FWIW, this broadly matches my own experience of working with Anna and participating in CFAR workshops.
There were tensions in how to relate to participants at AIRCS workshops, in particular.
These were explicitly recruitment programs for MIRI. This was extremely explicit—it was stated on the website, and I believe (though Buck could confirm) that all or most of the participants did a technical interview before they were invited to a workshop.
The workshops were part of an extended interview process. It was a combination of 1) the staff assessing the participants, 2) the participants assessing the staff, and 3) (to some extent) enculturating the participants into MIRI/rationalist culture.
However, the environment was dramatically less formal and more vulnerable than most job interviews: about a fourth of the content of the workshops was Circling, for instance.
This meant that workshop staff were both assessing the participants, and assessing their fit-to-the-culture while also aiming to be helpful to them and their personal development by their own lights, including helping them untangle philosophical confusions or internal conflicts.
These intentions were not incompatible, but there were sometimes in tension. It could feel callous to spend a few days having deep personal conversations with someone, talking with them and trying to support them, but then later, in a staff meeting, relatively quickly coming to a judgement about them: evaluating that they don’t make the cut.
This was a tension that we were aware of and discussed at the time. I think we overall did a good job of navigating it.
This was a very weird environment, by normal profesional standards. But to my knowledge, there was no incident in which we failed to do right by a AIRCS participant, exploited them, or treated them badly.
The majority of people who came had a good experience, regardless of whether they eventually got hired by MIRI. Of those that did not have a good experience, I believe this was predominantly (possibly entirely?) people who felt that the workshop was a waste of time, rather than that they had actively been harmed.
I would welcome any specific information to the contrary. I could totally believe that there was stuff that I was unaware of, or subtle dynamics that I wasn’t tracking at the time, but I would conclude were fucked up on reflection.
But as it is, I don’t think we failed to discharge our deontological duty towards any participants.
FWIW, this broadly matches my own experience of working with Anna and participating in CFAR workshops.
There were tensions in how to relate to participants at AIRCS workshops, in particular.
These were explicitly recruitment programs for MIRI. This was extremely explicit—it was stated on the website, and I believe (though Buck could confirm) that all or most of the participants did a technical interview before they were invited to a workshop.
The workshops were part of an extended interview process. It was a combination of 1) the staff assessing the participants, 2) the participants assessing the staff, and 3) (to some extent) enculturating the participants into MIRI/rationalist culture.
However, the environment was dramatically less formal and more vulnerable than most job interviews: about a fourth of the content of the workshops was Circling, for instance.
This meant that workshop staff were both assessing the participants, and assessing their fit-to-the-culture while also aiming to be helpful to them and their personal development by their own lights, including helping them untangle philosophical confusions or internal conflicts.
These intentions were not incompatible, but there were sometimes in tension. It could feel callous to spend a few days having deep personal conversations with someone, talking with them and trying to support them, but then later, in a staff meeting, relatively quickly coming to a judgement about them: evaluating that they don’t make the cut.
This was a tension that we were aware of and discussed at the time. I think we overall did a good job of navigating it.
This was a very weird environment, by normal profesional standards. But to my knowledge, there was no incident in which we failed to do right by a AIRCS participant, exploited them, or treated them badly.
The majority of people who came had a good experience, regardless of whether they eventually got hired by MIRI. Of those that did not have a good experience, I believe this was predominantly (possibly entirely?) people who felt that the workshop was a waste of time, rather than that they had actively been harmed.
I would welcome any specific information to the contrary. I could totally believe that there was stuff that I was unaware of, or subtle dynamics that I wasn’t tracking at the time, but I would conclude were fucked up on reflection.
But as it is, I don’t think we failed to discharge our deontological duty towards any participants.