(1) people who can generate promising new alignment ideas. (By far the top priority, but seems empirically rare.)
(2) competent executives who are unusually good at understanding the kinds of things MIRI is trying to do, and who can run their own large alignment projects mostly-independently.
For 2, I think the best way to get hired by MIRI is to prove your abilities via the Visible Thoughts Project. The post there says a bit more about the kind of skills we’re looking for:
Eliezer has a handful of ideas that seem to me worth pursuing, but for all of them to be pursued, we need people who can not only lead those projects themselves, but who can understand the hope-containing heart of the idea with relatively little Eliezer-interaction, and develop a vision around it that retains the shred of hope and doesn’t require constant interaction and course-correction on our part. (This is, as far as I can tell, a version of the Hard Problem of finding good founders, but with an additional constraint of filtering for people who have affinity for a particular project, rather than people who have affinity for some project of their own devising.)
For 1, I suggest initially posting your research ideas to LessWrong, in line with John Wentworth’s advice. New ideas and approaches are desperately needed, and we would consider it crazy to not fund anyone whose ideas or ways-of-thinking-about-the-problem we think have a shred of hope in them. We may fund them via working at MIRI, or via putting them in touch with external funders; the important thing is just that the research happens.
If you want to work on alignment but you don’t fall under category 1 or 2, you might consider applying to work at Redwood Research (https://www.redwoodresearch.org/jobs), which is a group doing alignment research we like. They’re much more hungry for engineers right now than we are.
If your “hiring a lot more maybe B-tier researchers” suggestion implies something more than the above ‘we intend to ensure that everyone whose ideas have a shred of hope gets funded’ policy, I’d be interested to hear what additional thing you think should happen, and why.
A consideration pushing against ‘just try to grow the field indiscriminately’ is the argument Alex Flint gives re the flywheel model.
Fiscal limits notwithstanding, doesn’t this suggest MIRI should try hiring a lot more maybe B-tier researchers?
Quoting a thing I said in March:
If your “hiring a lot more maybe B-tier researchers” suggestion implies something more than the above ‘we intend to ensure that everyone whose ideas have a shred of hope gets funded’ policy, I’d be interested to hear what additional thing you think should happen, and why.
A consideration pushing against ‘just try to grow the field indiscriminately’ is the argument Alex Flint gives re the flywheel model.