Seems likely that the distribution of personalities among math competition winners isn’t the same as the distribution of personalities you’d want in an FAI team.
These contests are a bit like spelling bees. There is some connection between good spelling and good writing, but the winner of the state spelling bee does not necessarily have the talent to become a good writer, and some fine writers are not good spellers.
Under ideal conditions, maybe SI would identify “safe” problems that seemed representative of the problem space as a whole and farm these problems out (in a way similar to decision theory has been farmed out some to Less Wrong), inviting the best performers on the safe problems to work on more dangerous problems.
Or SI could simply court proven mathematical researchers.
Yeah, that was the analogy I had in mind. I wasn’t sure if people here would be familiar with it though.
And yeah, I agree that math competition winners wouldn’t have the ideal distribution, although it probably wouldn’t hurt to recruit from them as well. Also, I may have some bias here, since I never liked competitions and avoided participating in them. But I agree with the points made in that article.
That seems like a good idea, although it’s hard to know what the problem space looks like without going there. My intuition says that it would be a good idea to try to have a good amount of diversity in whatever team is chosen.
On mathematician personalities:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/2z7/draft_three_intellectual_temperaments_birds_frogs/
Seems likely that the distribution of personalities among math competition winners isn’t the same as the distribution of personalities you’d want in an FAI team.
More potential problems with math competitions. Quote by a Fields medalist:
Under ideal conditions, maybe SI would identify “safe” problems that seemed representative of the problem space as a whole and farm these problems out (in a way similar to decision theory has been farmed out some to Less Wrong), inviting the best performers on the safe problems to work on more dangerous problems.
Or SI could simply court proven mathematical researchers.
It should be noted that I’m not a mathematician.
Yeah, that was the analogy I had in mind. I wasn’t sure if people here would be familiar with it though.
And yeah, I agree that math competition winners wouldn’t have the ideal distribution, although it probably wouldn’t hurt to recruit from them as well. Also, I may have some bias here, since I never liked competitions and avoided participating in them. But I agree with the points made in that article.
That seems like a good idea, although it’s hard to know what the problem space looks like without going there. My intuition says that it would be a good idea to try to have a good amount of diversity in whatever team is chosen.