By this stage of their careers, they already have those bits of paper. MIRI are asking people who don’t a priori highly value alignment research to jump through extra hoops they haven’t already cleared, for what they probably perceive as a slim chance of a job outside their wheelhouse. I know a reasonable number of hard science academics, and I don’t know any who would put in that amount of effort in the application for a job they thought would be highly applied for by more qualified applicants. The very phrasing makes it sound like they expect hundreds of applicants and are trying to be exclusive. If nothing else is changed, that should be.
Maybe they do in fact receive hundreds of applicants and must exclude most of them?
It’s not MIRI’s fault that there isn’t a pre-existing academic discipline of AI alignment research.
Imagine SpaceX had a branch office in some very poor country that literally didn’t have any engineering education whatsoever. Should they then lower their standards and invite applicants who never studied engineering? No, they should just deal with the fact that they won’t have very many qualified people, and/or they should do things like host workshops and stuff to help people learn engineering.
It wasn’t Los Alamos’ fault that there wasn’t a pre-existing academic discipline of nuclear engineering, but they got by anyway, because they had Von Neumann and other very smart people. If MIRI is to get by, they need to recruit Von Neumann-level people. Like maybe Terry Tao.
Just to be clear, there was a thriving field of nuclear engineering, and Los Almost was run mostly by leading figures in that field. Also, money was never a constraint on the Manhattan Program and it’s success had practically nothing to do with the availability of funding, but instead all to do with the war, the involvement of a number of top scientists, and the existence of a pretty concrete engineering problem that one could throw tons of manpower at.
The Manhattan project itself did not develop any substantial nuclear theory, and was almost purely an an engineering project. I do not know what we would get by emulating it at this point in time. The scientists involved in the Manhattan project did not continue running things like the Manhattan project, they went into other institutions optimized for intellectual process that were not capable of absorbing large amounts of money or manpower productively, despite some of them likely being able to get funding for similar things (some of them went on and built giant particle colliders, though this did not generally completely revolutionize or drastically accelerate the development of new scientific theories, though it sure was helpful).
By this stage of their careers, they already have those bits of paper. MIRI are asking people who don’t a priori highly value alignment research to jump through extra hoops they haven’t already cleared, for what they probably perceive as a slim chance of a job outside their wheelhouse. I know a reasonable number of hard science academics, and I don’t know any who would put in that amount of effort in the application for a job they thought would be highly applied for by more qualified applicants. The very phrasing makes it sound like they expect hundreds of applicants and are trying to be exclusive. If nothing else is changed, that should be.
Maybe they do in fact receive hundreds of applicants and must exclude most of them?
It’s not MIRI’s fault that there isn’t a pre-existing academic discipline of AI alignment research.
Imagine SpaceX had a branch office in some very poor country that literally didn’t have any engineering education whatsoever. Should they then lower their standards and invite applicants who never studied engineering? No, they should just deal with the fact that they won’t have very many qualified people, and/or they should do things like host workshops and stuff to help people learn engineering.
It wasn’t Los Alamos’ fault that there wasn’t a pre-existing academic discipline of nuclear engineering, but they got by anyway, because they had Von Neumann and other very smart people. If MIRI is to get by, they need to recruit Von Neumann-level people. Like maybe Terry Tao.
Just to be clear, there was a thriving field of nuclear engineering, and Los Almost was run mostly by leading figures in that field. Also, money was never a constraint on the Manhattan Program and it’s success had practically nothing to do with the availability of funding, but instead all to do with the war, the involvement of a number of top scientists, and the existence of a pretty concrete engineering problem that one could throw tons of manpower at.
The Manhattan project itself did not develop any substantial nuclear theory, and was almost purely an an engineering project. I do not know what we would get by emulating it at this point in time. The scientists involved in the Manhattan project did not continue running things like the Manhattan project, they went into other institutions optimized for intellectual process that were not capable of absorbing large amounts of money or manpower productively, despite some of them likely being able to get funding for similar things (some of them went on and built giant particle colliders, though this did not generally completely revolutionize or drastically accelerate the development of new scientific theories, though it sure was helpful).
I don’t think we disagree?
I think you do in practice, because you seem to believe that the best way to recruit those people is via a strategy like the above.