Thank you for this. I really appreciate this in-depth analysis, but I think it is unnecessarily harsh and critical in points. 

E.g., See: Hendrycks has it backwards: In order to have a real, scientific impact, you have to actually prove your thing holds up to the barest of scrutiny. Ideally before making grandiose claims about it, and before pitching it to fucking X. Look, I’m glad that various websites were able to point out the flaws in this paper. But we shouldn’t have had to. Dan Hendrycks and CAIS should have put in a little bit of extra effort, to spare all the rest of us the job of fact checking his shitty research. 

I will second the claim that Luke is exceptional, even amongst other exceptional people. He has a rare ability to simultaneously be incredibly impressive, warm, humble, caring, hardworking and productive. 

Hey! Yes, this is related to MIT/US immigration challenges and not something we can easily fix, unfortunately. We do sometimes hire people remotely. If you would like to express interest working with/for us, then you can submit a general expression of interest here.

Feel free to comment again if you have more specific questions, and I will do my best to answer. I may also ask HR to add more information about the position.

Thanks for the feedback, Riley. Sorry for the confusion. See the not very detailed job description on the MIT careers page. Probably the best and quickest way to apply is to make a submission here - just select the Junior Research Scientist/Technical Associate position (if that is the only one of interest). 

"From there, we asked it to compute the probabilities of 177 events from Metaculus that had happened (or not happened) since.

Concretely, we asked the bot whether Israel would carry out an attack on Iran before May 1, 2024. We compared the probabilities it arrived at to those arrived at independently by crowds of forecasters on the prediction platform Metaculus. We found that FiveThirtyNine performed just as well as crowd forecasts."

Just to check my understanding of the excerpt above, were all the 177 events used in evaluation related to Israel attacking Iran?

Quick response - the way that I reconcile this is that these differences were probably just due to context and competence interactions. Maybe you could call it comparative advantage fluctuations over time?

There probably no reasonable claim that advising is generally higher impact than Ops or vice versa. It will depend on the individual and the context. At some times, some people are going to be able to have much higher impact doing ops than advising, and vice versa.

From a personal perspective my advising opportunities very greatly. There are times where most of my impact comes from helping somebody else because I have been put in contact with them and I happen to have useful things to offer. There are also times where the most obviously counteractually impactful thing for me to do is to do research or some sort of operations work to enable other researchers. Both of these activities kind of have lumpy impact distributions because they only occur when certain rare criteria are collectively met.

In this case Abraham may have had much better advising opportunities relative to operations opportunities while this was not true for Peter.

Just wanted to quickly say that I hold a similar opinion to the top paragraph and have had similar experiences on terms of where I felt I had most impact.

I think that the choice of whether to be a researcher or do operations is very context dependant.

If there are no other researchers doing something important your competitive advantage may be to do some research because that will probably outperform the counterfactual (no research) and may also catalyze interest and action within that research domain.

However if there are a lot of established organizations and experienced researchers, or just researchers who are more naturally skilled than you already involved in the research domain, then you can often have a more significant impact by helping to support those researchers or attract new researchers.

One way to navigate this is to have a what I call a research hybrid role where you work as researcher but allocate some flexible amount of time to more operations / field building activities depending on what seems most valuable.

I haven't encountered any donors complaining that they were misled by donation matching offers, and I'm not aware of any evidence that offering donation matching has worse impacts than not having it, either in terms of total dollars donated or in attempts to increase donations to effective charities.

However, I haven't been actively looking for that evidence - is there something that I've missed?

Fair. Perhaps during the post event survey you could ask people who have attended previous events if they want to report any significant impacts from those past events? Then they can respond as relevant.