Thank you for writing this post, Adam! Looking forward to seeing what you and your epistemology team produce in the months ahead.
SERI MATS is doing a great job of scaling conceptual alignment research, and seem open to integrate some of the ideas behind Refine
I’m a big fan of SERI MATS. But my impression was that SERI MATS had a rather different pedagogy/structure (compared to Refine). In particular:
SERI MATS has an “apprenticeship model” (every mentee is matched with one mentor), whereas Refine mentees didn’t have mentors.
Refine was optimizing for people who could come up with “their own radically different agendas”, whereas SERI MATS doesn’t emphasize this. (Some mentors may encourage some of their mentees to think about new agendas, but my impression is that this varies a lot mentor-to-mentor, and it’s not as baked into the overall culture).
SERI MATS has (thus far) nearly-exclusively recruited from the EA/rationality/AIS communities. Seems like Refine also did this, though I imagine that “Refine 2.0” would be more willing to recruit from outside these communities. (I’m not sure what SERI-MATS’s stance is, but my impression is that their selection criteria heavily favors people who have existing work in AIS or existing connections. This of course makes sense, because past contributions/endorsements are a useful signal, unless the program is explicitly designed to go for oddball/weird/new/uncorrelated ideas).
Two questions for you:
Are there any particular lessons/ideas from Refine that you expect (or hope) SERI MATS to incorporate?
Do you think there’s now a hole in the space that someone should consider filling (by making Refine 2.0), or do you expect that much of the value of Refine will be covered by SERI MATS [and other programs]?
Are there any particular lessons/ideas from Refine that you expect (or hope) SERI MATS to incorporate?
I have shared some of my models related to epistemology and key questions to MATS organizers, and I think they’re supposed to be integrated in one of the future programs. Mostly things regarding realizing the importance of productive mistakes in science (which naturally pushes back a bit from the mentoring aspect of MATS) and understanding how less “clean” most scientific progress actually look like historically (with a basic reading list from the history of science).
From the impression I have, they are also now trying to give participants some broader perspective about the field, in addition to the specific frame of the mentor, and a bunch of the lessons from Refine about how to build a good model of the alignment problem apply.
On a more general level, I expect that I had enough discussions with them that they would naturally ask me for feedback if they thought of something that seemed Refine shaped or similar.
2. Do you think there’s now a hole in the space that someone should consider filling (by making Refine 2.0), or do you expect that much of the value of Refine will be covered by SERI MATS [and other programs]?
Hum, intuitively the main value from Refine that I don’t expect to be covered by future MATS would come from reaching out to very different profiles. There’s a non-negligeable chance that PIBBSS manages to make that work though, so not clear that it’s a problem.
Note that this is also part of why Refine feels less useful: when I conceived of it, most of these programs either didn’t exist or were not well-established. Part of the frustration came from having nothing IRL for non-american to join, and just no program spending a significant amount of time on conceptual alignment, which both MATS and PIBBSS (in addition to other programs like ARENA) are now fixing. Which I think is great!
FWIW my experience of MATS 0.1 (i.e. the first run/pilot 2021-22) was that it was more open-ended and diversity-focused than subsequent MATS, which has been more apprenticeship-focused. That was helpful for me at the time, but I don’t know if it was ever the intention per se, and I agree that the focus of MATS now is different. I haven’t thought long enough to decide if this is good or bad.
Thank you for writing this post, Adam! Looking forward to seeing what you and your epistemology team produce in the months ahead.
I’m a big fan of SERI MATS. But my impression was that SERI MATS had a rather different pedagogy/structure (compared to Refine). In particular:
SERI MATS has an “apprenticeship model” (every mentee is matched with one mentor), whereas Refine mentees didn’t have mentors.
Refine was optimizing for people who could come up with “their own radically different agendas”, whereas SERI MATS doesn’t emphasize this. (Some mentors may encourage some of their mentees to think about new agendas, but my impression is that this varies a lot mentor-to-mentor, and it’s not as baked into the overall culture).
SERI MATS has (thus far) nearly-exclusively recruited from the EA/rationality/AIS communities. Seems like Refine also did this, though I imagine that “Refine 2.0” would be more willing to recruit from outside these communities. (I’m not sure what SERI-MATS’s stance is, but my impression is that their selection criteria heavily favors people who have existing work in AIS or existing connections. This of course makes sense, because past contributions/endorsements are a useful signal, unless the program is explicitly designed to go for oddball/weird/new/uncorrelated ideas).
Two questions for you:
Are there any particular lessons/ideas from Refine that you expect (or hope) SERI MATS to incorporate?
Do you think there’s now a hole in the space that someone should consider filling (by making Refine 2.0), or do you expect that much of the value of Refine will be covered by SERI MATS [and other programs]?
Thanks for the kind words!
I have shared some of my models related to epistemology and key questions to MATS organizers, and I think they’re supposed to be integrated in one of the future programs. Mostly things regarding realizing the importance of productive mistakes in science (which naturally pushes back a bit from the mentoring aspect of MATS) and understanding how less “clean” most scientific progress actually look like historically (with a basic reading list from the history of science).
From the impression I have, they are also now trying to give participants some broader perspective about the field, in addition to the specific frame of the mentor, and a bunch of the lessons from Refine about how to build a good model of the alignment problem apply.
On a more general level, I expect that I had enough discussions with them that they would naturally ask me for feedback if they thought of something that seemed Refine shaped or similar.
Hum, intuitively the main value from Refine that I don’t expect to be covered by future MATS would come from reaching out to very different profiles. There’s a non-negligeable chance that PIBBSS manages to make that work though, so not clear that it’s a problem.
Note that this is also part of why Refine feels less useful: when I conceived of it, most of these programs either didn’t exist or were not well-established. Part of the frustration came from having nothing IRL for non-american to join, and just no program spending a significant amount of time on conceptual alignment, which both MATS and PIBBSS (in addition to other programs like ARENA) are now fixing. Which I think is great!
FWIW my experience of MATS 0.1 (i.e. the first run/pilot 2021-22) was that it was more open-ended and diversity-focused than subsequent MATS, which has been more apprenticeship-focused. That was helpful for me at the time, but I don’t know if it was ever the intention per se, and I agree that the focus of MATS now is different. I haven’t thought long enough to decide if this is good or bad.