The Singularity Institute is hiring an executive assistant near Berkeley

Louie

The Singularity Institute is hiring an executive assistant for Executive Director Luke Muehlhauser.

Right now his limiter (besides the need for some sleep and recreation) is not (1) cognitive exhaustion after a certain number of hours or (2) akrasia, but instead (3) needing to spend lots of time doing things that don't need to be him: e.g. hunting down the best product for X and buying it, shopping for food, finding names and email addresses for the top 30 researchers in field X, finding motorcycle classes and a motorcycle so he can stop paying so much for cabs when he doesn't have time for public transport, scheduling meetings with dozens of donors and collaborators, finding a good location for activity X, preparing an itinerary and buying plane tickets, and hundreds of other small things. (Some of these are 'life' things, some of these are SI things, but hours are hours.) Luke may also ask his executive assistant to handle certain tasks for other SI staffers.

Benefits:

Work directly with some of the central figures of Less Wrong, especially Luke(prog)
Work from home most of the time, with a somewhat self-determined schedule
Trial period at $15/hr for 20 hrs/week; if all goes well then get hired full-time at SI's standard starting salary of $3k/month

Responsibilities:

Represent our organization in a professional manner at all times
Manage scheduling and appointments for Luke
Prepare and manage correspondence professionally and accurately
Coordinate travel arrangements for Luke
Online and local shopping and transport
Internet research
Whatever else Luke needs done

Job requirements:

Good interpersonal skills and strong team-player attitude
Capable of clean, professional written communication with proper spelling, punctuation, and grammar
Positive, friendly and helpful attitude
Ability to handle sensitive and/or confidential material and information
Must pay strong attention to detail
Professional demeanor, dedicated and reliable, conscientious
Computer & internet literate
Own a car
Live in or near Berkeley, CA

Bonus points if you...

...have read the Core Sequences
...have experience as a personal or executive assistant
...have even better creative non-fiction writing skills than is required for professional correspondance
...are handy with Google Scholar
...know a good amount of math, statistics, computer science, or cognitive science
...have some skills in graphic design / presentation design

How to apply:

Send an email to jobs@intelligence.org with the subject line "Executive Assistant Position". Include your cover letter as plain text in the email body, and attach your résumé in PDF format.

The Singularity Institute is hiring an executive assistant for Executive Director Luke Muehlhauser.

Benefits:

Work directly with some of the central figures of Less Wrong, especially Luke(prog)
Work from home most of the time, with a somewhat self-determined schedule
Trial period at $15/hr for 20 hrs/week; if all goes well then get hired full-time at SI's standard starting salary of $3k/month

Responsibilities:

Represent our organization in a professional manner at all times
Manage scheduling and appointments for Luke
Prepare and manage correspondence professionally and accurately
Coordinate travel arrangements for Luke
Online and local shopping and transport
Internet research
Whatever else Luke needs done

Job requirements:

Good interpersonal skills and strong team-player attitude
Capable of clean, professional written communication with proper spelling, punctuation, and grammar
Positive, friendly and helpful attitude
Ability to handle sensitive and/or confidential material and information
Must pay strong attention to detail
Professional demeanor, dedicated and reliable, conscientious
Computer & internet literate
Own a car
Live in or near Berkeley, CA

Bonus points if you...

...have read the Core Sequences
...have experience as a personal or executive assistant
...have even better creative non-fiction writing skills than is required for professional correspondance
...are handy with Google Scholar
...know a good amount of math, statistics, computer science, or cognitive science
...have some skills in graphic design / presentation design

How to apply:

Send an email to jobs@intelligence.org with the subject line "Executive Assistant Position". Include your cover letter as plain text in the email body, and attach your résumé in PDF format.

Let me try again.

In 2009, each licensed driver drove an average of 14,000 miles.

For cars, the fatality rate per 100M VMT was 0.87 (the exact number is on page 22 of my original link). 14,000 miles/year * 0.87 deaths/100,000,000 miles = .0001218 deaths/year = 0.1218 millideaths/year. Inversely, 1 in 8210 people will die each year. Now, my math is hiding subtle assumptions - Traffic Safety Facts 2009 gives the fatality rate for passenger car occupants per vehicle miles traveled. This is affected by how many people occupy a given car! Their definition of motorcyclist also includes people other than the driver. So, these numbers are not exact - but note the direction of bias. It is obvious that cars carry more people on average than motorcycles - therefore, looking at the fatality rate for cars makes them seem more dangerous than they are to a solo driver. Yet the car fatality rate is already an order of magnitude less than for motorcycles. Properly handling this would only strengthen what I'm saying.

For motorcycles (page 28, original link), the same calculation gives 14,000 miles/year * 21.45 deaths/100,000,000 miles = 0.003003 deaths/year = 3.003 millideaths/year. Inversely, 1 in 333 people will die each year. As I mentioned, this is over 20 times riskier (24.7 times!).

Imagine how dangerous cars are. Imagine all of the people who die in car accidents each year. They're pretty dangerous! But they're getting safer, and people judge that their utility outweighs the risks involved. Now, is a risk that's almost 25 times greater worth it?

Now, why aren't our dumpsters clogged with the rotting bodies of motorcyclists? That's because there are far fewer of them than car drivers/occupants, and they travel fewer miles. This simply reduces the exposure to the risk of motorcycles - if a motorcyclist drives less than 14,000 miles per year and experiences less than 3 millideaths per year as a result, it is the reduced distance that is conferring a protective effect, not the motorcycle. Driving whatever distance is chosen in a car instead would reduce the risk of death by 25 times.

Finally, for an absolute comparison, to crime. As you may have heard, South Africa is kind of dangerous! Currently, their homicide rate is 31.9 per 100,000. That's 0.319 millideaths per year - riskier than being a car occupant in America, but less risky than being a motorcyclist, holding vehicle miles traveled constant as explained immediately above.

The relevant quantity is expected time or money savings from riding a motorcycle (relative to Luke's current policy of taking taxis, or his alternative policy of getting a car) minus expected cost of fatalities, not fatality rate per mile, motorcycle fatalities divided by car fatalities, or motorcycle fatalities divided by South African murders. If driving a car comes with higher fixed costs than driving a motorcycle (that you have to pay regardless of miles traveled), then even if the fatality risk from a motorcycle makes a car the obvious better choice f... (read more)

4gwern14y

I had this argument with AngryParsley (who also drives a motorcycle); he claimed, IIRC, that the motorcycle figures are inflated by drunk driving, and that for people who didn't drink and were safety-conscious, the figures were much less pessimistic.