Nate Soares once described autodidacting to prepare for a job at MIRI. For each position at MIRI (agent foundations, machine learning alignment, software engineer, type theorist, machine learning living library), what should one study if one wanted to do something like that today? (i.e. for agent foundations, is Scott Garrabrant’s suggestion of “Learn enough math to understand all fixed point theorems” essentially correct? Is there anything else one needs to know?)
I don’t know about what you need to know in order to do agent foundations research and trust Scott’s answer.
If you’re seriously considering autodidacting to prepare for a non-agent-foundations job at MIRI, you should email me (buck@intelligence.org) about your particular situation and I’ll try to give you personal advice. If too many people email me asking about this, I’ll end up writing something publicly.
In general, I’d rather that people talk to me before they study a lot for a MIRI job rather than after, so that I can point them in the right direction and they don’t waste effort learning things that aren’t going to make the difference to whether we want to hire them.
And if you want to autodidact to work on agent foundations at MIRI, consider emailing someone on the agent foundations team. Or you could try emailing me and I can try to help.
Nate Soares once described autodidacting to prepare for a job at MIRI. For each position at MIRI (agent foundations, machine learning alignment, software engineer, type theorist, machine learning living library), what should one study if one wanted to do something like that today? (i.e. for agent foundations, is Scott Garrabrant’s suggestion of “Learn enough math to understand all fixed point theorems” essentially correct? Is there anything else one needs to know?)
I don’t know about what you need to know in order to do agent foundations research and trust Scott’s answer.
If you’re seriously considering autodidacting to prepare for a non-agent-foundations job at MIRI, you should email me (buck@intelligence.org) about your particular situation and I’ll try to give you personal advice. If too many people email me asking about this, I’ll end up writing something publicly.
In general, I’d rather that people talk to me before they study a lot for a MIRI job rather than after, so that I can point them in the right direction and they don’t waste effort learning things that aren’t going to make the difference to whether we want to hire them.
And if you want to autodidact to work on agent foundations at MIRI, consider emailing someone on the agent foundations team. Or you could try emailing me and I can try to help.