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Comment by leogao - there seem to be three different possible levels of manager involvement in individual researchers: * type 1 (the grantmaker): the manager spends a day reading the grant application of the researcher and decided whether to fund him for the next 6 months based on his track record, whether the research idea makes sense, etc. day to day, the grantmaker is completely uninvolved in the actual research. on fact, the grantmaker might not even be making decisions about individual researchers, but about entire organizations. * type 2 (the research manager): the manager spends a few hours every month getting complete context on what each of their reports is working on. each report has a different project that the manager thinks makes sense. the manager provides a light touch to guide the project according to their research taste, and vetos any terrible ideas, but most of the time the report makes most of the day to day decisions about what to do. * type 3 (the tech lead): the manager sets research taste for their team and basically orders around their minions. the manager provides almost all of the research taste, and the reports are either just doing engineering work, or doing very tightly scoped research on things the manager has cleared. what I've seen at openai is a mix of all three, but I've found the second one to be the most predominant (my relationship with my managers has been like type 1.75 on average). high level research leaders are generally the first type; they allocate resources to parts of the org they believe to be the most important for the company as a whole. the second type is most people; most researchers have some random direction they believe in, and they are part of a team doing something similar, and their manager has substantial trust in their research taste. even for junior researchers, the focus is on having them develop their own taste eventually, rather than just executing on things for their manager. the third type is most common for large p

x leogao's Shortform — LessWrong leogao's Shortform by leogao 24th May 2022 AI Alignment Forum 1 min read 1592 7 Ω 3 This is a special post for quick takes by leogao . Only they can create top-level comments. Comments here also appear on the Quick Takes page and All Posts page . Rendering 0 / 1592 comments, sorted by top scoring (show more) Click to highlight new comments since: Today at 7:30 AM Moderation Log More from leogao View more Curated and popular this week 1592 Comments 1592 Comment Permalink leogao 5mo 20 0 there seem to be three different possible levels of manager involvement in i

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