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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: Why I'm Not (Yet) A Full-Time Technical Alignment Researcher, published by NicholasKross on May 25, 2023 on LessWrong.
I have bills to pay (rent and food). For those, I need money. Most full-time technical alignment researchers solve this problem by looking for outside funding. (I.e., most researchers are not independently wealthy; they go to someone else to afford to work on alignment full-time.)
To get funding in alignment, you generally apply for a grant or a job. In both cases, anyone who'd give you those things will want to see evidence, beforehand, that you know what you're doing. To a near-tautological degree, this evidence must be "legible".
How do I make my skills/ideas legible? The recommended route is to write my ideas on a blog/LessWrong, read and interact with other alignment materials, and then... eventually it's enough, I assume. For reasons I may/not write about in the near future, many ideas about alignment (especially anything that could be done with today's systems) could very well accelerate capabilities work. There are at least some types of alignment research that are also easy to use for increasing capabilities. Since I'm especially interested in John Wentworth's "abstraction" ideas, anything good I come up might also be like that. In other words legibility and security conflict at least some of the time, especially on the sorts of ideas I'm personally likely to have.
OK, fine, maybe it's hard to publish legible non-exfohazardous original/smart thoughts about AI alignment. Luckily, funders and hire-ers don't expect everyrone coming in to have already published papers! Perhaps I can simply demonstrate my skills, instead?
Firstly, many technical skills relevant to AI alignment are hard to demonstrate efficiently. Say you develop a cool new ML algorithm. Did you just speed up capabilities? Okay, just take public notes on a large amount of technical reading... but that mostly signals conscientiousness, not research Talent:tm:! Well, how about you do another technical project... well, now you're wasting precious time that maybe should've been spent on original research. How long are your timelines? (This also applies to the "become independently wealthy to fund yourself" strategy, only more so. I spent an embarrassingly long time on that route in my spare time...)
My skills, themselves, are not always legible!
Some of my skills are legible enough for my resume: I've engineered some software at some companies, I know how to debug things, and I list more in a section below. I'm pretty okay at these things.
However, I think the stuff I'm best at is currently under-measured. These skills include (but aren't limited to): fast learning (assuming I have the energy and sleep and hopefully a bit of prior exposure to the topic), some technical intuition, absurdly-general knowledge, a good bit of security mindset, having-read-and-understood-most-of-The-Sequences, thinking clearly (again modulo sleep/energy), noticing some things, curiosity, and the oft-mocked-but-probably-underrated "creativity" or "idea generation". I wish there were something like Human Benchmark but for the kinds of "mental motions" needed in AI alignment research.
Even when my skills are legible, they don't seem to be "world-class" in the way that MIRI or OpenAI seem to select for. I got a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science (with a minor in Mathematics) from RIT, in upstate New York. Is that impressive? I got a math-SAT score of over 700, IIRC, and the paper I got back said I was in the 98th or 99th percentile. Is that interesting? I worked with Tensorflow at an internship, and have learned (and often forgotten) the basics of ML coding in classes and online courses. Is that enough for more theoretical/mathematical/conceptual work in alignment? I list more of these in a section below, bu...
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