Open & Welcome Thread – March 2021

Hi all (and thanks Ben for starting this thread),

Our group (Philosophy & Ethics group, TU Eindhoven, The Netherlands) has a call for three PhD positions which might be of interest to some of you (the deadline is very soon though - March 10). All three positions are fully funded and for a period of 4 years. Please feel free to get in touch or send me a PM if you'd like some additional info on them!

PhD Position A: Norms of Explainable AI
PhD Position B: Cognitive Science of AI
PhD Position C: Philosophy of Science/Social epistemology

About three years ago, I started a quantitative cryptocurrency hedge fund with my brother and Satvik [LW · GW]. We have been doing pretty well, and in addition to raising more $$ this year, we have decided to expand our team. We're looking for a few potential roles:

1.  Quants: expected background in quantitative trading + some engineering skills
2.  Developers: at least 5+ years of experience; familiarity with AWS, ETL, data quality assurance and writing fast code are plusses
3.  Researchers: we give you the data / problem and you do your magic; this role can be part-time / consulting; expected background: PhD or similarly deep understanding of your "magic"

You can PM me on this website (or email me).

If you don't fit these buckets, but you're very interested and you think you could help us, PM me anyway.

Ought is building Elicit, an AI research assistant using language models to automate and scale parts of the research process. Today, researchers can brainstorm research questions, search for datasets, find relevant publications, and brainstorm scenarios.  They can create custom research tasks and search engines.  You can find demos of Elicit here and a podcast explaining our vision here.  

We're hiring for the following roles:

• Machine Learning Engineer (NLP)
• Full-Stack Software Engineer
• Frontend Engineer
• Engineering Lead
• Frontend Engineering Intern
• Software Engineering Intern

Each job description contains sample projects from our roadmap. 

Research is one of the primary engines by which society moves forward.  We're excited about the potential language models and ML have for making this engine orders of magnitude more effective. 

My company, Wave, is building mobile money in the developing world (wave.com). We are a for-profit company helping mostly-unbanked people get access to money and digital markets. Besides the usual software engineering jobs, I’ve had particular trouble finding great senior product managers (3+ yrs experience in entrepreneurship, Product at tech companies, or engineering leadership) and head of information security (5+ yrs, ideally with some security certification experience). Not all of these roles are posted on our website so email me privately if you are interested! My email is lincoln at our url :)

The Centre for Effective Altruism is hiring a full stack developer and our partner organization Giving What We Can is hiring a developer/technical product manager.

For the developer position, we are piloting a Tour of Service model: we think that a qualified candidate could transform the community’s online infrastructure in a short, focused period, and we encourage you to apply even if you might only want to stay for 1-2 years.

I’d be happy to answer any questions you might have about the role.

I'm thinking of experimenting with this google docs to markdown converter, next time I really want footnotes.

But there are a lot of other things I like about the WYSIWIG editor that I'd be sad to abandon.

Yep, agree, also want this. Just a bit complicated tech-wise and UI-wise, so it's a reasonably large investment.

It would also be great if it showed a hover preview of the footnote like in this post [LW(p) · GW(p)] that used comment footnotes.

But it’s not an “impossibility”. It’s an “unwillingness”—on your part! You could use the Markdown editor to add footnotes, very easily.

I am interested in how learning rationalist techniques could help me navigate making complex life choices.

Have you already found some useful answers?

In my opinion, the greatest value usually comes from a few rather simple techniques, assuming that you actually do them. In other words, the typical failures are "not even trying" and "thinking about what needs to be done (and reading about it), but never actually doing it".

A few simple techniques:

• actually spend 5 minutes by clock trying to answer the question
• ask a smart and trusted person
• use Google (to find answers to factual questions)
• write a letter to an imaginary smart advisor, imagine their response (e.g. asking for more details, or making an obvious conclusion "well if you say X is better, why aren't you already doing X?"), write another letter, etc.
• imagine it is actually your friend having the problem, what would you advise them?
• imagine you chose X and later you regretted the outcome. why? (say the most likely reason)
• decide by flipping a coin (actually flip the coin), now contemplate how you feel about the outcome

Since you haven't gotten any responses, here's some stuff I remember that seems somewhat related:

• Old posts around here trying to find the best/good textbooks. (Search page [? · GW], some relevant links: The Best Textbooks on Every Subject [LW · GW], Best Textbook List Expansion [LW · GW], General textbook comparison thread [LW · GW]. There's also "Literature Reviews [? · GW]", maybe an explanation of how to do those would be useful to you - I think there's 2 blog posts that do that floating around, one by an Elizabeth perhaps.)
• There's also a little bit of stuff about studying*, and note taking systems (for example, Zetelkasten (search), wait no it's Zettelkasten [LW · GW](a how to post)).
• This post is about grad school, maybe there's one for undergrads by someone else that I haven't read?
• Or you might have to write it.
• There also might be general stuff that might be useful for undergrads in particular. I have no idea what that might be, but here's The Hammertime Sequence [? · GW].

*There was a post by American Breakfast that seemed good, no that's AllAmericanBreakfast [LW · GW] (and the search was awful at finding that) but I don't remember which one. This one maybe? https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HZuAT2sGbDbasdjy5/the-multi-tower-study-strategy [LW · GW] They also seem to write a bit about this topic so maybe something they've written will be useful.

I would guess more “Gray Tribe” ~ “increased likelihood of being technology early adopters” rather than “aspiring rationalist” specifically.

I can proofread it. You can send the draft to me via private message.

You should be able to paste youtube links into the default editor and it'll automatically work. I'm not sure about the markdown editor.