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.”
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.”