(You said “Besides offering similar internships”. But I’m pretty excited about other orgs running similar internships, and/or running programs that are vaguely similar and address basically the same issues but aren’t “internships”. So I’ll say a bit about that cluster of stuff, with apologies for sort-of ignoring instructions!)
David wrote:
I’m happy to see an increase in the number of temporary visiting researcher positions at various EA orgs. I found my time visiting GPI during their Early Conference Career Programme very valuable (hint: applications for 2021 are now open, apply!) and would encourage other orgs to run similar sorts of programmes to this and FHI’s (summer) research scholars programme. I’m very excited to see how our internship program develops as I really enjoy mentoring.
I second all of that, except swapping GPI’s Early Conference Career Programme (which I haven’t taken part in) for the Center on Long-Term Risk’s Summer Research Fellowship. I did that fellowship with CLR from mid August to mid November, found it very enjoyable and useful.
I recently made a tag for posts relevant to what I called “research training programs”. By this I mean things like FHI and CLR’s Summer Research Fellowships, Rethink Priorities’ planned internship program, CEA’s former Summer Research Fellowship, probably GPI’s Early Career Conference Programme, probably FHI’s Research Scholars Program, maybe the Open Phil AI Fellowship, and maybe ALLFED’s volunteer program. Readers interested in such programs might want to have a look at the posts with that tag.
I think that these programs might be one of the best ways to address some of the main bottlenecks in EA or at least in longtermism (I’ve thought less about areas of EA other than longtermism). What I mean is related to the claim that EA being vetting-constrained, and to Ben Todd’s claim that some of EA’s main bottlenecks at the moment are “organizational capacity, infrastructure, and management to help train people up”. There was also some related discussion here (though it’s harder to say whether that overall supported the claims I’m gesturing at).
So I’m really glad a few more such programs have recently popped up in longtermism. And I’m really excited about Rethink’s internship program (which I wasn’t involved in the planning of, and didn’t know about when I accepted the role at Rethink). And I’d be keen to see more such programs emerge over time. I think they could take a wide variety of forms, including but not limited to internships.
Research training programs, and similar things
(You said “Besides offering similar internships”. But I’m pretty excited about other orgs running similar internships, and/or running programs that are vaguely similar and address basically the same issues but aren’t “internships”. So I’ll say a bit about that cluster of stuff, with apologies for sort-of ignoring instructions!)
David wrote:
I second all of that, except swapping GPI’s Early Conference Career Programme (which I haven’t taken part in) for the Center on Long-Term Risk’s Summer Research Fellowship. I did that fellowship with CLR from mid August to mid November, found it very enjoyable and useful.
I recently made a tag for posts relevant to what I called “research training programs”. By this I mean things like FHI and CLR’s Summer Research Fellowships, Rethink Priorities’ planned internship program, CEA’s former Summer Research Fellowship, probably GPI’s Early Career Conference Programme, probably FHI’s Research Scholars Program, maybe the Open Phil AI Fellowship, and maybe ALLFED’s volunteer program. Readers interested in such programs might want to have a look at the posts with that tag.
I think that these programs might be one of the best ways to address some of the main bottlenecks in EA or at least in longtermism (I’ve thought less about areas of EA other than longtermism). What I mean is related to the claim that EA being vetting-constrained, and to Ben Todd’s claim that some of EA’s main bottlenecks at the moment are “organizational capacity, infrastructure, and management to help train people up”. There was also some related discussion here (though it’s harder to say whether that overall supported the claims I’m gesturing at).
So I’m really glad a few more such programs have recently popped up in longtermism. And I’m really excited about Rethink’s internship program (which I wasn’t involved in the planning of, and didn’t know about when I accepted the role at Rethink). And I’d be keen to see more such programs emerge over time. I think they could take a wide variety of forms, including but not limited to internships.
And I’d strongly recommend aspiring or early-career researchers consider applying to such programs. See also Jsevillamol’s post My experience on a summer research programme.
(As always, these are just my personal views, not necessarily the views of other people at Rethink.)