(Cross-posted from MIRI's blog.)

MIRI's looking for a full-time office manager to support our growing team. It’s a big job that requires organization, initiative, technical chops, and superlative communication skills. You’ll develop, improve, and manage the processes and systems that make us a super-effective organization. You’ll obsess over our processes (faster! easier!) and our systems (simplify! simplify!). Essentially, it’s your job to ensure that everyone at MIRI, including you, is able to focus on their work and Get Sh*t Done.

That’s a super-brief intro to what you’ll be working on. But first, you need to know if you’ll even like working here.

A Bit About Us

We’re a research nonprofit working on the critically important problem of superintelligence alignment: how to bring smarter-than-human artificial intelligence into alignment with human values.¹ Superintelligence alignment is a burgeoning field, and arguably the most important and under-funded research problem in the world. Experts largely agree that AI is likely to exceed human levels of capability on most cognitive tasks in this century—but it’s not clear when, and we aren’t doing a very good job of preparing for the possibility. Given how disruptive smarter-than-human AI would be, we need to start thinking now about AI’s global impact. Over the past year, a number of leaders in science and industry have voiced their support for prioritizing this endeavor:

• Stuart Russell, co-author of the leading textbook on artificial intelligence and a MIRI advisor, gives a compelling argument for doing this work sooner rather than later.
• Nick Bostrom of Oxford University, another MIRI research advisor, published Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies, which details the potential value of smarter-than-human AI systems as well as the potential hazards.
• Elon Musk (Paypal, SpaceX, Tesla), Bill Gates (Microsoft co-founder), Stephen Hawking (world-renowned theoretical physicist), and others have publicly stated their concerns about long-term AI risk.
• Hundreds of AI researchers and engineers recently signed an open letter advocating for more research into robust and beneficial artificial intelligence. A number of MIRI publications are cited in the corresponding Research Priorities document.

People are starting to discuss these issues in a more serious way, and MIRI is well-positioned to be a thought leader in this important space. As interest in AI safety grows, we’re growing too—we’ve gone from a single full-time researcher in 2013 to what will likely be a half-dozen research fellows by the end of 2015, and intend to continue growing in 2016.

All of which is to say: we really need an office manager who will support our efforts to hack away at the problem of superintelligence alignment!

If our overall mission seems important to you, and you love running well-oiled machines, you’ll probably fit right in. If that’s the case, we can’t wait to hear from you.

What it’s like to work at MIRI

We try really hard to make working at MIRI an amazing experience. We have a team full of truly exceptional people—the kind you’ll be excited to work with. Here’s how we operate:

Flexible Hours

We do not have strict office hours. Simply ensure you’re here enough to be available to the team when needed, and to fulfill all of your duties and responsibilities.

Modern Work Spaces

Many of us have adjustable standing desks with multiple large external monitors. We consider workspace ergonomics important, and try to rig up work stations to be as comfortable as possible.

Living in the Bay Area

We’re located in downtown Berkeley, California. Berkeley’s monthly average temperature ranges from 60°F in the winter to 75°F in the summer. From our office you’re:

• A 10-second walk to the roof of our building, from which you can view the Berkeley Hills, the Golden Gate Bridge, and San Francisco.
• A 30-second walk to the BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit), which can get you around the Bay Area.
• A 3-minute walk to UC Berkeley Campus.
• A 5-minute walk to dozens of restaurants (including ones in Berkeley’s well-known Gourmet Ghetto).
• A 30-minute BART ride to downtown San Francisco.
• A 30-minute drive to the beautiful west coast.
• A 3-hour drive to Yosemite National Park.

Vacation Policy

Our vacation policy is that we don’t have a vacation policy. That is, take the vacations you need to be a happy, healthy, productive human. There are checks in place to ensure this policy isn’t abused, but we haven’t actually run into any problems since initiating the policy.

We consider our work important, and we care about whether it gets done well, not about how many total hours you log each week. We’d much rather you take a day off than extend work tasks just to fill that extra day.

Regular Team Dinners and Hangouts

We get the whole team together every few months, order a bunch of food, and have a great time.

Top-Notch Benefits

We provide top-notch health and dental benefits. We care about our team’s health, and we want you to be able to get health care with as little effort and annoyance as possible.

Agile Methodologies

Our ops team follows standard Agile best practices, meeting regularly to plan, as a team, the tasks and priorities over the coming weeks. If the thought of being part of an effective, well-functioning operation gets you really excited, that’s a promising sign!

Other Tidbits

• Moving to the Bay Area? We’ll cover up to $3,500 in travel expenses.
• Use public transit to get to work? You get a transit pass with a large monthly allowance.
• All the snacks and drinks you could want at the office.
• You’ll get a smartphone and full plan.
• This is a salaried position. (That is, your job is not to sit at a desk for 40 hours a week. Your job is to get your important work done, even if this occasionally means working on a weekend or after hours.)

It can also be surprisingly motivating to realize that your day job is helping people explore the frontiers of human understanding, mitigate global catastrophic risk, etc., etc. At MIRI, we try to tackle the very largest problems facing humanity, and that can be a pretty satisfying feeling.

If this sounds like your ideal work environment, read on! It’s time to talk about your role.

What an office manager does and why it matters

Our ops team and researchers (and collection of remote contractors) are swamped making progress on the huge task we’ve taken on as an organization.

That’s where you come in. An office manager is the oil that keeps the engine running. They’re indispensable. Office managers are force multipliers: a good one doesn’t merely improve their own effectiveness—they make the entire organization better.

We need you to build, oversee, and improve all the “behind-the-scenes” things that ensure MIRI runs smoothly and effortlessly. You will devote your full attention to looking at the big picture and the small details and making sense of it all. You’ll turn all of that into actionable information and tools that make the whole team better. That’s the job.

Sometimes this looks like researching and testing out new and exciting services. Other times this looks like stocking the fridge with drinks, sorting through piles of mail, lugging bags of groceries, or spending time on the phone on hold with our internet provider. But don’t think that the more tedious tasks are low-value. If the hard tasks don’t get done, none of MIRI’s work is possible. Moreover, you’re actively encouraged to find creative ways to make the boring stuff more efficient—making an awesome spreadsheet, writing a script, training a contractor to take on the task—so that you can spend more time on what you find most exciting.

We’re small, but we’re growing, and this is an opportunity for you to grow too. There’s room for advancement at MIRI (if that interests you), based on your interests and performance.

Sample Tasks

You’ll have a wide variety of responsibilities, including, but not necessarily limited to, the following:

• Orienting and training new staff.
• Onboarding and offboarding staff and contractors.
• Managing employee benefits and services, like transit passes and health care.
• Payroll management; handling staff questions.
• Championing our internal policies and procedures wiki—keeping everything up to date, keeping everything accessible, and keeping staff aware of relevant information.
• Managing various services and accounts (ex. internet, phone, insurance).
• Championing our work space, with the goal of making the MIRI office a fantastic place to work.
• Running onsite logistics for introductory workshops.
• Processing all incoming mail packages.
• Researching and implementing better systems and procedures.

Your “value-add” is by taking responsibility for making all of these things happen. Having a competent individual in charge of this diverse set of tasks at MIRI is extremely valuable!

A Day in the Life

A typical day in the life of MIRI’s office manager may look something like this:

• Come in.
• Process email inbox.
• Process any incoming mail, scanning/shredding/dealing-with as needed.
• Stock the fridge, review any low-stocked items, and place an order online for whatever’s missing.
• Onboard a new contractor.
• Spend some time thinking of a faster/easier way to onboard contractors. Implement any hacks you come up with.
• Follow up with Employee X about their benefits question.
• Outsource some small tasks to TaskRabbit or Upwork. Follow up with previously outsourced tasks.
• Notice that you’ve spent a few hours per week the last few weeks doing xyz. Spend some time figuring out whether you can eliminate the task completely, automate it in some way, outsource it to a service, or otherwise simplify the process.
• Review the latest post drafts on the wiki. Polish drafts as needed and move them to the appropriate location.
• Process email.
• Go home.

You’re the one we’re looking for if:

• You are authorized to work in the US. (Prospects for obtaining an employment-based visa for this type of position are slim; sorry!)
• You can solve problems for yourself in new domains; you find that you don’t generally need to be told what to do.
• You love organizing information. (There’s a lot of it, and it needs to be super-accessible.)
• Your life is organized and structured.
• You enjoy trying things you haven’t done before. (How else will you learn which things work?)
• You’re way more excited at the thought of being the jack-of-all-trades than at the thought of being the specialist.
• You are good with people—good at talking about things that are going great, as well as things that aren’t.
• People thank you when you deliver difficult news. You’re that good.
• You can notice all the subtle and wondrous ways processes can be automated, simplified, streamlined… while still keeping the fridge stocked in the meantime.
• You know your way around a computer really well.
• Really, really well.
• You enjoy eliminating unnecessary work, automating automatable work, outsourcing outsourcable work, and executing on everything else.
• You want to do what it takes to help all other MIRI employees focus on their jobs.
• You’re the sort of person who sees the world, organizations, and teams as systems that can be observed, understood, and optimized.
• You think Sam is the real hero in Lord of the Rings.
• You have the strong ability to take real responsibility for an issue or task, and ensure it gets done. (This doesn’t mean it has to get done by you; but it has to get done somehow.)
• You celebrate excellence and relentlessly pursue improvement.
• You lead by example.

Bonus Points:

• Your technical chops are really strong. (Dabbled in scripting? HTML/CSS? Automator?)
• Involvement in the Effective Altruism space.
• Involvement in the broader AI-risk space.
• Previous experience as an office manager.

Experience & Education Requirements

• Let us know about anything that’s evidence that you’ll fit the bill.

How to Apply

Click here to apply by July 31, 2015!

P.S. Share the love! If you know someone who might be a perfect fit, we’d really appreciate it if you pass this along!

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1. More details on our About page. ↩

The Centre for Effective Altruism, the group behind 80,000 Hours, Giving What We Can, the Global Priorities Project, Effective Altruism Outreach, and to a lesser extent The Life You Can Save and Animal Charity Evaluators, is looking to grow its team with a number of new roles:

• Giving What We Can: Director of Research
• Giving What We Can: Communications Manager
• 80,000 Hours: Head of Research
• Central CEA: Chief Operating Officer
• Global Priorities Project: Research Fellow (accepting expressions of interest at this point)
• We are also looking for 'graduate volunteers' for Giving What We Can in 2015, particularly over the summer

We are so keen to find great people that if you introduce us to someone new who we end up hiring, we will pay you $1,000 for the favour! If you know anyone awesome who would be a good fit for us please let me know: robert [dot] wiblin [at] centreforeffectivealtruism [dot] org. They can also book a short meeting with me directly.

We may be able to sponsor outstanding applicants from the USA.

Applications close Friday 5th December 2014.

Why is CEA an excellent place to work? 

First and foremost, “making the world a better place” is our bottom line and central aim. We work on the projects we do because we think they’re the best way for us to make a contribution. But there’s more.

What are we looking for?

The specifics of what we are looking for depend on the role and details can be found in the job descriptions. In general, we're looking for people who have many of the following traits:

• Self-motivated, hard-working, and independent;
• Able to deal with pressure and unfamiliar problems;
• Have a strong desire for personal development;
• Able to quickly master complex, abstract ideas, and solve problems;
• Able to communicate clearly and persuasively in writing and in person;
• Comfortable working in a team and quick to get on with new people;
• Able to lead a team and manage a complex project;
• Keen to work with a young team in a startup environment;
• Deeply interested in making the world a better place in an effective way, using evidence and research;
• A good understanding of the aims of the Centre for Effective Altruism and its constituent organisations.

I hope to work at CEA in the future. What should I do now?

Of course this will depend on the role, but generally good ideas include:

• Study hard, including gaining useful knowledge and skills outside of the classroom.
• Degrees we have found provide useful training include: philosophy, statistics, economics, mathematics and physics. However, we are hoping to hire people from a more diverse range of academic and practical backgrounds in the future. In particular, we hope to find new members of the team who have worked in operations, or creative industries.
• Write regularly and consider starting a blog.
• Manage student and workplace clubs or societies.
• Work on exciting projects in your spare time.
• Found a start-up business or non-profit, or join someone else early in the life of a new project.
• Gain impressive professional experience in established organisations, such as those working in consulting, government, politics, advocacy, law, think-tanks, movement building, journalism, etc.
• Get experience promoting effective altruist ideas online, or to people you already know.
• Use 80,000 Hours' research to do a detailed analysis of your own future career plans.

I'm an undergraduate studying molecular biology, and I am thinking of going into science. In Timothy Gower's "The Importance of Mathematics", he says that many mathematicians just do whatever interests them, regardless of social benefit. I'd rather do something with some interest or technological benefit to people outside of a small group with a very specific education.

Does anybody have any thoughts or links on judging the impact of the work on a research topic?

Clearly, the pursuit of a research topic must be producing truth to be helpful, and I've read Vladimir_M's heuristics regarding this.

Here's something I've tried. My current lab work is on the structure of membrane proteins in bacteria, so this is something I did to see where all this work on protein structure goes. I took a paper that I had found to be a very useful reference for my own work, about a protein that forms a pore in the bacterial membrane with a flexible loop, experimenting with the influence of this loop on the protein's structure. I used the Web of Science database to find a list of about two thousand papers that cited papers that cited this loop paper. I looked through this two-steps-away list for the ones that were not about molecules. Without too much effort, I found a few. The farthest from molecules that I found was a paper on a bacterium that sometimes causes meningitis, discussing about a particular stage in its colonization of the human body. A few of the two-steps-away articles were about antibiotics discovery; though molecular, this is a topic that has a great deal of impact outside of the world of research on biomolecules.

Though it occurs to me that it might be more fruitful to look the other way around: to identify some social benefits or interests people have, and see what scientific research is contributing the most to them.

We are pleased to announce a new vacancy at the Programme on the Impacts of Future Technology. Please forward to any who would be interested.

 

James Martin Postdoctoral Research Fellowship:

Socio-economic Impacts of Technological Change 
with the Programme on the Impacts of Future Technology

University of Oxford

Faculty of Philosophy

The Future of Humanity Institute, Oxford Martin School

 

Grade 7: £29,249–£39,257 per annum 
Protocol reference number: HUM/11043F/E

 

Applications are invited for a Research Fellowship within the Oxford Martin Programme on the Impacts of Future Technology, an interdisciplinary programme within the Oxford Martin School at Oxford University.  This Fellowship is available on a one year full-time or two years part-time fixed term basis.

 

The Programme, directed by Professor Nick Bostrom, analyzes possibilities related to long-range technological change and potential social impacts of future transformative technologies. Research foci include the future of computing and machine intelligence, existential risks, predictive and evaluative uncertainty, and related philosophical issues.

 

The postholder will conduct research on socio-economic and strategic impacts of potentially transformative or disruptive future technological innovations, including (but not limited to) advances in computing and machine intelligence, biosecurity and surveillance technology. Academic background is open. Potential areas include economics, political science, legal theory, and sociology; other relevant areas include environmental economics, game theory, and risk management. A multidisciplinary background would be favourable.

For further particulars and application details, please see:

http://www.futuretech.ox.ac.uk/vacancies

or contact:futuretech@philosophy.ox.ac.uk. 

The deadline for applications is Monday 9^th April.

Some of you probably aren't aware yet of the rather excellent High Impact Careers / 80,000 hours blog.

It covers topics about how to have the biggest impact with your career, including

• how likely you are to become Prime Minister
• Decision Making under Moral Uncertainty
• Temporal Concerns
• Health vs Education
• Existential Risks
• Startups in the US vs UK
• ... and many more

The contributors include Carl Shuman, Will Crouch, Ben Todd and Katja Grace, with an impressively regular updating schedule at the moment.

The reasoning is obvious in retrospect, but is useful to have written down, especially with the research that's gone into the posts. - much like the Sequences in that regard.

Response to: The Value of Theoretical Research

 

Reading paulfchristiano's article the other day, I realized that I had had many similar discussions with myself, and have been guilty of motivated stopping and poor answers to all of them.

However, one major roadblock in my pursuing better answers, is that I feel that I have been "locked in" to my current path.

I am currently a mathematics Ph.D. student.  I did not have a minor.  I don't have significant programming skills or employment experience.  I know nothing about finance.  I know a lot about mathematics.

 

Paul says:

There is a shortage of intelligent, rational people in pretty much every area of human activity. I would go so far as to claim this is the limiting input for most fields.

However, "most fields" is not a very good tool for narrowing my search space; I have spent my entire life in school, and I like having structures and schedules that tell me when I'm doing productive things and that I've progressed to certain stages.  I'm not ready to drop out and do whatever, and I don't have a particular idea of what whatever might be.

 

On the other hand, I currently have a variety of resources available to me.  For example, I have a steady income (a grad student stipend isn't much, but it's plenty for me to live on), and I have the ability to take undergraduate classes for free (though not the spare time at the moment.)

My current intent is to continue and finish my Ph.D., but to attempt to take classes in other subjects, such as linguistics, biology and chemistry, and computer science which might lead to other interesting career paths.

 

Has anybody else had a similar feeling of being "locked in"?  How have you responded to it?  For those who have studied mathematics, are you still?  If you continued, what helped you make that decision?  If you stopped, what about that?  What did you end up doing?  How did you decide on it?