CFAR-run MIRI Summer Fellows program: July 7-26

post by AnnaSalamon · 2015-04-28T19:04:27.403Z · LW · GW · Legacy · 17 comments

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CFAR will be running a three week summer program this July for MIRI, designed to increase participants' ability to do technical research into the superintelligence alignment problem.

The intent of the program is to boost participants as far as possible in four skills:

1. The CFAR “applied rationality” skillset, including both what is taught at our intro workshops, and more advanced material from our alumni workshops;
2. “Epistemic rationality as applied to the foundations of AI, and other philosophically tricky problems” -- i.e., the skillset taught in the core LW Sequences.  (E.g.: reductionism; how to reason in contexts as confusing as anthropics without getting lost in words.)
3. The long-term impacts of AI, and strategies for intervening (e.g., the content discussed in Nick Bostrom’s book Superintelligence).
4. The basics of AI safety-relevant technical research.  (Decision theory, anthropics, and similar; with folks trying their hand at doing actual research, and reflecting also on the cognitive habits involved.)

The program will be offered free to invited participants, and partial or full scholarships for travel expenses will be offered to those with exceptional financial need.

If you're interested (or possibly-interested), sign up for an admissions interview ASAP at this link (takes 2 minutes): http://rationality.org/miri-summer-fellows-2015/

Also, please forward this post, or the page itself, to anyone you think should come; the skills and talent that humanity brings to bear on the superintelligence alignment problem may determine our skill at navigating it, and sharing this opportunity with good potential contributors may be a high-leverage way to increase that talent.

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