UPDATE 2: Do you have any questions about the Epistea Residency? Join us for a live Q&A call with the organizers on July 20, Thursday 9 am CET / Wednesday midnight 0 am PDT at https://us06web.zoom.us/j/85371078204

UPDATE: We clarified the sections on funding, applying as an individual and have extended the deadline to apply (now July 24).

Motivation

In the past years, the research and development of new methods in rationality and epistemics have slowed down significantly and become increasingly more neglected. However, clear thinking and rationality, we believe, is not less important today than it was before. Even though attention of LessWrong and applied rationality communities has been recently mostly focused on direct intervention into AI risk, in our view, a lot of potential problems with the transition to powerful AI systems are related to the ability of humans to think clearly, and in particular, the ability of humans to think clearly in groups. Based on thinking about the relative importance and neglectedness of rationality, we at Epistea decided to organize a residency program aiming to improve the situation and bring new people to the areas of rationality, epistemics, and civilisational sanity.

Epistea Residency
The Epistea Residency program will be happening from September 18 to November 25, 2023 as part of Prague Fall Season 2023 at Fixed Point in Prague, Czech Republic. One way to think about the fellowship is as a program somewhat similar to SERI-MATS or PIBBSS, but focused on advancing epistemics and applied rationality, rather than AI alignment directly (this does not preclude projects which advance both rationality and alignment). For the 10-week in-person residency program, we will invite between 20 to 30 participants, forming teams of 3-5 members each. We expect all team members to dedicate at the minimum 0.5 FTE (20 hours per week) to the residency, granting them the possibility to at least partially maintain their regular work commitments if necessary. By the end of their residency, the teams will be expected to deliver a project output or reach a major project milestone.

Current tentative mentors for the program are: Anna Salamon, Jan Kulveit, Nora Ammann, Eli Tyre, Gavin Leech, Raymond Douglas and Damon Sasi

Format

The teams will have the option to propose their own project withi...

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