Thanks for sharing!

One of my first interviewers did a 1-hour interview, after which he (rightly) did not continue the process. He explained very clearly why and what skills I was missing. He also set up an additional call where he talked through how my skill-set might be most valuable within an impactful role, and some ideas. He gave me lots of connections to people he knew. And so on. And he offered to help if I needed help. 

This is great practice; however, I believe it happens only in a minority of cases. Typically, people who are filtered out early receive an email stating they can't receive individual feedback. Given this, I recommend that if someone makes it far enough to be invited to an interview, ask for feedback at the end of the meeting before concluding. It's better than sending an email after a decision has been made. 

Alternatively, if you encounter the hiring manager at a conference, consider reaching out. However, if the interview was some time ago, don't expect them to remember, as they’ve likely conducted hundreds since then.

I mostly felt the lack of context limiting in the early days when I was actually trying to gain more context.

Strongly agree, once you "have your foot in the door" its much easier to get additional context as you know where to look for it. 

Thanks for sharing your experience!

Thanks for expanding! I appreciate the distinction between "language" and "concepts" as well as your thoughts on using language for in-group signaling and too much in-group hiring.

To follow up on this:

it's not important to me that people know a lot about in-group language, people, or events around AI safety

I can see that people and events are less important, but as far as concepts go, I presume it would be important for them to know at least some of the terms, such as x/s risk, moral patienthood, recursive self-improvement, take-off speed, etc.

As far as I know, really none of these are widely known outside of the AIS community, or do you mean something else by in-group language?

Ah, right. x) Thanks so much for pointing this out!

Yeah I agree about this case, I will actually take it out!

Thanks for sharing this, David!

thanks for flagging, I fixed it now!

Sorry for the late reply, Vasco. Thanks for your comment! I echo some of Chris's points, but wanted to add some scattered thoughts:

I think the cost-effectiveness of AIS groups vs Bluedot would definitely depend on a given group, as I expect there to be large differences between different groups. The best ones might be more cost-effective than Bluedot, but I doubt anyone looked at this very rigorously (this analysis is great, but doesn't include a Bluedot-like program). If you have the money, you likely want to fund both even if one is slightly better than the other.

 The volunteer-run initiatives are likely more cost-effective kind of by default (though see next point).

Another consideration is a tradeoff between impact and cost-effectiveness. E.g if Bluedot is not funding constrained, then it might make sense for them to optimize for the largest impact, even if that comes with the price of slightly decreased cost-effectiveness. An example of this could be diminishing returns on spending money on LinkedIn ads. This could mean that the marginal impact of money donated to them is smaller, but funders still might prefer this to having to spend time on evaluating 10 AIS groups due to time costs)

Great post, thanks for sharing!