Hi Chris, thanks for your comment! Our main disagreement seems to be whether the field doing this kind of proactive headhunting will decrease the quality of the community.
My take on this is roughly: I don’t think commitment selection filters for MCPs disappear because we try to headhunt them; career changes are still a pretty big decision, and there’s not really any reason why a highly respected, talented MCP who’s headhunted would choose to transition to AI safety if they didn’t care about the field or want to contribute. Those we can convince with the workshops will feel more confident about taking the leap with some amount of hand-holding; those who aren’t convinced probably won’t choose to transition anyway, so no harm done.
Hi Craig! I think you brought up some really good points re: what this piece covers vs doesn’t. I wrote this piece with mainly MCPs who have some number of the following problems in mind:
don’t have connections in the space,
unsure how to do the career transition,
have some amount of interest but not confident enough to quit original job,
have applied for roles and want to work in the field but haven’t gotten accepted anywhere.
The solution I proposed was:
to headhunt people actively,
to create workshops to convince those people they should transition,
to hold their hands and guide them through various resources + do reverse headhunting for them to find the most promising roles.
I understand it was probably confusing for me to have gone from MCPs struggling to get in to a model that, via headhunting, seemed to imply that we should prioritize getting the most talented MCPs to transition in (via e.g. educating them about AI risk).
To clarify, I included the headhunting aspect because these kinds of programs usually have applications open by default rather than inviting people, but I think it may be worth doing both (e.g. I think versions of Lateral Workshop that are invite-based for mathematicians should exist, but in an ideal world there should also be general versions of Lateral Workshop that run the normal application process). Either that, or the active headhunters running these programs would hopefully have MCPs who are / have struggled to transition in in the past on their radars, so the workshops would serve both types of MCPs—those trying to transition and those not really having considered it strongly.
I also:
think that some MCPs who struggle to transition in do so in part because of lack of context,
or because AI safety orgs are pretty insular and rely a lot on recommendations for hiring,
or because they may not have been able to devote very much time to the transition,
in which case, I think a workshop like this which also walks through applying for career transition grants would be pretty helpful.
So you’re right that the pipeline doesn’t solve your specific case; remote-friendly roles and compensation are field-level problems that I didn’t try to tackle in this post, because I’m honestly not sure how to. What I’d say is the pipeline shrinks the population of blocked MCPs to the more difficult structural cases like yours, which, although not perfect, is progress over the current state of affairs.
Hope that clarifies things—let me know your thoughts!