- Create online videos or other digital content.
- Volunteer for the 2010 Singularity Summit.
- Organize monthly dinner parties to cultivate new supporters.
- Translate MIRI webpages into other languages, e.g. French, German, Japanese, Mandarin, Spanish, etc.
- Contribute to the collaborative rationality blog Less Wrong.
- Host a Less Wrong meetup, or remind organizers to host them.
Requirements for volunteers are fairly minimal, but you must be able to:
- Read and write English on a basic or higher level
- Complete tasks reliably with minimal supervision
- Stick to deadlines, and let us know if you can’t meet them
Additional skills, like programming, ability to write well, foreign languages, math talent, etc. are a definite plus. If you are interested, please shoot us an email with a brief summary of who you are, what your interests and skills are and how you’d like to help.
If you want to contribute, but don’t know how you can help, please email MIRI Volunteer Coordinator Louie Helm at louie@intelligence.org.
Apply today!
I just have to say, what a great idea. Kudos to whoever came up with this.
Edit: You should have an email address for those people who want to contribute and have an idea of what they can contribute, if only because it makes it easier for them to respond—and thus yields more respondents.
Thanks!
People who already have something specific that they think they should work on should contact me (Thomas McCabe) at tom.mccabe@intelligence.org.
Volunteer for Summit == Get to attend Summit for free as long as you do volunteer tasks?
Possibly. Contact Aruna Vassar (aruna.vassar@intelligence.org) for more info.
If you attend the Summit as a volunteer, don’t expect to see many of the talks.
downvoted—I don’t like ads, even for causes I generally support.
Why not?
Did you also downvote http://lesswrong.com/lw/29c/be_a_visiting_fellow_at_the_singularity_institute/ ?
I didn’t at the time, I went back and did so. Also, that one didn’t trigger my “ugh! content-free marketing” filter as strongly, likely because it was purely declarative. This one starts off on a very wrong foot with rhetorical questions that serve no purpose except to try to create fake rapport to help sell the later pitch.
I did have marketing in mind, yes, but the first paragraph also serves an obviously useful purpose: it declares what audience we are trying to address. People who are not interested in existential risks or the Visiting Fellows program probably won’t be as interested in volunteering, and it saves everyone a lot of time to state that up front.