Stop Applying And Get To Work

plex

[-]Katalina Hernandez12h2014

Thank you for adding that last part, "Have a sufficient financial safety net".

Not everyone can afford to leave paid work and just do AI Safety work for free / in favour of unstable short fellowships.

It's harsh but it's the reality. If you have dependants (children, or other family members) or have massive student loans to pay every month, and have zero financial support from anyone else...

I'd say: still dedicate as much time as possible to your research. Like OP says- more time to actually doing the work than on applications.

But I've seen people get pressured into quitting their work or studies and made feel like they're not committed enough if they don't. When it turns out they'd be putting their entire family in financial duress if they did so.

And to those who can afford not to work for a salary: please remember to be kind and prudent. Some of us also have short timelines, but we'd like our families to have food on their plate too.

P.S.: in case it isn't obvious, I do support the message on this post.

[-]Linda Linsefors11h1511

I would recomend thay anyone with dependents, or any other need for economic stability (e.g. lack of safety net from your family or country) should focus on erning money.

You can save up and fund yourself. Or if that takes too long, you can give what you can give 10% (or what ever works for you) to support someone else.

[-]Katalina Hernandez10h42

Agreed! Thank you, Linda. For readers: this also goes for students who do not have support from family members or whose families have a quite precarious situation- quitting your degree may leave you with thousands in debt that you'll still have to repay.

[-]the gears to ascension18h157

Rejections should link this.

[-]Rana Dexsin18h1916

I'm not sure. I see how it could be helpful to some applicants, but in the context of that particular interaction, it feels interpretable as “we're not going to fund you; you should totally do it for free instead”. Something about that feels off, in the direction of… “insult”? “exploitative”? maybe just “situationally insensitive”?—but I haven't pinned down the source of the feeling.

[-]the gears to ascension12h*139

Hmm reasonable counterargument, I may become convinced after pondering. In this context, my mental representative^[1] of "put it in the email" says:

Sure, I'll bite that bullet. Put something to this effect:

We understand that not getting funded or mentored is frustrating. Unfortunately, we have no money, no researchers, and more applicants than there are grains of sand on earth. Don't wait around for someone to fund you, the world needs bootstrappers. If you're sufficiently motivated and can self-fund such that you have time to {study, research, policy, activism, genius weird ideas, wording unfinished - should be single word covering all these cases}, consider volunteering your thinking and agency to whatever gap you can identify. We hope people doing good work somehow get retroactive funding, though this is not on the horizon.

Basically I want these funding and mentoring opportunities to be apologetic about their very existence being near-unavoidably misleading. I want this as part of an ensemble of small tweaks to hopefully prepare to not depend on official connections to find people who can contribute. There are a lot of brilliant insights not being attempted because people aren't getting mental hero licenses, (though the literal phrase hero license is a bad prompt for many). They see opportunity, apply, get discouraged about the whole thing, because they're humans. I want the rejection to pump them up to sit down and think about the problem end to end as part of open community. probably also needs links to some tsvi/wentworth/wei dai getting-started posts.

edit: and I agree with Katalina downthread that this needs to also be written so that it is clear it only asks for what makes sense to the reader. I mean it to be a call to agency.

^{^}
Mental representative: whatever ensemble in my head that represents a thing as a coherent simulator of that thing. Subcircuit which has temporarily allocated to represent something I encounter. Compare "representation", which can include representations too low resolution to qualify as being a representative.

[-]hunterglenn21h129

This is the way!

[-]Sergii10h112

Identify the risk scenario you'd most like to mitigate, and the 1-3 potentially most effective interventions.

this is actually hard, and where I stumble. for me the whole thing seems too owerwhelming to have a perference.

do you have any specific examples? what are the scenario(s) that drive your efforts?

[-]Quinn7h41

I spent a long time spinning my wheels calculating the "scenarios i'd most like to mitigate" and the "1-3 potentially most effective interventions" before noticing that not specializing was slowly killing me. Agree that this is the hard part, but a current guess of mine is that at least some people should do the 80/20 by identifying a top 5 then throwing dice.

I have to make a post about specialization, the value it adds to your life independent of the choice of what to specialize in, etc.

[-]zroe115h119

What this means in practice is that the "entry-level" positions are practically impossible for "entry-level" people to enter.

This problem in and of itself is extremely important to solve!

The pipeline is currently: A University group or some set of intro-level EA/AIS reading materials gets a young person excited about AI safety. The call to action is always to pursue a career in AI safety and part of the reasoning is that there are very few people currently working on the problem (it is neglected!). Then, they try to help out but their applications keep getting rejected.

I believe we should:

Be honest about AI safety job prospects.
Create new programs that find creative ways to bridge the gap in the talent pipeline described above. I believe we can do so much better than just MATS and the growing list of MATS clones.

[-]Linda Linsefors11h31

Definetly yes to more honestly!

However, I think it's unfair to describe all the various AI safery programs as "MATS clones". E.g. AISC is both order and quite diffrent.

But no amount of "creative ways to bridge the gap" will solve the fundamental problem, because there isn't a gap realy. There isn't lots of senior jobs, if we could only level up people faster. The simple fact is that there isn't enough money.

[-]sanyer1h41

The soundness of this advice depends a bit on what career path you want to pursue, though. If you want to do some lobbying or policy advocacy, it's pretty difficult to "just get to work" if you don't have the right network, skill set, and credentials. And working in that area without knowing what you're doing can also be quite harmful.

[-]Raemon14m20

See also: if you aren't financially stable, rather than "earn to give", "earn to get sufficiently wealthy you can afford to not have a job for several years while working on AI stuff".

BTW, I think "financial stable" doesn't mean "you can technically survive awhile" it's "you have cushion that you will not feel any scarcity mindset." For almost everyone I think this means at least 6 months more runway than you think you plan to use, and preferably more like a year.

(Note, AI automation might start doing wonky things to job market by the time you're trying to get hired again, if you run out of money)

I also don't really recommend people try to do this as their first job. I think there's a collection of "be a competent adult" skills that you probably don't have yet right out of college, and having any kind of job-with-a-boss for at least like 6 months is probably valuable.

[-]sanyer2h20

It's worth saying that applying for things can also yield some benefits. I definitely became a better writer through the various work tests I did when I was applying to lots of training programs. I also got some nice feedback (props to CLR especially!) and the experience helped me to better understand what different orgs & people are working on. I also got a clearer idea of my career aspirations.

This is assuming you get through the very first round and get to do some test tasks though...

^{^}

If nobody seems to be on the ball, consider starting your own project.

^{^}

Here it's quite helpful to focus on what you do best, where you might have an unfair advantage, etc.

^{^}

As a general rule, assume the person you're messaging or talking to doesn't have the time to listen to your takes - get straight to the point and make sure you've done the cognitive labor for them.

^{^}

I should add that in order to do this you need to have developed a bit of agency, as well as understanding of the field you're trying to contribute to. I'm also assuming that since you have the capacity to apply for things, you also have the capacity to get things done if you trade the time.

^{^}

Post encouraged and mildly improved by plex based on a conversation with Pauliina. From the other side of this, I'd much rather take someone onto a project who has spent a few months trying to build useful things than spending cycles to signal for applications, even if their projects don't go anywhere. You get good at what you practice. Hire people who do things and go do things. e.g. I once gave the org Alignment Ecosystem Development, which runs all the aisafety.com resources, to a volunteer (Bryce Robertson) who'd been helping out competently for a while. Excellent move! He had proved he actually did good stuff unprompted and has been improving it much more than I would have.

Also! I'd much rather work with someone who's been practicing figuring out inside views of what's actually good to orient their priorities rather than someone looking for a role doing work which someone else thinks is good and got funding to hire for. Deference is the mind-killer.

LESSWRONG
LW

LESSWRONG
LW

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Stop Applying And Get To Work

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