I have a fair amount of research latitude, and I’m working at an org with a broad and flexible remit to try to identify and work on the most important questions. This makes the Hamming question — what are the most important questions in your field and why aren’t you working on them — hard to avoid! This is uncomfortable, because if you don’t feel like you’re doing useful work, you’re out of excuses. But it’s also very motivating.
There is an ‘agenda’ in the sense that there’s a list of questions and directions with some consensus that someone at Forethought should work on them. But there’s a palpable sense that the bottleneck to progress isn’t just more researchers to shlep on with writing up ideas, so much as more people with crisp, opinionated takes about what’s important, who can defend their views in good faith.
One possible drawback is that Forethought is not a place where you learn well-scoped skills or knowledge by default, because as a researcher you are not being trained for a particular career track (like junior → senior SWE) or taught a course (like doing a PhD). But there is support and time for self-directed learning, and I’ve learned a lot of tacit knowledge about how to do this kind of research especially from the more senior researchers.
I would personally appreciate people applying with research or industry expertise in fields like law, law and economics, physics, polsci, and ML itself. You should not hold off on applying because you don’t feel like you belong to the LessWrong/EA/AI safety sphere, and I’m worried that Forethought culture becomes too insular in that respect (currently it’s not much of a concern).
If you’re considering applying, I recorded a podcast with Mia Taylor, who recently joined as a researcher!
Thanks for writing this! Some personal thoughts:
I have a fair amount of research latitude, and I’m working at an org with a broad and flexible remit to try to identify and work on the most important questions. This makes the Hamming question — what are the most important questions in your field and why aren’t you working on them — hard to avoid! This is uncomfortable, because if you don’t feel like you’re doing useful work, you’re out of excuses. But it’s also very motivating.
There is an ‘agenda’ in the sense that there’s a list of questions and directions with some consensus that someone at Forethought should work on them. But there’s a palpable sense that the bottleneck to progress isn’t just more researchers to shlep on with writing up ideas, so much as more people with crisp, opinionated takes about what’s important, who can defend their views in good faith.
One possible drawback is that Forethought is not a place where you learn well-scoped skills or knowledge by default, because as a researcher you are not being trained for a particular career track (like junior → senior SWE) or taught a course (like doing a PhD). But there is support and time for self-directed learning, and I’ve learned a lot of tacit knowledge about how to do this kind of research especially from the more senior researchers.
I would personally appreciate people applying with research or industry expertise in fields like law, law and economics, physics, polsci, and ML itself. You should not hold off on applying because you don’t feel like you belong to the LessWrong/EA/AI safety sphere, and I’m worried that Forethought culture becomes too insular in that respect (currently it’s not much of a concern).
If you’re considering applying, I recorded a podcast with Mia Taylor, who recently joined as a researcher!