I think this makes the right kind of mentorship and exercising the right kind of judgment more valuable. FWIW the article’s author got outed as a fabulist of some form in the last few hours; he admitted to lying about MATS and hasn’t furnished any proof about his other resume lines.
I think this is a legibility problem; the whole rationalist corpus is available for easy consumption, Bayesian reasoning is not that hard to figure out, and there’s a pretty universal presumption of good faith (the author still has a lot of defenders!), so it’s really hard to sit two people down, one of whom is a mercenary there to use the fellowship as a stepping stone to wealth, power, etc, the other there out of genuine belief, and detect which is which reliably off of conversation alone.
At least at the selection layer, it seems like the most important thing is finding small honesty and motivation tells. I’m a recent college grad and in college I helped found a club which had pretty explosive and rapid success which we believed was thanks to our distinct internal culture and norms which put us at odds with our otherwise famously-mercenary college.
In the end we found two filters to be reliable and workable. The first was a very brief screening application which explicitly prohibited AI-generated responses. Whoever read the application plugged results into Pangram if they were suspicious. Our belief was that if the applicant couldn’t do a ~15 minute screener with their own writing, then we had no reliable positive indications of their motivation or work quality, and a pretty strong negative signal about their honesty.
The next was a curveball question in which we explicitly encouraged “I don’t know, here’s what I do know and here’s how I’d start solving it” and clarifying-follow ups as answers. The questions always varied and were always premised around very specific information about our field; having an answer from the hip was very high-signal for motivation and work quality, asking the right questions was higher signal for work quality but lower for motivation.
These two filters were the only absolutes in the process, and any other information we asked (resume, specific question content, etc) was purely about placement or deciding between marginal applicants. When I graduated, the club had basically kept its original culture while being successful. Maybe this approach will be helpful for thinking through the problems?
I think this makes the right kind of mentorship and exercising the right kind of judgment more valuable. FWIW the article’s author got outed as a fabulist of some form in the last few hours; he admitted to lying about MATS and hasn’t furnished any proof about his other resume lines.
I think this is a legibility problem; the whole rationalist corpus is available for easy consumption, Bayesian reasoning is not that hard to figure out, and there’s a pretty universal presumption of good faith (the author still has a lot of defenders!), so it’s really hard to sit two people down, one of whom is a mercenary there to use the fellowship as a stepping stone to wealth, power, etc, the other there out of genuine belief, and detect which is which reliably off of conversation alone.
At least at the selection layer, it seems like the most important thing is finding small honesty and motivation tells. I’m a recent college grad and in college I helped found a club which had pretty explosive and rapid success which we believed was thanks to our distinct internal culture and norms which put us at odds with our otherwise famously-mercenary college.
In the end we found two filters to be reliable and workable. The first was a very brief screening application which explicitly prohibited AI-generated responses. Whoever read the application plugged results into Pangram if they were suspicious. Our belief was that if the applicant couldn’t do a ~15 minute screener with their own writing, then we had no reliable positive indications of their motivation or work quality, and a pretty strong negative signal about their honesty.
The next was a curveball question in which we explicitly encouraged “I don’t know, here’s what I do know and here’s how I’d start solving it” and clarifying-follow ups as answers. The questions always varied and were always premised around very specific information about our field; having an answer from the hip was very high-signal for motivation and work quality, asking the right questions was higher signal for work quality but lower for motivation.
These two filters were the only absolutes in the process, and any other information we asked (resume, specific question content, etc) was purely about placement or deciding between marginal applicants. When I graduated, the club had basically kept its original culture while being successful. Maybe this approach will be helpful for thinking through the problems?