Comment by bigred100 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bigred100 | Hacker News Reader

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I don’t mean to sound entirely too rude, but I want to ask the following hypothetical question. You are working at a research lab at a research university. You need to hire someone who is going to help you do research on new techniques for interpretable machine learning. Do you hire

1. Someone with extensive knowledge of machine learning, and a much smaller (but existent) interest in the societal importance of interpretability

Or

2. A policy guy who knows tons about why these things should be interpretable, but has a very limited knowledge of machine learning?

Now, let’s say the position is policy relating to machine learning. Do you hire

1. The guy with extensive knowledge of policy who knows something of machine learning

Or

2. The guy with extensive knowledge of ML who knows a bit of policy?

It just seems like common sense, and it’s hard not to read a lot of comments as high ego engineers arguing that their tribe needs more sinecures and special treatment

I work in this space and regularly interact with folks on both sides of that aisle.

I would hire both. If you want to do anything serious in the space, you need the resources to hire a well-rounded team. Maybe in five years this won't be true, but at the moment this is a space where technological capabilities are driving policy making decisions.

I had to choose one, the answer depends on if this is a soldier or a general.

If it's a soldier ($ or $$ salary), I would choose a CS PhD who has demonstrated an interest and aptitude for learning about policy. There are a lot of opportunities for that person to learn about policy including part-time fellowships with think tanks and federal agencies, sometimes even embedded in a lawmaker's staff. Conversely, taking a policy person and getting them to the point where they can adequately process the fire hose of AI fairness/safety/explainability research is going to require a lot more effort.

If it's a general ($$$ or $$$$ salary), I would choose whoever I could manage to hire that has the most influence in whatever agency or legislature is most relevant to the policies I want to push.

But again, especially for soldiers, it's a false choice, and if you find yourself in a situation where you have to make this choice then you need to focus on fundraising instead of your first hire...

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