It's sort of not that useful though. This is a description of the "shovel-ready" projects and those are actually pretty straight-forward. If you fit into one of those categories, you'd basically be under a single person with a well-defined discipline and you can get a pretty good sense of who you'd be working for by scanning a half-dozen paper abstracts if you're not already familiar with them. There's a decent chance you're actually funded directly out of the individual professor's research grant. It's pretty business as usual.
But being a post-doc for an interdisciplinary center can be a lot more confusing. If the center has someone who is an expert in your field then they're semi-qualified to supervise your work and they sort of become your boss by default. If there isn't an expert in your field, the standard academic mentor-apprentice model starts to break down and it's not always clear what will replace it. Sometimes you become predominantly a lackey/domain expert/flex researcher for existing projects. Sometimes the center recruits someone to mentor you. Some you are expected to develop a novel focus for the group. And if the group has been around for a while you can estimate a lot of these answers just from publication history, but with something brand new it's much harder.
And this is a stupid hard problem to even describe. It isn't clear what department "All the things that might possibly go wrong that would make us all die" belongs in. On some level I understand why the "Specialist knowledge and skills" are super vague general things like "good level of scientific literacy" and "strong quantitative reasoning skills." And overly-broad job listings are par for the course, but before I personally would want to put together a 3 page project proposal or hunt down a 10 page writing sample relevant or even comprehensible to people outside of my field, I'd like to have some sense of whether anyone would even read them or whether they'd just be confused as to why I applied.
Hi Leplen,
I'm only assisting on CSER on a casual basis but here are some rough notes that should at least be helpful.
As you point out, the job description is general because the enterprise is interdisciplinary and there are a lot of ways that people could contribute to it. Projects apart from those specified would be significantly designed to match the available personelle and their expertise. If someone wanted to contribute to some specific technology, such as nanotech, that you've previously written about on this forum, and had a credible background that...
[To be cross-posted at Effective Altruism Forum, FLI news page]
I'm delighted to announce that the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk has had considerable recent success in grantwriting and fundraising, among other activities (full update coming shortly). As a result, we are now in a position to advance to CSER's next stage of development: full research operations. Over the course of this year, we will be recruiting for a full team of postdoctoral researchers to work on a combination of general methodologies for extreme technological (and existential) risk analysis and mitigation, alongside specific technology/risk-specific projects.
Our first round of recruitment has just opened - we will be aiming to hire up to 4 postdoctoral researchers; details below. A second recruitment round will take place in the Autumn. We have a slightly unusual opportunity in that we get to cast our net reasonably wide. We have a number of planned research projects (listed below) that we hope to recruit for. However, we also have the flexibility to hire one or more postdoctoral researchers to work on additional projects relevant to CSER's aims. Information about CSER's aims and core research areas is available on our website. We request that as part of the application process potential postholders send us a research proposal of no more than 1500 words, explaining what your research skills could contribute to CSER. At this point in time, we are looking for people who will have obtained a doctorate in a relevant discipline by their start date.
We would also humbly ask that the LessWrong community aid us in spreading the word far and wide about these positions. There are many brilliant people working within the existential risk community. However, there are academic disciplines and communities that have had less exposure to existential risk as a research priority than others (due to founder effect and other factors), but where there may be people with very relevant skills and great insights. With new centres and new positions becoming available, we have a wonderful opportunity to grow the field, and to embed existential risk as a crucial consideration in all relevant fields and disciplines.
Thanks very much,
Seán Ó hÉigeartaigh (Executive Director, CSER)
"The Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (University of Cambridge, UK) is recruiting for to four full-time postdoctoral research associates to work on the project Towards a Science of Extreme Technological Risk.
We are looking for outstanding and highly-committed researchers, interested in working as part of growing research community, with research projects relevant to any aspect of the project. We invite applicants to explain their project to us, and to demonstrate their commitment to the study of extreme technological risks.
We have several shovel-ready projects for which we are looking for suitable postdoctoral researchers. These include:
However, recruitment will not necessarily be limited to these subprojects, and our main selection criterion is suitability of candidates and their proposed research projects to CSER’s broad aims.
Details are available here. Closing date: April 24th."