Mihaly Barasz is an IMO gold medalist perfect scorer. From what I've seen personally, I'd guess that Paul Christiano is better than him at math. I forget what Marcello's prodigy points were in but I think it was some sort of computing olympiad. All should have some sort of verified performance feat far in excess of the listed educational attainment.
These days I'd describe myself as a decision theorist, with a strong interest in human rationality. Boasting of my mathematical talent in that company seems inappropriate; I don't have comparable prodigy markers (well, some very early ones of similar statistical rareness, but that was at easier problems at a younger age, and I was not properly developed as a pure math prodigy since then). I've often played a key role in figuring out which math to invent, but have relatively less comparative advantage at proving things within a given system once invented, unless the key happens to be checking laws against a concrete example which I seem to do earlier than most mathematicians. What I really do doesn't seem to have very much of a name, and can't realistically be described in a document like this one.
Anna Salamon has an Erdos number of 2.
Anna Salamon has an Erdos number of 2.
This isn't something that is normally listed as a qualification. It essentially signals math fandom rather than math and including it in a list of qualifications sounds very unprofessional. The signaling isn't great here.
It's interesting but not impressive. The only Erdos number that has ever been a useful gauge of extraordinary skill is 0.
"All should have some sort of verified performance feat far in excess of the listed educational attainment"
A relevant point, I'm debating adding that. The audience I'd had in mind when first putting this together was people trying to decide which courses, schools, or training would help them get into x-risk research. For that crowd, knowing who the prodigies are and what performance metrics they did well on what wouldn't be that useful. But I realize that there may be very young, very high-talent people reading a list like this and trying to decide where they should focus their efforts, and they might be interested in knowing others like them ended up in x-risk.
Who did I miss?
Michael Vassar, previous president of (what is now) MIRI
Peter Thiel, major donor to MIRI
Kaj Sotala, writer, longtime LW contributor, MIRI visitor/researcher.
various CFAR people
Kaj Sotala, writer, longtime LW contributor, MIRI visitor/researcher.
Background: BA (Cognitive Science, minor in Computer Science), University of Helsinki; working on MSc (Computer Science, minor in Mathematics), University of Helsinki. Personal website.
I notice you're getting a masters with a minor attached. I didn't know that you could do that, I thought you just got a masters in a single subject. Is that unique to Finish universities or is it a common thing?
It's very common in Finnish universities, but I don't know about elsewhere.
ETA: I think our minors are smaller than in other countries, though - Wikipedia says that "To obtain an academic minor, two years of study at university in a selected subject is the usual requirement", but here you can obtain it with the equivalent of half a year to a full year worth of studies.
ETA2: Wait, that two years requirement fails a basic sanity check. Bachelor's degrees are typically 3-4 years, right? So then a minor would constitute at least full half of your degree? That can't be right.
I never had a minor, but it's usually just a handful of classes scattered throughout the course offerings. I've known people to complete minors in three semesters, and it may be possible to do it in less if you have some of the prereqs out of the way.
Forgive my lack of modesty, but Luke wrote about my writings on X-risk here:
http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/hpt/elites_and_ai_stated_opinions/
James Miller http://sophia.smith.edu/~jdmiller/resume.pdf
Not at all, happy to add you. One of the surprises I had after doing this (and one of the reasons it was valuable) was in finding that there are multiple people from economics and law who think and write about these issues. Maybe I'm just out of touch, but I wasn't expecting that.
[edit]: I'm also thinking about contacting just those people who seem a little out of place on a list like this, like the lawyers, and asking them why they ended up in x-risk and whether their background helped significantly. My own cluster of talents would make me a better fit for law school than math graduate school (leaving aside the fact that I just really want to learn some math), but it doesn't seem like the optimal way of getting into the field.
Benja Fallenstein is currently at the University of Bristol and was previously at the University of Vienna, although I'm not sure in exactly what capacity in either case. Nisan Stiennon now has a Ph.D. in mathematics from Stanford. And forgive my lack of modesty as well, but I'm currently a visiting fellow at MIRI. (Background: B.Sc. in mathematics from MIT, and if you care about the point Eliezer brought up, Putnam Honorable Mention. Paul Christiano was on the IMO team and Marcello Herreshoff was a USACO finalist.)
You'll be added, and thanks for the extra information.
Another surprise was the small but non-negligible number of x-riskers who 'only' have an undergraduate degree or even less. I'll probably reach out to those people to see if their backgrounds have any shared features. Unless the feature turns out to be 'I'm a prodigy'. Nothing against the prodigies (I'm wasn't too far off myself, when I was a younger), but it isn't something reproducible. The best I can do now is work hard until I'm very, very good at math/computing/philosophy, and it's less impressive when you're an adult :-)
Well, some of the people on this list are currently in graduate school (e.g. Paul Christiano and myself). Some others dropped out. There's something of a culture of dropping out of graduate school in the Bay Area rationality community.
Maybe I need to apply to graduate school in San Francisco and then drop out :)
Incidentally, are there good graduate schools in the area with a high concentration of rationalists or connection to the rationalist community?
UC Berkeley has the virtue of being physically close to CFAR / MIRI, but it has so many students that "high concentration" is both false and not obviously a good metric to use when commenting on its rationalist population (which includes me, Paul Christiano, Alex Mennen, and probably other people I'm forgetting). MIRI is planning on moving closer to it as well.
Has there ever been any talk of establishing an FHI type thing at UC Berkeley? Liron Shapira might be interested in participating; he's an alumnus. Their faculty club hosted Robin Hanson's talk on effective altruism, right?
(The only problem with this plan is that it would leave too many important people vulnerable to a devastating California earthquake.)
Okay, physical proximity to those organizations will probably affect my decision. Thanks for the information.
Sir Martin Rees, wrote a book about human extinction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Our_Final_Hour
Richard Posner, wrote a book about human extinction
John Lesli, wrote a book about human extinction - The End of the World: The Science and Ethics of Human Extinction http://books.google.ru/books/about/The_End_of_the_World.html?id=gUXgpH6nizIC&redir_esc=y
Bill Joy wrote famous article "Why the future does not need us". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_The_Future_Doesn't_Need_Us
J.Carrigan wrote about risks of dowloading alien AI via SETI. http://home.fnal.gov/~carrigan/SETI/SETI%20Hacker_AC-03-IAA-8-3-06.doc
Robert Freitas wrote an article about grey goo with math estimates. http://www.foresight.org/nano/Ecophagy.html
Adrian Kent wrote "Critical look at risk assessments for global catastrophes" - an article about collider and probabilities. http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-ph/0009204
Herman Khan wrote about Doomsday machine in the book "On Thermonuclear war". http://www.scribd.com/doc/16563514/Herman-Khan-On-Doomsday-machine
Excellent, I will check all of these out.
One of the methodological issues facing me as I worked on this was whether or not to include people who were not x-risk researchers but who had written a piece or two about x-risk. Several of the authors in the new Global Catastrophic Risk (2008) book appear to fall into this category. In practical terms, the physicists who are x-risk researchers have the same resumes as physicists who are not, but making the distinction does keep the list from getting too long.
I say all that because I may or may not decide to include each of these people in the roll call. Your effort is appreciated regardless.
5) Stuart Armstrong
Background: PhD in philosophy (Oxford)
This seems incorrect. From the FHI website:
His Oxford D.Phil was in parabolic geometry, calculating the holonomy of projective and conformal Cartan geometries. He later transitioned into computational biochemistry, designing several new ways to rapidly compare putative bioactive molecules for virtual screening of medicinal compounds.
Yeah, you're right, thanks for catching that. I saw "D.Phil" and just thought 'philosophy', but I'm guessing this is math.
I'm not entirely sure why, but I instinctively felt like downvoting this. Though, I haven't done it yet as I don't quite understand the urge.
I won't try to talk you out of it. I didn't post this expecting accolades, but it was a non-trivial amount of work and it will be useful to several different types of people, namely newcomers trying to get names straight and people thinking about going into x-risk who are planning for the future. After all, I didn't compile this list for no reason, I was trying to answer a different set of questions and this information wasn't available in a single convenient place. Several hours and a lot of tedium were required to track it all down, and I'd rather others not have to duplicate the effort for no reason.
So I won't apologize for it either. Originally the plan had been to make it as comprehensive as possible and post it to main, that way when I finish the bigger project to which this was just a prelude, I can link there rather than having one sprawling mega-post. Given the reception, I'm reconsidering that.
I'm working on a substantial research piece concerned with x-risk, and a sub-task of that involves compiling a list of important people in the field along with a brief summary of their education and relevant links. I realized that such a list might be a useful bit of meta-scholarship on its own, so I'm posting an incomplete version of it here in case anyone thinks there are people I should add. I haven't tracked down all the cv's and personal websites yet but I'd like to get the feedback ball rolling. After the LW crowd has given me any criticisms it thinks are relevant, I'll polish the list up.
The focus is on researchers in x-risk and related fields, so I'm not including, say, every machine intelligence researcher, just the ones who, as far as I can tell, show an awareness of the possible existential impact of their work. In practice this means those who are affiliated with x-risk reduction groups like the Future of Humanity Institute or MIRI, or ones who've specifically written on x-risk. No, that's not quite fair, but I needed some heuristic for narrowing down the list, and my mind is open if anyone has a better idea.
And yes, this is mostly information that's available with a little Googling (though a few people were hard to track down). But this list, when completed, will allow any interested person to quickly see the educational pathways taken by a large number of x-risk researchers. I'm compiling this information as opposed to, say, current position or research interests because the former is more relevant to the bigger project I'm working on, the latter is more likely to change, and besides Googling is easy if you're only interested in a handful of people. But if there is demand for a more thorough and comprehensive document, I could also put that together.
I've erred on the side of inclusion, which means I included people even if they were interns or associates as opposed to primary researchers. Of course I intend to finish this on my own, but if anyone just wants to help, let me know.
Who did I miss?
Associated with the Future of Humanity Institute and the Machine Intelligence Research Institute:
Eliezer Yudkowsky
Background:
extremely high mathematical talent with a strong philosophical bent.
wiki
Robin Hanson
Background:
BS physics (University of California, Irvine)
MS in physics/philosophy of science (University of Chicago)
PhD in Social Science (California Institute of Technology).
cv
Nick Bostrom
Background:
BA in philosophy, mathematics, mathematical logic, and artificial intelligence (University of Gotenberg)
MA in philosophy, physics (University of Stockholm)
MSc computational neuroscience (King's College, London)
PhD in philosophy (London School of economics)
cv
personal website
Luke Muehlhauser
Background:
studied psychology (University of Minnesota)
personal website
Stuart Armstrong
Background:
PhD in mathematics (Oxford)
blog (not personal)
Anders Sandberg
Background:
MS in computer science (Stockholm University)
PhD in computational neuroscience (Stockholm University)
personal blog
Toby Ord
Background:
Bachelor's degrees in computer science, mathematics, and
philosophy (University of Melbourne)
PhD in philosophy (Balliol College & Christ Church, University of Oxford)
cv
personal site
Daniel Dewey
Background:
BS in Computer Science, Philosophy (Carnegie Mellon University)
personal website
cv
Ben Goertzel
Background:
BA in Mathematics (Simon's Rock College)
PhD in Mathematics (Temple University)
cv
Carl Shulman
Background:
BA in philosophy (Harvard)
J.D. (New York University School of Law)
LW wiki
Anna Salamon
Background:
Bachelor's in Mathematics (University of California Santa Barbara)
personal website
Nick Beckstead
Background:
BA in philosophy and mathematics (University of Minnesota)
PhD philosophy (Rutgers)
personal website/cv
Carl Frey
Background:
M.Sc. in Business & Economics
PhD in Economics (Technische Universität Berlin)
website
Milan Circovik
Background:
BS. in theoretical physics (university of Belgrade)
MS in Earth and Space Sciences (University of New York, Stony Brook)
PhD in physics (University of New York, Stony Brook)
professional information
Guy Kahane
Background:
Bachelors in philosophy (Oxford)
PhD in philosophy (Oxford)
Vincent Müller
Background:
studied philosophy with cognitive science, linguistics and history (Marburg, Hamburg, London, Oxford)
personal website
Erik Drexler
Background: BS in interdisciplinary science (MIT)
MS in Astro/Aerospace engineering (MIT)
PhD (MIT)
Seán Ó hÉigeartaig
Background:
B.A. Human Genetics (Trinity College, Dublin)
PhD in molecular genetics (Trinity College, Dublin)
Louie Helm
Background:
MS in Computer Science (University of Texas, Austin)
Malo Bourgon
Background:
MS in engineering (University of Guelph, Ontario)
Alex Altair
Background:
studied physics and mathematics (Maine school of science and mathematics)
Mihaly Barasz
Background:
MS in Mathematics (Eotvos Lorand University, Budapest)
Paul Christiano
Background:
Bachelors in Mathematics (MIT)
Benja Fallenstein
Background:
BSc in mathematics (University of Vienna)
working on PhD in mathematics (Bristol University, U.K.))
Joshua Fox
Background:
BA mathematics (Brandeis)
PhD (Harvard)
Anja Heinisch
Background:
MS, major in math, minor computer science (university of
Braunschweig, Germany)
Marcello Herreshoff
Background:
BA in mathematics (Stanford)
High performance in mathematics competitions
Bill Hibbard
Background:
BA in mathematics (University of Wisconsin, Madison)
MS in computer science (University of Wisconsin, Madison)
PhD in computer science (University of Wisconsin, Madison)
Patrick LaVictoire
Background:
AB in mathematics (University of Chicago)
PhD in mathematics (University of California, Berkeley)
Vladimir Nesov
Background:
MS in applied mathematics and physics (Moscow institute of physics and technology)
Steve Rayhawk
Background:
degree in mathematics (UC Santa Barbara college of creative studies)
Nisan Stiennon
Background:
BS in mathematics and physics (University of Michigan)
PhD in mathematics (Stanford)
Kaj Sotala
Background:
BA in Cognitive Science with a minor in Computer Science (University of Helsinki)
working on MSc in Computer Science, minor in Mathematics (University of
Helsinki)
personal website
James Miller
Background:
BA (Wesleyan University)
MA in economics (Yale University)
J.D (Stanford Law School)
PhD in economics (University of Chicago)
cv
Qiaochu Yuan
Background:
B.Sc. in mathematics (MIT)
Michael Vassar
Background:
B.S (Penn State)
M.B.A (Drexel University)
Associated with the Global Catastrophic Risk Institute:
Seth Baum
Background:
BS in applied mathematics and optics (University of Rochester)
MS in electrical engineering (Northeastern University)
PhD in Geography (Pennsylvania State University)
Tony Barrett
Background:
BS in chemical engineering (University of California)
PhD in engineering and public policy (Carnegie Mellon University)
Grant Wilson
Background:
BA in environmental policy (Western Washington University)
J.D. (Lewis and Clark law school)
U. Tuncay Alparslan
Background:
BS in industrial engineering (University of Ankara, Turkey)
MS in operations research (Cornell)
PhD in operations research (Cornell)
Robert de Neufville
Background:
AB in government (Harvard)
MS in political science (University of California, Berkeley)
Mark Fusco
Background:
BA in religious studies and english literature (University of Toronto)
M.A.R in philosophical theology (Yale)
S.T.L in moral theology (Pontifical Lateran University)
Jacob Haqq-Misra
Background:
B.S. degrees in Astrophysics and Computer Science (University of Minnesota)
M.S. in Meteorology (Pennsylvania State University)
Ph.D. in Meteorology & Astrobiology (Pennsylvania State University)
Arden Rowell
Background:
B.A. in Anthropology/Archaeology (University of Washington)
J.D. (University of Chicago Law School)
Jianhua Xu
Background:
B.S. degree in Chemical Engineering and English (Dalian University
of Technology)
M.S. in Environmental Science (Peking University)
Ph.D. in Engineering and Public Policy (Carnegie Mellon University)
Kaitlin Butler
Background:
B.A. in Sociology (Vassar College )
M.A. in Climate and Society (Columbia University)
Tim Maher
Background:
B.S. in Astrophysics (University of Missouri, St. Louis)
Kelly Hostetler
Background:
B.S. in Political Science (Columbia University)
Matt Moretto
Background:
B.A. in History (Columbia University)
Associated with the Center for Applied Rationality
Julia Galef
Background:
Bachelor's in Statistics (Columbia)
Michael Smith
Background:
Master's in Mathematics (University of Oregon)
PhD in Mathematics and Science Education (University of California, San Diego)
Andrew Critch
Background:
BSc in Mathematics
PhD in Mathematics (University of California, Berkeley)
Yan Zhang
Background:
PhD in Mathematics (MIT)
Leah Libresco
Background:
B.A. in Political Science (Yale)
Dan Keys
Background:
Bachelor's in Mathematics and Statistics (Swathmore College)
Master's in Social Psychology (Cornell University)
Associated with the Skoll Global Threat Fund
Larry Brilliant
Background:
Undergraduate degree in philosophy (
MD (Wayne Medical School)
Master’s of Public Health (
Jane Bloch
Background:
B.A. in Political Science (University of Washington)
Scott Field
Background:
M.A in Political Science (University of California, Berkeley)
M.A. in International & Area Studies (University of California, Berkeley)
P.hD in Behavioral Ecology (University of Adelaide)
David Kroodsma
Background:
B.S. in Physics (Stanford)
M.S. in Earth Systems (Stanford)
Sylvia Lee
Background:
Bachelor’s in Civil Engineering (McGill University)
Master’s in Environmental Engineering (M.I.T)
Bruce Lowry
Background:
B.A. in International Relations (Pomona College)
M.A. in International Affairs (Johns Hopkins school of Advanced International
Studies)
Amy Luers
Background:
B.S. in environmental resources engineering (Humboldt University)
M.S. in environmental resources engineering (Humboldt University)
M.S. in international policy studies (Stanford)
Ph.D in environmental science (Stanford)
Annie Maxwell
Background:
B.A. in English, Political Science (University of Michigan)
M.A in public policy (University of Michigan)
Bessma Mourad
Background:
B.A. in Environmental Studies (University of California, Santa Cruz)
M.S. (energy and resources group, University of California, Berkeley)
Jennifer Olsen
Background:
Bachelor’s in Biomathematics (Rutgers)
Master’s in Public Health (George Washington University)
Certificate in Weapons of Mass Destruction (Uniformed Services University for
health sciences)
Ph.D (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill)
Mark Smolinski
Background:
B.S. (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor)
M.D. (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor)
Master’s in Public Health (University of Arizona)
Lindsay Steele
Background:
B.A. in economics and spanish (University of California, Santa
Barbara)
Misc
Shane Legg
Background: MSc (University of Auckland)