It confuses me that the FAQ has pretty minimal qualifications for knowledge of AI safety, and at the same time the application asks someone to summarize how an agenda in an area of AI safety research could fail, and to parse a paper with a lot of AI terms, and also that the application says one should only spend an hour finishing it (although this page says an hour and a half). It took me like 30 minutes just to fill out everything besides those two technical questions in the application :D and I cannot answer those technical questions well without doing hours of additional research (more than 90 minutes to do a a half decent job of answering just those two technical questions). I failed the application lol :D
edit: The part that confuses me is whether I should spend a bunch of time to research the answer to these questions, or whether being able to answer these questions within the time limit of 60 to 90 minutes is part of the requirements to get into the program.
We do want the participants on ARENA to have quite a strong interest in AI safety, which is why we ask people to evidence some substantial engagement with AI safety agendas (which is what that question is designed to do). However, we’re not looking for perfect answers for either of the questions, nothing that should take hours of research if you’re engaged consistently on LessWrong/Alignment Forum.
However, it’s not that you must finish the application within 60-90 minutes, this is just a rough estimate of how long it would take someone who’s engaged with AI and AI safety to complete it (which may be wrong, sorry that this was the case!). We aren’t presuming in this estimate that people are doing a lot of research to provide the highest quality answers to these questions, since that’s really not what we’re expecting. Although of course you’re free to spend as much or as little time as you want on the application.
It confuses me that the FAQ has pretty minimal qualifications for knowledge of AI safety, and at the same time the application asks someone to summarize how an agenda in an area of AI safety research could fail, and to parse a paper with a lot of AI terms, and also that the application says one should only spend an hour finishing it (although this page says an hour and a half). It took me like 30 minutes just to fill out everything besides those two technical questions in the application :D and I cannot answer those technical questions well without doing hours of additional research (more than 90 minutes to do a a half decent job of answering just those two technical questions). I failed the application lol :D
edit: The part that confuses me is whether I should spend a bunch of time to research the answer to these questions, or whether being able to answer these questions within the time limit of 60 to 90 minutes is part of the requirements to get into the program.
We do want the participants on ARENA to have quite a strong interest in AI safety, which is why we ask people to evidence some substantial engagement with AI safety agendas (which is what that question is designed to do). However, we’re not looking for perfect answers for either of the questions, nothing that should take hours of research if you’re engaged consistently on LessWrong/Alignment Forum.
However, it’s not that you must finish the application within 60-90 minutes, this is just a rough estimate of how long it would take someone who’s engaged with AI and AI safety to complete it (which may be wrong, sorry that this was the case!). We aren’t presuming in this estimate that people are doing a lot of research to provide the highest quality answers to these questions, since that’s really not what we’re expecting. Although of course you’re free to spend as much or as little time as you want on the application.