The Singularity Institute is undergoing a series of important strategic discussions. There are many questions for which we wish we had more confident answers. We can get more confident answers on some of them by asking top-level mathematicians & mathletes (e.g. Putnam fellow, IMO top score, or successful academic mathematician / CS researcher).
If you are such a person and want to directly affect Singularity Institute strategy, contact me at luke@intelligence.org.
Thank you.
Now back to your regularly scheduled rationality programming...
The questions were about which properties the Singularity Institute would need to possess in order to successfully recruit young mathletes. The two most common answers were "previous technical results" and "one or two cool people already on the team." (But, for example, most people didn't care about peer review.) It seems that mathletes wanted to be able to see that these problems were tractable not just to humans but also to the Singularity Institute in particular. That sounds reasonable, of course, but self-reported motivations are often wrong, so we're in the process of gathering additional forms of data, too.