[Cross-posted from EA Forum. Summary: Four new postdoc positions at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk: Evaluation of extreme technological risk (philosophy, economics); Extreme risk and the culture of science (philosophy of science); Responsible innovation and extreme technological risk (science & technology studies, sociology, policy, governance); and an academic project manager (cutting across the Centre’s research projects, and playing a central role in Centre development). Please help us to spread the word far and wide in the academic community!]

An inspiring first recruitment round

The Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (Cambridge, UK) has been making excellent progress in building up our research team. Our previous recruitment round was a great success, and we made three exceptional hires. Dr Shahar Avin joined us in September from Google, with a background in the philosophy of science (Cambridge, UK). He is currently fleshing out several potential research projects, which will be refined and finalised following a research visit to FHI later this month. Dr Yang Liu joined us this month from Columbia University, with a background in mathematical logic and philosophical decision theory. Yang will work on problems in decision theory that relate to long-term AI, and will help us to link the excellent work being done at MIRI with relevant expertise and talent within academia. In February 2016, we will be joined by Dr Bonnie Wintle from the Centre of Excellence for Biosecurity Risk Analysis (CEBRA), who will lead our horizon-scanning work in collaboration with Professor Bill Sutherland’s group at Cambridge; among other things, she has worked on IARPA-funded development of automated horizon-scanning tools, and has been involved in the Good Judgement Project.

We are very grateful for the help of the existential risk and EA communities in spreading the word about these positions, and helping us to secure an exceptionally strong field. Additionally, I have now moved on from FHI to be CSER’s full-time Executive Director, and Huw Price is now 50% funded as CSER’s Academic Director (we share him with Cambridge’s Philosophy Faculty, where he remains Bertrand Russell Chair of Philosophy).

Four new positions:

We’re delighted to announce four new positions at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk; details below. Unlike the previous round, where we invited project proposals from across our areas of interest, in this case we have several specific positions that we need to fill for our three year Managing Extreme Technological Risk project, funded by the Templeton World Charity Foundation; details are provided below. As we are building up our academic brand within a traditional university, we expect to predominantly hire from academia, i.e. academic researchers with (or near to the completion of) PhDs. However, we are open to hiring excellent candidates without candidates but with an equivalent and relevant level of expertise, for example in think tanks, policy settings or industry.

Three of these positions are in the standard academic postdoc mould, working on specific research projects. I’d like to draw attention to the fourth, the academic project manager. For this position, we are looking for someone with the intellectual versatility to engage across our research strands – someone who can coordinate these projects, synthesise and present our research to a range of audiences including funders, collaborators, policymakers and industry contacts. Additionally, this person will play a key role in developing the centre over the next two years, working with our postdocs and professorial advisors to secure funding, and contributing to our research, media, and policy strategy among other things. I’ve been interviewed in the past (https://80000hours.org/2013/02/bringing-it-all-together-high-impact-research-management/) about the importance of roles of this nature; right now I see it as our biggest bottleneck, and a position in which an ambitious person could make a huge difference.

We need your help – again!

In some ways, CSER has been the quietest of the existential risk organisations of late – we’ve mainly been establishing research connections, running lectures and seminars, writing research grants and building relations with policymakers (plus some behind-the scenes involvement with various projects). But we’ve been quite successful in these things, and now face an exciting but daunting level of growth: by next year we aim to have a team of 9-10 postdoctoral researchers here at Cambridge, plus senior professors and other staff. It’s very important we continue our momentum by getting world-class researchers motivated to do work of the highest impact. Reaching out and finding these people is quite a challenge, especially given our still-small team. So the help of the existential risk and EA communities in spreading the word – on your facebook feeds, on relevant mailing lists in your universities, passing them on to talented people you know – will make a huge difference to us.

Thank you so much!

Seán Ó hÉigeartaigh (Executive Director, CSER)

“The Centre for the Study of Existential Risk is delighted to announce four new postdoctoral positions for the subprojects below, to begin in January 2016 or as soon as possible afterwards. The research associates will join a growing team of researchers developing a general methodology for the management of extreme technological risk.

Evaluation of extreme technological risk will examine issues such as:

The use and limitations of approaches such as cost-benefit analysis when evaluating extreme technological risk; the importance of mitigating extreme technological risk compared to other global priorities; issues in population ethics as they relate to future generations; challenges associated with evaluating small probabilities of large payoffs; challenges associated with moral and evaluative uncertainty as they relate to the long-term future of humanity. Relevant disciplines include philosophy and economics, although suitable candidates outside these fields are welcomed. More: Evaluation of extreme technological risk

Extreme risk and the culture of science will explore the hypothesis that the culture of science is in some ways ill-adapted to successful long-term management of extreme technological risk, and investigate the option of ‘tweaking’ scientific practice, so as to improve its suitability for this special task. It will examine topics including inductive risk, use and limitations of the precautionary principle, and the case for scientific pluralism and ‘breakout thinking’ where extreme technological risk is concerned. Relevant disciplines include philosophy of science and science and technology studies, although suitable candidates outside these fields are welcomed. More: Extreme risk and the culture of science;

Responsible innovation and extreme technological risk asks what can be done to encourage risk-awareness and societal responsibility, without discouraging innovation, within the communities developing future technologies with transformative potential. What can be learned from historical examples of technology governance and culture-development? What are the roles of different forms of regulation in the development of transformative technologies with risk potential? Relevant disciplines include science and technology studies, geography, sociology, governance, philosophy of science, plus relevant technological fields (e.g., AI, biotechnology, geoengineering), although suitable candidates outside these fields are welcomed. More: Responsible innovation and extreme technological risk

We are also seeking to appoint an academic project manager, who will play a central role in developing CSER into a world-class research centre. We seek an ambitious candidate with initiative and a broad intellectual range for a postdoctoral role combining academic and administrative responsibilities. The Academic Project Manager will co-ordinate and develop CSER’s projects and the Centre’s overall profile, and build and maintain collaborations with academic centres, industry leaders and policy makers in the UK and worldwide. This is a unique opportunity to play a formative research development role in the establishment of a world-class centre. More: CSER Academic Project Manager

Candidates will normally have a PhD in a relevant field or an equivalent level of experience and accomplishment (for example, in a policy, industry, or think tank setting). Application Deadline: Midday (12:00) on November 12th 2015.”

Related to: Scholarship: How to Do It Efficiently

There has been a slightly increased focus on the use of search engines lately. I agree that using Google is an important skill - in fact I believe that for years I have came across as significantly more knowledgeable than I actually am just by quickly looking for information when I am asked something.

However, There are obviously some types of information which are more accessible by Google and some which are less accessible. For example distinct characteristics, specific dates of events etc. are easily googleable¹ and you can expect to quickly find accurate information on the topic. On the other hand, if you want to find out more ambiguous things such as the effects of having more friends on weight or even something like the negative and positive effects of a substance - then googling might leave you with some contradicting results, inaccurate information or at the very least it will likely take you longer to get to the truth.

I have observed that in the latter case (when the topic is less 'googleable') most people, even those knowledgeable of search engines and 'science' will just stop searching for information after not finding anything on Google or even before² unless they are actually willing to devote a lot of time to find it. This is where my recommendation comes - consider doing a scholarly search like the one provided by Google Scholar.

And, no, I am not suggesting that people should read a bunch of papers on every topic that they discuss. By using some simple heuristics we can easily gain a pretty good picture of the relevant information on a large variety of topics in a few minutes (or less in some cases). The heuristics are as follows:

1. Read only or mainly the abstracts. This is what saves you time but gives you a lot of information in return and this is the key to the most cost-effective way to quickly find information from a scholary search. Often you wouldn't have immediate access to the paper anyway, however you can almost always read the abstract. And if you follow the other heuristics you will still be looking at relatively 'accurate' information most of the time. On the other hand, if you are looking for more information and have access to the full paper then the discussion+conclusion section are usually the second best thing to look at; and if you are unsure about the quality of the study, then you should also look at the method section to identify its limitations.³

2. Look at the number of citations for an article. The higher the better. Less than 10 citations in most cases means that you can find a better paper.

3. Look at the date of the paper. Often more recent = better. However, you can expect less citations for more recent articles and you need to adjust accordingly. For example if the article came out in 2013 but it has already been cited 5 times this is probably a good sign. For new articles the subheuristic that I use is to evaluate the 'accuracy' of the article by judging the author's general credibilty instead - argument from authority.

4. Meta-analyses/Systematic Reviews are your friend. This is where you can get the most information in the least amount of time!

5. If you cannot find anything relevant fiddle with your search terms in whatever ways you can think of (you usually get better at this over time by learning what search terms give better results).

That's the gist of it. By reading a few abstracts in a minute or two you can effectively search for information regarding our scientific knowledge on a subject with almost the same speed as searching for specific information on topics that I dubbed googleable. In my experience scholarly searches on pretty much anything can be really beneficial. Do you believe that drinking beer is bad but drinking wine is good? Search on Google Scholar! Do you think that it is a fact that social interaction is correlated with happiness? Google Scholar it! Sure, some things might seem obvious to you that X but it doesn't hurt to search on google scholar for a minute just to be able to cite a decent study on the topic to those X disbelievers.

This post might not be useful to some people but it is my belief that scholarly searches are the next step of efficient information seeking after googling and that most LessWrongers are not utilizing this enough. Hell, I only recently started doing this actively and I still do not do it enough. Furthermore I fully agree with this comment by gwern:

My belief is that the more familiar and skilled you are with a tool, the more willing you are to reach for it. Someone who has been programming for decades will be far more willing to write a short one-off program to solve a problem than someone who is unfamiliar and unsure about programs (even if they suspect that they could get a canned script copied from StackExchange running in a few minutes). So the unwillingness to try googling at all is at least partially a lack of googling skill and familiarity.

A lot of people will be reluctant to start doing scholarly searches because they have barely done any or because they have never done it. I want to tell those people to still give it a try. Start by searching for something easy, maybe something that you already know from lesswrong or from somewhere else. Read a few abstracts, if you do not understand a given abstract try finding other papers on the topic - some authors adopt a more technical style of writing, others focus mainly on statistics, etc. but you should still be able to find some good information if you read multiple abstracts and identify the main points. If you cannot find anythinr relevant then move on and try another topic.

P.S. In my opinion, when you are comfortable enough to have scholarly searches as a part of your arsenal you will rarely have days when there is nothing to check for. If you are doing 1 scholarly search per month for example you are most probably not fully utilizing this skill.

1. By googleable I mean that the search terms are google friendly - you can relatively easily and quickly find relevant and accurate information.
2. If the people in question have developed a sense for what type of information is more accessible by google then they might not even try to google the less accessible-type things.
3. If you want to get a better and more accurate view on the topic in question you should read the full paper. The heuristic of mainly focusing on abstracts is cost-effective but it invariably results in a loss of information.