Nathan Labenz: uncertainty

Transcript context

…It varies. So there are some, some of the mentors will ask for questions like, I don't know, what do you think about X concept? Others won't be as interested. Obviously, as you say, right, these costly signals are the most important thing. Like, have you done good research? Do you have a deliverable, like a product? Do you have a strong reference for an important person? That's also key. Do you have, like, have you done your homework in terms of the Blue dot course and other things, right? I think that math selection doesn't currently emphasize breadth of knowledge very much, mostly because mentors don't necessarily want that. And I think that this is maybe a weakness in our process to some extent, if we don't then help people build that breadth. But we do, we have seminar programs. We have tons of opportunities for intermingling between different research streams, which really rapidly builds a breadth of knowledge. And we have like, we used to have like discussion groups and these, these still occur occasionally with like workshops and so on. So I would say like, I really do encourage everyone to do like a basic blue dot course or, or equivalent like AI safety Atlas and case of good courses. as well. But I think that this is not as required for selection, and it's more just to prevent you from entering MATS and then starting to do a research project and realizing, Oh crap, I have no idea where the gaps are. I don't understand how my work fits into anything. How do I get funding after MATS? How do I get a job? Blah, blah, blah. How do I choose a good original research direction? So it's more for your ability to actually deliver within the program, tracking research, and less to do with your ability to get in at the moment. Which is pretty important because maths is just a stepping stone. If you do maths and then you don't produce a great deliverable by the end of maths, sure, it's a great thing on your resume, but it's not going to be enough in many cases because it's such a competitive environment. So yeah, I think that it's really good for people to build a shallow but broad understanding of the literature. So I would recommend don't be checking X constantly for new papers, blah, blah, blah, unless they're in your field. Maybe set up some Google Scholar alerts for Interp, if that's your thing. But more every so often do a periodic deep dive into What are all the cool updates across different fields? You know what I mean? And you can do this by like every year looking at the new Blue Dog course or every month looking at some research roundups or highlights like Z as a newsletter or transformer. And there are other people you can follow on X. That's my main recommendation. So your admissions rate, it's super low, right? I don't want to, we want to encourage people to apply, but it is a very selective program. What does the kind of funnel look like in terms of, I don't know if there's intermediate steps that, you know, would make sense to talk about selected. And then I think the good news, though, is if you do get into the program, your success rate on the other end of like getting into the field in a professional W-2 employee status sort of way is really high. You want to run us through those numbers? Yeah. So last program, I think we accepted around 5% of people, maybe 4% who applied in our initial like intake form. There was a subsequent process that they had to complete, which is applying to specific mentors and streams. And I think we accepted somewhere around six and a half to 7% of those people. So a bit higher. That maybe is the figure I'd focus on, somewhere around 7%, let's say. Now that's better than people think, right? They hear, they thought it was something like a, I think the Anthropic Fellows program, for example, was like 2% because Anthropic, big name, right? But mass is larger, we have more diversity and more spots and so on. And I think that like, Yeah, I think people should also just treat the application process as a learning experience. In general, we try and make it like some streams are going to be more painful than others. But I think that for the streams like Neil Nando's where you spend 10 hours working on a project, then you have something really cool for your GitHub. That can only help.…

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