Rob Henderson: A Journey from Foster Care to the US Military to Elite Academia — #20

Rob Henderson grew up in foster homes in California, joined the Air Force at 17, attended Yale on the G.I. Bill, and is currently a Gates Fellow at Cambridge University (UK). He is an acute observer of American society and has coined the term Luxury Beliefs to describe ideas and opinions that confer status on the rich at very little cost, while taking a toll on the lower class.Steve and Rob discuss:00:00 Early life and foster experience20:21 Rob’s experience in the Air Force31:26 Transitioning from the Air Force to Yale and then Cambridge44:04 Dating and socializing as an older student50:06 Reflections on the Yale Halloween email controversy1:01:10 Personal incentives and careerists in higher education1:09:45 Luxury beliefs and how they show up in elite institutions1:31:08 Age and moral judgments1:42:50 Rob on resisting legacy academia and his futureLinks:Rob's substackhttps://robkhenderson.substack.com/Luxury Beliefs are the Latest Status Symbol for Rich Americanshttps://nypost.com/2019/08/17/luxury-beliefs-are-the-latest-status-symbol-for-rich-americans/Music used with permission from Blade Runner Blues Livestream improvisation by State Azure.–Steve Hsu is Professor of Theoretical Physics and of Computational Mathematics, Science, and Engineering at Michigan State University. Previously, he was Senior Vice President for Research and Innovation at MSU and Director of the Institute of Theoretical Science at the University of Oregon. Hsu is a startup founder (SafeWeb, Genomic Prediction, Othram) and advisor to venture capital and other investment firms. He was educated at Caltech and Berkeley, was a Harvard Junior Fellow, and has held faculty positions at Yale, the University of Oregon, and MSU.Please send any questions or suggestions to [email protected] or Steve on Twitter @hsu_steve. Announcing this for some friends at Mechanize - a startup that builds environments for training and evaluating frontier LLMs. Its customers include the top AI labs, and it has contributed to the breakthrough in coding capabilities of frontier models. Mechanize is hiring! https://mechanize.work/b/hsu Compensation is extremely competitive. For technical roles, $300-500k. They are also seeking smart generalists. For example: Research Engineer, Alignment: Build evals that test for misaligned model behaviors  $500K salary Puzzle Maker: Design interesting and original puzzles that LLMs can’t yet solve  $300K salary Mechanize understands that my readership is highly selected. There is a VERY GOOD CHANCE you will be interviewed if you apply via the link above.