If funding were available, the Centre for Effective Altruism would consider hiring someone to work closely with Prof Nick Bostrom to provide anything and everything he needs to be more productive. Bostrom is obviously the Director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University, and author of Superintelligence, the best guide yet to the possible risks posed by artificial intelligence.
Nobody has yet confirmed they will fund this role, but we are nevertheless interested in getting expressions of interest from suitable candidates.
The list of required characteristics is hefty, and the position would be a challenging one:
- Willing to commit to the role for at least a year, and preferably several
- Able to live and work in Oxford during this time
- Conscientious and discreet
- Trustworthy
- Able to keep flexible hours (some days a lot of work, others not much)
- Highly competent at almost everything in life (for example, organising travel, media appearances, choosing good products, and so on)
- Will not screw up and look bad when dealing with external parties (e.g. media, event organisers, the university)
- Has a good personality 'fit' with Bostrom
- Willing to do some tasks that are not high-status
- Willing to help Bostrom with both his professional and personal life (to free up his attention)
- Can speak English well
- Knowledge of rationality, philosophy and artificial intelligence would also be helpful, and would allow you to also do more work as a research assistant.
The research Bostrom can do is unique; to my knowledge we don't have anyone who has made such significant strides clarifying the biggest risks facing humanity as a whole. As a result, helping increase Bostrom's output by say, 20%, would be a major contribution. This person's work would also help the rest of the Future of Humanity Institute run smoothly.
I don't think it's obvious that would be the best approach.
This forum is as internal as it gets without asking potential candidates via email or in person.
Both approaches are valid, but they optimize to attract different people. The gist that I get from this job ad is that they are looking for someone who is a good assistant while being passionate about effective altruism, willing to help indirectly rather than promote their own ego and eager to find creative ways to improve themselves and Bostrom's workflow. My guess is that they would prefer someone less experienced to a person for whom this is just another assistant job, provided that the less experienced person views the role as a challenge to grow into. If the thing that they are optimizing for is work experience/existing skills, I agree that it would be better to match the writing style to standardized assistant job ads. In that case, they might as well post it on the matching sites. Best would be obviously to have someone who fills all the criteria perfectly, but it's going to be hard to come by a person with extensive experience who does not already have a better project to work on or is willing to accept what I'm sure will be a very low salary.
The description as is was much more interesting to me than a standard job ad would have been. I don't think I would have applied if it had read like the standard job ad. That said, I am not trying to argue the description is perfect, just that I prefer the type of description.
tl;dr: If you want excited people to apply, don't post a boring job ad.
Facebook is not internal. Also LW is world-readable.
I think it's perfectly fine not to care about the cultishness impression, by the way, just as long as you realize that is what you are doing.