The Singularity Institute needs researchers capable of doing literature searches, critically analyzing studies, and summarizing their findings. The fields involved are mostly psychology (biases and debiasing, effective learning, goal-directed behavior / self help), computer science (AI and AGI), technological forecasting, and existential risks.
Gwern's work (e.g. on sunk costs and spaced repetition) is near the apex of what we need, but you don't need to be as skilled as Gwern or write as much as he does to do most of the work that we need.
Pay is hourly and starts at $14/hr but that will rise if the product is good. You must be available to work at least 20 hrs/week to be considered.
Perks:
- Work from home, with flexible hours.
- Age and credentials are irrelevant; only the product matters.
- Get paid to research things you're probably interested in anyway.
- Contribute to human knowledge in immediately actionable ways. We need this research because we're about to act on it. Your work will not fall into the journal abyss that most academic research falls into.
If you're interested, apply here.
Why post this job ad on LessWrong? We need people with some measure of genuine curiosity.
Also see Scholarship: How to Do It Efficiently.
I regret I have only one up vote to give.
Clever information addicts can find some productive employment after all! Honestly I'd apply if I didn't already have other professional/academic goals for the next few months, I'd probably use your research tasks to procrastinate from achieving them. :)
What specifically do you want researched?
Less dramatic examples:
Tons of stuff. Recent examples we paid gwern for are sunk costs and value extrapolation.
I have no problems at all with this construction, nor its current execution. I think it's wonderful. And I really don't want to start a flamewar. But don't you think it would be nice if there were a standard footnote in these posts stating that they were sponsored by SIAI? To inform readers, and maybe as a courtesy to those posters who write informative, well-researched posts without compensation.
Proper research ethics demands it.
I don't know about 'standard' but I did mention it in both.
It's probably worthwhile asking people to put the logo with an alt text of sponsored by leading to lesswrong or siai. people that stumble onto such an article that don't know about lw or siai are likely to be interest, should also help pagerank.
I was just wondering, since it wasn't explicitly stated either way, if you accept applications from outside the US? 14 dollars will go farther in some parts of the world than it will in California or New York.
Yes, definitely
This sounds very interesting. How much time would you want from each researcher? I'm currently in full time education but could probably spare a few hours a week.
Email sent.
This is a very nice way to close the feedback loop between the practice of research and the sort of theory preached here.
You might want to edit your e-mail to be in [at] [dot]org format. I don't know if LW has had a problem with e-mail detecting bots or not, but my e-mail is publicly available on my school's website because of an organization I'm in, and I get all kinds of spam.
I'd guess the spammer spiders must be quite conversant in this standard and commonly practiced ritual for averting them...
They weren't as of July 2008. But that's ages ago in internet time. I don't know of anyone who's done this experiment more recently.
I ran into a comment recently that when email providers were using keyword-based filtering, the spammers updated within days. At this point, I'd guess it doesn't matter - Gmail's anti-spam measures are pretty good. I keep my address on my site in the clear, and spam is pretty handleable, and lots of random people manage to email me successfully. (I'm a real go-to guy when it comes to modafinil, it seems.)