More personal context on my Substack.
Pauliina
Karma: 236
For sure, it’s hard, and also perhaps the most crucial part if you wanna feel like you’re doing the most effective thing you could be doing.
When I started this process after graduating ~9 months ago, I spent the first ~2 months mainly reading, trying to get a broad general understanding of what’s going on and why. I had already established that I cared the most about preventing extinction scenarios.
It might help simplify to go the Ngo route of batching risks together and identifying the intervention that would mitigate the whole bunch at once.
Personally, it took me ~2 months to come to the conclusion that an international agreement/treaty on red lines might be the single most high EV, reasonable, no-brainer intervention out there. Have explored other options but always returned to this one. Would like to see folks shoot for the moon and honestly try to make something like this happen 2026-2027.
I tried that route as well, delved semi deeply into an alignment-objectives-adjacent subject for ~2 months, but wasn’t happy with the EV and length of feedback loop. My timelines are too short.
I’m also generally happy that people in AI safety are qualified at least on paper, yes!
Yeah but that doesn’t really change the general argument made by sanyer here. I do have some networks, trivial skills and credentials, but I could also be an incompetent noob who’s like a chimp with a hammer thinking they’re fixing things.
I guess the crucial difference here is that I do my best to a) learn from other people, b) go for short feedback loops rather than shooting off my own high-cost, high-risk tangents, and c) elicit, actually listen to, and carefully assess feedback from various directions. All this while examining in detail the underlying assumptions behind people’s reasoning which have nothing to do with experiences/credentials.
Identifying as an impostor has really been beneficial here I guess. I’d rather be safe than sorry, and assume I don’t know the stuff others do, until I have good reason to believe they’re just as confused as I am.
I’m also counting on people with reasonable world models to tell me if they think I’m doing something net negative, but until they do, I’ll assume I can just do things.
Basically I want these funding and mentoring opportunities to be apologetic about their very existence being near-unavoidably misleading.
Super agree! I wanna say something like “please respect the time of people who are doing everything in their power to have a maximally positive impact in the world”. Bottom line: It’s unethical to waste a fellow altruist’s time.
I’d really like to see orgs change how they describe positions to candidates. E.g. being way more transparent about how many applicants they’ve had in the past, what are the deciding factors in their selection, and whether it’s actually even remotely possible that they would consider someone without a relevant visa/residency, or someone who doesn’t meet the exact preferred qualifications listed.[1]
I’m saying this while keeping in mind that it’s hard to predict the quality and quantity of applicants, but my broad intuition still is that common sense alone should nudge towards this direction.
An example of a win-win would be for orgs to use extremely brief screening forms at the first application stage, ones that would actually take a person <15 minutes to fill out, and didn’t leave any room for overcompensation.[2]
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“Even if you don’t meet all the requirements, we still strongly encourage you to apply” does not give a clear enough idea of the probability or circumstances under which this would be possible. I find it a bit unethical at this stage to be signaling fake inclusivity when the truth is more like “yeah, on paper, you don’t need to have experience, but in practice, there’s a <1% chance we’ll select you if you don’t”.
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Like don’t ask for a CV—that way you prevent people from wasting their time tailoring one for the position.
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I understand where you’re coming from, and agree that you should be very mindful of how your ignorance might create blind spots in your EV calculations, but really the kind of “work” that I’m referring to could also be extremely low-cost and low-risk. Example: You might spot mistakes or opportunities for improvement on a website of an org that is doing important work, and offer to help fix those.
Is money really the bottleneck? It seems to me that the distribution of senior mentors to entry-level people is more of a bottleneck. Also, funneling the right people into the right projects is a slower process than funding. Please let me know if my intuition seems to be off here.
This is a good addition! However, I’m assuming that if the advice given in this post applies to you, you’re already using a nontrivial amount of time on applications, which you’re not getting paid for anyway. So might as well trade that time for volunteering or working on your own project. [1]
Also I should make explicit a fundamental underlying assumption I have, which is that if you do a great job as a volunteer, you’re more likely to get hired or funded [2], than if you were starting the application process from scratch.
Orgs spend significant resources in hiring people, and I’m sure many would be happy to skip the recruitment process and just hire the person they’ve already seen in action, or is already doing the job for them. I personally believe most AIS orgs act in good faith and want to pay the people who do valuable work for them if they have the financial means to do so.- ^
Probably should be added here that if you have good reason to believe you’re likely to be accepted to a position, I wouldn’t discourage you from applying—this is definitely not the purpose of this post.
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...for either a) what you’re already doing, b) a different position in the same org/project, or c) a position in another org/project because now you have relevant experience in your CV.
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Stop Applying And Get To Work
Glad you’ve been thinking about this! So far this is the only post/article I’ve found exploring the topic specifically from the European perspective.
I imagine it to be easier if the international network initially runs under the name of one individual national organization.
I’m a bit skeptical of this. Wouldn’t you think that such international network/organization might not gain as much traction if it used the name of a national one, since it would be kind of misleading?
What do you think would be the best course of action if a national organization wanted to scale up into an international one, without sacrificing the original national organization completely? What could a successful branching out process look like? Supposing that creating a new organization would miss out on some of these benefits of scaling up you mention here.
Looking forward to reading this in the future! I’d like to add though that some people really enjoy being generalists, wearers of many hats, and Jacks of all trades, ready to switch tasks/projects/cause areas if priorities seem to change.