welcome to the nonlinear library, where we use text-to-speech software to convert the best writing from the rationalist and ea communities into audio.
This is: What FHI’s Research Scholars Programme is like: views from scholars, published by rosehadshar on the effective altruism forum.
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FHI’s Research Scholars Programme (RSP) has now been running for just under two years, and we’re excited to have launched applications for a third cohort of research scholars.
In this post, I (RSP’s project manager) want to share some scholars’ responses to a series of prompts about RSP, in their own words. I’ve removed some prompts where there weren’t many responses or I didn’t think they’d be very helpful, and sometimes lightly edited the responses for clarity.
Each scholar’s experience of RSP is different, and this sample (~11 out of 19 scholars) probably isn’t representative; but I hope it will give an illustrative idea of what RSP can be like to those who are interested in the programme or considering applying.
Note that RSP is still a young programme, and we continue to make changes (that we hope are on-average improvements), so future experiences may differ.
Why did you want to do RSP in the first place?
“I wanted to figure out my career plans, work on my health, and see what kinds of research I was good at.”
“After having led the research wing of an EA organization, I wanted to transition to doing research myself, but wasn’t sure which area to focus on. I was hoping to explore different directions to make a more informed decision.”
“I had a fairly specific vision of what I wanted to work on, and thought I could teach myself the important necessary things from online resources and books. I liked that RSP seemed to provide a good environment for independent research and study.”
“I really liked the program description, and a large amount of research freedom and space to explore."
What are you working on at the moment?
“I’m trying to clarify and evaluate claims that distributions of opportunities for altruistic impact are often heavy-tailed – i.e. roughly that the total impact from many different activities will be dominated by the few highest-impact ones.”
“I’m working on a few projects at the moment. One is on investigating potential effects from transformative narrow AI, one is on investigating atomically precise manufacturing, and one is on mapping out potential paths to transformative AI.”
“I’m working on several projects at the moment, one of which is on the effects current and advanced AI systems might have on human autonomy. In another project, I analyse the opportunities and challenges that might arise from introducing broader impact statement requirements for ML conference submissions.”
How do you spend most of your time?
“Most of my time is spent on the research projects that I am working on. In practice, this means that I spend a fair bit of time doing solo research and writing either at Oxford’s libraries or in the FHI office. I also spend time meeting with collaborators, other researchers, or people doing work that is relevant to my research. There is an active community of researchers willing to engage on new projects, so I find there is no shortage of people interested in workshopping ideas or collaborating.”
“It depends on the time of the academic year. I spend the majority of my time on research but there are times where other things, such as teaching, presenting, or consulting take up a whole bunch of my time.”
“This was actually quite varied during the program, where in some quarters I was every few weeks in the US, attending conferences and workshops and meeting many others working in the field, other times I was mainly walking in Christchurch meadows, thinking, drawing at whiteboards, and not talking to too many people"
What problems have you faced on RSP?
“[T]he freedom to largely do what you like is a strength, but the relative lack of structure can also be a challenge. Although the RSP leadership pr...
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