This is a small write-up of when I applied for a PhD in Risk Analysis 1.5 years ago. I can elaborate in the comments!
I believed doing a PhD in risk analysis would teach me a lot of useful skills to apply to existential risks, and it might allow me to direectly work on important topics. I worked as a Research Associate on the qualitative ide of systemic risk for half a year. I ended up not doing the PhD because I could not find a suitable place, nor do I think pure research is the best fit for me. However, I still believe more EAs should study something along the lines of risk analysis, and its an especially valuable career path for people with an engineering background.
Why I think risk analysis is useful:
EA researchers rely a lot on quantification, but use a limited range of methods (simple Excel sheets or Guesstimate models). My impression is also that most EAs don’t understand these methods enough to judge when they are useful or not (my past self included). Risk analysis expands this toolkit tremendously, and teaches stuff like the proper use of priors, underlying assumptions of different models, and common mistakes in risk models.
The field of Risk Analysis
Risk analysis is a pretty small field, and most is focused on risks of limited scope and risks that are easier to quantify than the risks EAs commonly look at. There is a Society of Risk Analysis (SRA), which manages the Journal of Risk Analysis (the main journal of this field). I found most of their study topics not so interesting, but it was useful to get an overview of the field, and there were some useful contacts to make (1). The EA-aligned org GCRI is active and well-established in SRA, but no other EA orgs are.
Topics & advisers
I hoped to work on GCR/X-risk directly, which substantially reduced my options. It would have been useful to just invest in learning a method very well, but I was not motivated to research something not directly relevant. I think it’s generally difficult to make an academic career as a general x-risk researcher, and it’s easier to research 1 specific risk. However, I believes this leaves open a number of cross-cutting issues.
I have a shortlist of potential supervisors I considered/contacted/was in conversation with, including in public policy and philosophy. I can provide this list privately on request.
Best grad programs:
The best background for grad school seems to be mathematics or more specifically, engineering. (I did not have this, which excluded a lot of options). The following 2 programs seemed most promising, although I only investigated PRGS in depth:
Pardee RAND graduate school https://www.prgs.edu/ Not specifically Risk Analysis, but Policy Analysis. Has a lot of practical application, more intellectual freedom than most PhD programs, and has a lot of EA-adjacent topics. An EA alumnus is David Manheim.
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(1) For example, I had a nice conversation with the famous psychology researcher Paul Slovic, who now does research into the psychology involved in mass atrocities. https://psychology.uoregon.edu/profile/pslovic/
Aww yes, people writing about their life and career experiences! Posts of this type seem to have some of the best ratio of “how useful people find this” to “how hard it is to write”—you share things you know better than anyone else, and other people can frequently draw lessons from them.
This is a small write-up of when I applied for a PhD in Risk Analysis 1.5 years ago. I can elaborate in the comments!
I believed doing a PhD in risk analysis would teach me a lot of useful skills to apply to existential risks, and it might allow me to direectly work on important topics. I worked as a Research Associate on the qualitative ide of systemic risk for half a year. I ended up not doing the PhD because I could not find a suitable place, nor do I think pure research is the best fit for me. However, I still believe more EAs should study something along the lines of risk analysis, and its an especially valuable career path for people with an engineering background.
Why I think risk analysis is useful:
EA researchers rely a lot on quantification, but use a limited range of methods (simple Excel sheets or Guesstimate models). My impression is also that most EAs don’t understand these methods enough to judge when they are useful or not (my past self included). Risk analysis expands this toolkit tremendously, and teaches stuff like the proper use of priors, underlying assumptions of different models, and common mistakes in risk models.
The field of Risk Analysis
Risk analysis is a pretty small field, and most is focused on risks of limited scope and risks that are easier to quantify than the risks EAs commonly look at. There is a Society of Risk Analysis (SRA), which manages the Journal of Risk Analysis (the main journal of this field). I found most of their study topics not so interesting, but it was useful to get an overview of the field, and there were some useful contacts to make (1). The EA-aligned org GCRI is active and well-established in SRA, but no other EA orgs are.
Topics & advisers
I hoped to work on GCR/X-risk directly, which substantially reduced my options. It would have been useful to just invest in learning a method very well, but I was not motivated to research something not directly relevant. I think it’s generally difficult to make an academic career as a general x-risk researcher, and it’s easier to research 1 specific risk. However, I believes this leaves open a number of cross-cutting issues.
I have a shortlist of potential supervisors I considered/contacted/was in conversation with, including in public policy and philosophy. I can provide this list privately on request.
Best grad programs:
The best background for grad school seems to be mathematics or more specifically, engineering. (I did not have this, which excluded a lot of options). The following 2 programs seemed most promising, although I only investigated PRGS in depth:
Engineering & Public Policy, Carnegie Mellon http://coursecatalog.web.cmu.edu/schools-colleges/collegeofengineering/departmentofengineeringandpublicpolicy/
Pardee RAND graduate school https://www.prgs.edu/
Not specifically Risk Analysis, but Policy Analysis. Has a lot of practical application, more intellectual freedom than most PhD programs, and has a lot of EA-adjacent topics. An EA alumnus is David Manheim.
--
(1) For example, I had a nice conversation with the famous psychology researcher Paul Slovic, who now does research into the psychology involved in mass atrocities. https://psychology.uoregon.edu/profile/pslovic/
Aww yes, people writing about their life and career experiences! Posts of this type seem to have some of the best ratio of “how useful people find this” to “how hard it is to write”—you share things you know better than anyone else, and other people can frequently draw lessons from them.