Hiring Luke full time would be an excellent choice for the SIAI. I spent time with Luke at mini-camp and can provide some insight.

• Luke is an excellent communicator and agent for the efficient transmission of ideas. More importantly, he has the ability to teach these skills to others. Luke has shown this skill publicly on Less Wrong and also on his blog, with this distilled analysis of Eliezer's writing "Reading Yudkowsky."

• Luke is a genuine modern day renaissance man, a true polymath. However, Luke is very self-aware of his limitations and has devoted significant work to finding ways of removing or mitigating those limitations. For example any person with a broad range of academic interests could fall prey to never acquiring useful skills in any of those interest areas. Luke sees this as a serious problem of concern and wants to maximize the efficiency of searching the academic space of ideas. Again, for Luke this is a teachable skill. His session "Productivity and Scholarship" at minicamp outlined techniques for efficient research and reducing akrasia. None of that material would be particularly surprising for a regular reader of Less Wrong -- because Luke pioneered critical posts on these subjects. Luke's suggestions were all implementable and process focused, such as utilizing review articles and Wikipedia to rapidly familiarize one's self broadly with the jargon of a new discipline before doing deep research.

• Luke is an excellent listener and has a high degree of effectiveness in human interaction. This manifests itself as someone you enjoy speaking to, who seems interested in your views, and then who is able to tell you why you are wrong in a way that makes you feel smarter. (Compare with Eliezer, who will simply turn away when you are wrong. This is fine for Eliezer, but not ideal for SIAI as an organization.) Again, Luke understands how to teach this skill set. It seems likely that Luke would raise the social effectiveness of SIAI as an organization and then also generate positive affectations toward the organization in his dealings with others.

Luke would have a positive influence on the culture of the SIAI, the research of the SIAI, and the public face of the SIAI. Any organization would love to find someone who excels in any one of those dimensions, much less someone who excels in all of them.

Mini-camp was an exhausting challenge to all of the instructors. Luke never once showed that exhaustion, let it dampen his enthusiasm, or let his annoyance be shown (except, perhaps, as a tactical tool to move along a stalled or irrelevant conversation). In many ways he presented the best face of "mini-camp as a consumable product." That trait (we could call it customer focus or product awareness) is a critical skill the SIAI is lacking.

An example of how Luke has changed me. I was only vaguely aware of the concepts of efficient learning and study. Of course, I know about study habits and putting in time at practice in a certain sense. These usually emphasize practice and time investment (which is important) but underemphasize the value of finding the right things to spend time on.

It was only when I read Luke's posts, spoke to him, and participated in his sessions at mini-camp that I received a language for thinking about and conducting introspection on the subject of efficient learning. Specifically, I've applied his standards and process to my study of guitar and classical music and I now feel I've effectively solved the question of where to spend my time and am solely in the realm of doing the actual practice, composition, and research. I've advanced more in the past few months of music study than I have ever done in the prior year and a half I played guitar.

In the past month I have actively applied his skill of skimming review material (review books on classical composers) and then used wikipedia to rapidly drill down on confusing component subjects. In the past month, I have actively applied his skill of thinking vicariously about someone else's victory that represents goals I have to make a hard road seem less like a barrier and more like a negotiable terrain. In the past month, I have applied his skill of considering the merits of multiple competing areas of interest, determined the one with the most impact, and pursued it (knowing I could later scoop up the missing pieces more quickly).

I did all of that with the awareness that Luke was the source of the skills and language that let me do those things.

I am more awesome because of Luke.