What has been the causal history of you deciding that it was worth leaving your previous job to work with MIRI? Many people have a generic positive or negative view of MIRI, but it’s much stronger to decide to actually work there.
Earning to give started looking worse and worse the more that I increased my respect for Open Phil; by 2017 it seemed mostly obvious that I shouldn’t earn to give. I stayed at my job for a few months longer because two prominent EAs gave me the advice to keep working at my current job, which in hindsight seems like an obvious mistake and I don’t know why they gave that advice. Then in May, MIRI advertised a software engineer internship program which I applied to; they gave me an offer, but I would have had to quit my job to take the offer, and Triplebyte (which I’d joined as the first engineer) was doing quite well and I expected that if I got another software engineering job it would have much lower pay. After a few months I decided that there were enough good things I could be doing with my time that I quit Triplebyte and started studying ML (and also doing some volunteer work for MIRI doing technical interviewing for them).
I tried to figure out whether MIRI’s directions for AI alignment were good, by reading a lot of stuff that had been written online; I did a pretty bad job of thinking about all this.
At this point MIRI offered me a full time job and Paul Christiano offered me a month-long trial working with him at OpenAI; I took Paul’s offer mostly because I wanted to learn more about how Paul and other OpenAI people think about AI and AI safety. I wasn’t great at the work, partially because it was ML and I don’t like experimenting with ML that much, but it was a great experience and I learned a lot and I’m really glad I did it. They didn’t give me an offer, saying that I should go and learn more ML and reapply if I wanted to, which seemed very reasonable to me. I then accepted the MIRI offer.
I think there were two decisions here: quitting my job and joining MIRI. Quitting my job seems pretty overdetermined in hindsight, because it seemed that there were many different direct work opportunities I could pursue and many different skills I could be trying to learn. If I wasn’t at a company which I liked as much as Triplebyte I would have quit much earlier.
I joined MIRI without a strong inside view model of why their work made sense, mostly based on the fact that Nate Soares had deeply impressed me with his thoughts on CS and physics, Eliezer seemed like a generally really smart guy based on his writing, and because I thought I had a strong comparative advantage in working for them compared to other orgs (because I’d done functional programming and could help with recruiting).
I tried to figure out whether MIRI’s directions for AI alignment were good, by reading a lot of stuff that had been written online; I did a pretty bad job of thinking about all this.
I’m curious about why you think you did a bad job at this. Could you roughly explain what you did and what you should have done instead?
What has been the causal history of you deciding that it was worth leaving your previous job to work with MIRI? Many people have a generic positive or negative view of MIRI, but it’s much stronger to decide to actually work there.
Earning to give started looking worse and worse the more that I increased my respect for Open Phil; by 2017 it seemed mostly obvious that I shouldn’t earn to give. I stayed at my job for a few months longer because two prominent EAs gave me the advice to keep working at my current job, which in hindsight seems like an obvious mistake and I don’t know why they gave that advice. Then in May, MIRI advertised a software engineer internship program which I applied to; they gave me an offer, but I would have had to quit my job to take the offer, and Triplebyte (which I’d joined as the first engineer) was doing quite well and I expected that if I got another software engineering job it would have much lower pay. After a few months I decided that there were enough good things I could be doing with my time that I quit Triplebyte and started studying ML (and also doing some volunteer work for MIRI doing technical interviewing for them).
I tried to figure out whether MIRI’s directions for AI alignment were good, by reading a lot of stuff that had been written online; I did a pretty bad job of thinking about all this.
At this point MIRI offered me a full time job and Paul Christiano offered me a month-long trial working with him at OpenAI; I took Paul’s offer mostly because I wanted to learn more about how Paul and other OpenAI people think about AI and AI safety. I wasn’t great at the work, partially because it was ML and I don’t like experimenting with ML that much, but it was a great experience and I learned a lot and I’m really glad I did it. They didn’t give me an offer, saying that I should go and learn more ML and reapply if I wanted to, which seemed very reasonable to me. I then accepted the MIRI offer.
I think there were two decisions here: quitting my job and joining MIRI. Quitting my job seems pretty overdetermined in hindsight, because it seemed that there were many different direct work opportunities I could pursue and many different skills I could be trying to learn. If I wasn’t at a company which I liked as much as Triplebyte I would have quit much earlier.
I joined MIRI without a strong inside view model of why their work made sense, mostly based on the fact that Nate Soares had deeply impressed me with his thoughts on CS and physics, Eliezer seemed like a generally really smart guy based on his writing, and because I thought I had a strong comparative advantage in working for them compared to other orgs (because I’d done functional programming and could help with recruiting).
I’m curious about why you think you did a bad job at this. Could you roughly explain what you did and what you should have done instead?