4, 5, and 2 in that order. You might think you could bypass 2 by advertising a high enough salary, but keep in mind that just advertising a high salary being available gives you problems 4 and 5 immediately, and if you don’t advertise a superstar salary and don’t have a reputation for paying it, then you may not be approached by any talent who’s both money-desiring enough, and strong enough as a talent, to force you to confront the question of whether you need to actually take on disadvantages 4 and 5 for that particular person.
Based just on my experience at MIRI, I’ll add another vote to “4, 5, and 2 in that order,” especially if #5 includes funders and if #2 includes gwern’s “shortage of reliably diagnosable talented people.”
Item #4 is a pretty big deal in practice. ’Nuff said.
I’ve exhibited #5 throughout my tenure as CEO at MIRI, and perhaps still do. I’ve been repeatedly resistant to higher salaries and in retrospect I think the Board was right in two cases to be less timid than I was. Now the big worry is funders: the EA movement, in particular, may prefer martyr-ish salaries, though on that point I’m relieved to see that GiveWell’s founders still make substantially more than I do.
On #2, consider MIRI’s hiring of myself and Nate Soares. Neither of us are “superstars” — at least not yet; we’ll try! — but we are clearly good for MIRI at the present stage, and yet I came in with no executive experience and no relevant technical background, and Nate came in with no research publications, having learned logic and model theory a few months before his hiring. There are probably other good hires out there available to MIRI but I just don’t know what they look like. And of course in general, the world is not training FAI talent the way it trains, say, programming talent or finance talent. So in MIRI’s case there is a pretty unusual “genuine absence of talented people.”
In the context of math talent (as opposed to philosophical/reductionist/naturalist*) at MIRI?
*I’m interested in whether the talent in question was something that is already understood by academia (in the sense that being really good at math in particular ways is well understood to be a quality that is desireable by the community, but the specific type of reductionist philosophical talent that you would be looking for isn’t seen that way by academic philosophy in general.)
4, 5, and 2 in that order. You might think you could bypass 2 by advertising a high enough salary, but keep in mind that just advertising a high salary being available gives you problems 4 and 5 immediately, and if you don’t advertise a superstar salary and don’t have a reputation for paying it, then you may not be approached by any talent who’s both money-desiring enough, and strong enough as a talent, to force you to confront the question of whether you need to actually take on disadvantages 4 and 5 for that particular person.
This reply is based on experience.
Based just on my experience at MIRI, I’ll add another vote to “4, 5, and 2 in that order,” especially if #5 includes funders and if #2 includes gwern’s “shortage of reliably diagnosable talented people.”
Item #4 is a pretty big deal in practice. ’Nuff said.
I’ve exhibited #5 throughout my tenure as CEO at MIRI, and perhaps still do. I’ve been repeatedly resistant to higher salaries and in retrospect I think the Board was right in two cases to be less timid than I was. Now the big worry is funders: the EA movement, in particular, may prefer martyr-ish salaries, though on that point I’m relieved to see that GiveWell’s founders still make substantially more than I do.
On #2, consider MIRI’s hiring of myself and Nate Soares. Neither of us are “superstars” — at least not yet; we’ll try! — but we are clearly good for MIRI at the present stage, and yet I came in with no executive experience and no relevant technical background, and Nate came in with no research publications, having learned logic and model theory a few months before his hiring. There are probably other good hires out there available to MIRI but I just don’t know what they look like. And of course in general, the world is not training FAI talent the way it trains, say, programming talent or finance talent. So in MIRI’s case there is a pretty unusual “genuine absence of talented people.”
In the context of math talent (as opposed to philosophical/reductionist/naturalist*) at MIRI?
*I’m interested in whether the talent in question was something that is already understood by academia (in the sense that being really good at math in particular ways is well understood to be a quality that is desireable by the community, but the specific type of reductionist philosophical talent that you would be looking for isn’t seen that way by academic philosophy in general.)