EA - Good Futures Initiative: Winter Project Internship by Aris Richardson

The Nonlinear Library

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: Good Futures Initiative: Winter Project Internship, published by Aris Richardson on November 27, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. TLDR: I'm launching Good Futures Initiative, a winter project internship to sponsor students to take on projects to upskill, test their fit for career aptitudes, or do impactful work over winter break. You can read more on our website and apply here by December 11th if interested! Good Futures Initiative The Good Futures Initiative is a 4.5 week internship in which students can use their winter break to lead high-EV projects. Projects could take many forms, but each project produces a final product while accomplishing one of these three goals: Skill up the intern in order for them to work on AI Safety or Biosecurity in the future. Let the intern explore an aptitude for an impactful career. Create impact directly. Good Futures takes place remotely from December 18th-January 25th, with a minimum of 12 hours of work per week. Accepted applicants will receive a $300 stipend and up to $1000 in funding for additional time or project fees. I expect to accept ~12 interns. The final number will depend largely on my capacity, but I may offer a lower-effort version of the program for promising applicants who I can’t fully fund/support (with a cohort for weekly check-ins and invites to guest speaker events). Example projects These project examples are far from perfect. At the start of the internship, I'd work with each intern to be sure they're doing the best project fit for their goals. That being said, I’m excited by projects similar to (and better than!!) these. Skilling up by working on AI Safety technical projects that have been posted by existing researchers, with the goal of creating a lesswrong post detailing your findings. For an example of a potential project to work on, Sam Bowman posted the following project: Consider questions where the most common answer online is likely to be false (as in TruthfulQA). If you prompt GPT-3-Instruct (or similar) with questions and correct answers in one domain/topic, then ask it about another domain/topic, will it tend to give the correct answer or the popular answer? As you make the domains/topics more or less different, how does this vary? Exploring an aptitude for communications by creating 2 articles on longtermist ideas and submitting them to 10 relevant magazines for publishing. Create impact by translating 3 relevant research papers from AGISF into Mandarin and posting them somewhere where they can be accessed by ML engineers in China. In addition to leading a focused project, interns will have weekly one-on-one progress check-ins with me (accountability), guest speaker events (expertise), and a meeting with a cohort of ~5 other interns working on projects (community). Our projects are student-directed. Although there will be guest speakers who have expertise in various topics, weekly advising/mentorship will be focused on helping students learn to self-sufficiently lead projects and build skills, rather than technical help executing the projects. E.g.: Accountability, increasing ambition, figuring out how to increase a project’s EV, making sure interns focus on the right metrics each week. Students are encouraged to apply for technical projects that will help them upskill/test their fit for technical work and reach out to additional mentors during the internship. Rationale This internship fills a few gaps the EA community has in the process of getting students/recent grads to seriously pursue high-impact work. Students have a lot of time over winter break, but few obvious opportunities for impactful work, structured aptitude testing, or focused skilling-up. There are a lot of students or recent graduates interested in switching to a more impactful career, but aren't sure of the best way to do ...