Could there be some kind of mentorship incentive? Another problem at large in alignment research seems to be lack of mentors, since most of the people skilled enough to fill this role are desperately working against the clock. A naïve solution could be to offer a smaller prize to the mentor of a newer researcher if the newbie’s submission details a significant amount of help on their part. Obviously, dishonest people could throw the name of their friend on the submission because “why not”, but I’m not sure how serious this would be.
What would be nice would be some incentive for high quality mentorship / for bringing new people into the contest and research field, in a way that encourages the mentors to get their friends in the contest, even though that might end up increasing the amount of competition they have for their own proposal.
This might also modestly improve social incentives for mentors, since people like being associated with success and being seen as helpful / altruistic.
ETA: What about a flat prize (a few thousand dollars) you can only win once, but thence can mentor others and receive a slightly more modest sum for prizes they win? It might help kickstart people’s alignment careers if sufficiently selective / give them the confidence to continue work. Have to worry about the details for what counts as mentorship, depending on how cheaty we think people would try to be.
As Raemon noted, mentorship bottleneck is actually a bottleneck. Senior researchers who should mentor are the most bottlenecked resource in the field, and the problem is unlikely to be solved by financial or similar incentives. Motivating too much is probably wrong, because mentoring competes with time to do research, evaluate grants, etc. What can be done is
improve the utilization of time of the mentors (e.g. mentoring teams of people instead of individuals)
do what can be done on peer-to-peer basis
use mentors from other fields to teach people generic skills, e.g. how to do research
I can probably spend some time (perhaps around 4 hours / week) on mentoring, especially for new researchers that want to contribute to the learning-theoretic research agenda or its vicinity. However, I am not sure how to make this known to the relevant people. Should I write a post that says “hey, who wants a mentor?” Is there a better way?
Important not to let the perfect be the enemy of the good. There’s almost certainly a better way to find mentors, but this would be far better than not doing anything, so I’d say that if you can’t find an actionable better option within (let’s say) a month, you should just do it. Or just do it now and replace with better method when you find one.
I think the mentorship bottleneck is quite important, but my sense is it actually is a bottleneck, i.e. most people with the capacity to mentor people already are.
Could there be some kind of mentorship incentive? Another problem at large in alignment research seems to be lack of mentors, since most of the people skilled enough to fill this role are desperately working against the clock. A naïve solution could be to offer a smaller prize to the mentor of a newer researcher if the newbie’s submission details a significant amount of help on their part. Obviously, dishonest people could throw the name of their friend on the submission because “why not”, but I’m not sure how serious this would be.
What would be nice would be some incentive for high quality mentorship / for bringing new people into the contest and research field, in a way that encourages the mentors to get their friends in the contest, even though that might end up increasing the amount of competition they have for their own proposal.
This might also modestly improve social incentives for mentors, since people like being associated with success and being seen as helpful / altruistic.
ETA: What about a flat prize (a few thousand dollars) you can only win once, but thence can mentor others and receive a slightly more modest sum for prizes they win? It might help kickstart people’s alignment careers if sufficiently selective / give them the confidence to continue work. Have to worry about the details for what counts as mentorship, depending on how cheaty we think people would try to be.
As Raemon noted, mentorship bottleneck is actually a bottleneck. Senior researchers who should mentor are the most bottlenecked resource in the field, and the problem is unlikely to be solved by financial or similar incentives. Motivating too much is probably wrong, because mentoring competes with time to do research, evaluate grants, etc. What can be done is
improve the utilization of time of the mentors (e.g. mentoring teams of people instead of individuals)
do what can be done on peer-to-peer basis
use mentors from other fields to teach people generic skills, e.g. how to do research
prepare better materials for onboarding
Some relevant bits from Critch’s blog, relevant to the “use mentors from other fields for generic skills” include:
Leverage Academia
Using “Get into UC Berkeley” as a screening filter.
Deliberate Grad School.
I can probably spend some time (perhaps around 4 hours / week) on mentoring, especially for new researchers that want to contribute to the learning-theoretic research agenda or its vicinity. However, I am not sure how to make this known to the relevant people. Should I write a post that says “hey, who wants a mentor?” Is there a better way?
Important not to let the perfect be the enemy of the good. There’s almost certainly a better way to find mentors, but this would be far better than not doing anything, so I’d say that if you can’t find an actionable better option within (let’s say) a month, you should just do it. Or just do it now and replace with better method when you find one.
Off-the-cuff: I think making that post is probably good. In the longterm hopefully we can come up with a more enduring solution.
I think the mentorship bottleneck is quite important, but my sense is it actually is a bottleneck, i.e. most people with the capacity to mentor people already are.