Description du poste
I'm currently evaluating grant applications for the Corrigibility Research Fund. For the most part, my methodology is the same as it was in September. But the applications I get keep falling into the same familiar patterns, so I thought I'd write a little about those patterns, and why I don't want to fund them.
The most superficial pattern of note is SLOP. So much slop. You don't even know.
Slop is more than just whether an application is AI generated. We're now in an era where people across the world, including those who don't really speak English, can contribute to work that would otherwise be restricted to people of a single language or nationality or place, and I like that. When I see an application that discloses its use of AI and gives a reasonable justification for it, I try to look past the stylistic tics and focus purely on whether the underlying application is promising.[1]
Still, we're not yet in the domain where AIs can write good grant applications without some human assistance, so a high Pangram score is definitely evidence that an application is junk. Another remarkably common sign of slop was messed up formatting or other indications that people just copy-pasted from a text file without even proofreading. If you can't be bothered to read your own application, I'm not sure why I should be. By contrast, the best applications are clear, short, and dense, cutting straight to the way in which the applicant wants to be valuable to the research effort. Don't define corrigibility for me in the intro unless you have reason to think that I don't understand my own area of specialization.[2]
Moving past these shallow concerns, most applications cluster together into archetypes that I apparently didn't warn against well enough in my earlier writing. An individual application will sometimes fall into multiple of these, but any one of them is usually grounds for rejection. So, without further ado, here are five kinds of grants that I don't want to fund...
1. “A gov