All but 2 of the papers listed on Manifund as coming from AISC projects are from 2021 or earlier. Because I’m interested in the current quality in the presence of competing programs, I looked at the two from 2022 or later: this in a second-tier journal and this in a NeurIPS workshop, with no top conference papers. I count 52 participants in the last AISC so this seems like a pretty poor rate, especially given that 2022 and 2023 cohorts (#7 and #8) could both have published by now.
[...] They also use the number of AI alignment researchers created as an important metric. But impact is heavy-tailed, so the better metric is value of total research produced. Because there seems to be little direct research, to estimate the impact we should count the research that AISC alums from the last two years go on to produce. Unfortunately I don’t have time to do this.
That list of papers is for direct research output of AISC. Many of our alumni have lots of publications not on that list.
Just looking at the direct project outputs is not a good metric for evaluating AISC since most of the value comes from the upskilling. Counting the research that AISC alumns have done since AISC, is not a bad idea, but as you say, a lot more work, I imagine this is partly why Arb chose to do it the way they did.
I agree that heavy tailed-ness in research output is an important considerations. AISC do have some very successful alumni. If we didn’t this would be a major strike against AISC. The thing I’m less certain of is to what extent these people would have succeeded without AISC. This is obviously a difficult thing to evaluate, but still worth trying.
Mostly we let Arb decide how to best to their evaluation, but I’ve specifically asked them to interview our most successful alumni to at least get these peoples estimate of the importance of AISC. The result of this will be presented in their second report.
That list of papers is for direct research output of AISC. Many of our alumni have lots of publications not on that list.
For example, I looked up Marius Hobbhahn—Google Scholar
Just looking at the direct project outputs is not a good metric for evaluating AISC since most of the value comes from the upskilling. Counting the research that AISC alumns have done since AISC, is not a bad idea, but as you say, a lot more work, I imagine this is partly why Arb chose to do it the way they did.
I agree that heavy tailed-ness in research output is an important considerations. AISC do have some very successful alumni. If we didn’t this would be a major strike against AISC. The thing I’m less certain of is to what extent these people would have succeeded without AISC. This is obviously a difficult thing to evaluate, but still worth trying.
Mostly we let Arb decide how to best to their evaluation, but I’ve specifically asked them to interview our most successful alumni to at least get these peoples estimate of the importance of AISC. The result of this will be presented in their second report.