I’m mentoring again at MATS this winter. The way I select and supervise MATS fellows is very different from what most mentors do; you should consider applying even if (and perhaps especially if) you don’t think of yourself as an “AI safety” person. I select mentees almost entirely for their ability to think clearly about complicated topics. I’ve found that the best signal of this is having written a blog post that teaches me something interesting. I don’t care about applicants’ publication record (and in fact number of published papers is anticorrelated with clarity of thinking amongst top applicants). I am very open to accepting mentees who haven’t done undergrad degrees. My mentees have the freedom to follow any line of inquiry they want. This includes research areas that I’m personally not interested in. The one constraint I apply is that mentees need to be aiming at understanding *something* that seems deeply conceptually interesting to them. A previous mentee spent almost his whole fellowship working on a project which I thought was misguided; I considered this a success because by the end he understood why it was misguided well enough to formulate a new (and very promising) research direction. Having said that, I expect that MATS will be most valuable for both of us if your interests overlap with mine. Fortunately, mine are very broad: they include formal logic, agent foundations, game theory, ethics, sociology, and political philosophy. You can see more on my blog ( I also want to lower the barrier to people applying, since formal applications can be aversive. If you are the kind of person who procrastinates a lot on applications, you are welcome to email me at richardcngo@gmail.com with the subject line MATS WINTER 2027, attaching some piece of your writing and/or some commentary on one of my blog posts (which is also what I ask for in the main application). I can’t commit to replying to everyone, but if it seems particularly promising for you to then do the main application I’ll tell you so.