Encouraging PhD students to be more strategic about how they pursue it
Discouraging longtermist EA PhD-holders from going on to pursue a faculty position in a university, thus implying that they should pursue some other sector (perhaps industry, government, or nonprofits)
I also wanted to encourage you to add more specific observations and personal experiences that motivate this advice. What type of grad program are you in now (PhD or master’s), and how long have you been in it? Were you as strategic in your approach to your current program as you’re recommending to others? What are some specific actions you took that you think others neglect? Why do you think that other sectors outside academia offer a superior incentive structure for longtermist EAs?
I am doing 1. 2 is an incidental from the perspective of this post, but is indeed something I believe (see my response to bhalperin). I think my attempt to properly flag my background beliefs may have led to the wrong impression here. Or alternatively my post doesn’t cover very much on pursuing academia, when the expected post would have been almost entirely focused on this, thereby seeming like it was conveying a strong message?
In general I don’t think about pursuing “sectors” but instead about trying to solve problems. Sometimes this involves trying to get a particular government gig to influence a policy, or needing to write a paper with a particular type of credibility that you might get from an academic affiliation or a research non-profit, or needing to build and deploy a technical system in the world, which maybe requires starting an organization.
I’d encourage folks to work backwards from problems, to possible solutions, to what would need to happen on an object level to realize those solutions, to what you do with your PhD and other career moves. “Academia” isn’t the most useful unit of analysis in this project, which is partly why I wasn’t primarily trying to comment on it.
Regarding specific observations and personal experiences: I agree this post could be better with more things like this. Unfortunately, I don’t feel like including them. Open invite to DM me if you are thinking about a PhD or already in one and want to talk more, including about my strategy.
That makes sense. I like your approach of self-diagnosing what sort of resources you lack, then tailoring your PhD to optimize for them.
One challenge with the “work backwards” approach is that it takes quite a bit of time to figure out what problems to solve and how to solve them. As I attempted this planning my own immanent journey into grad school, my views gained a lot of sophistication, and I expect they’ll continue to shift as I learn more. So I view grad school partly as a way to pursue the ideas I think are important/good fits, but also as a way to refine those ideas and gain the experience/network/credentials to stay in the game.
The “work backwards” approach is equally applicable to resource-gathering as finding concrete solutions to specific world problems.
I think it’s important for career builders to develop gears-level models of how a PhD or tenured academic career gives them resources + freedom to work on the world problems they care about; and also how it compares to other options.
Often, people really don’t seem to do that. They go by association: scientists solve important problems, and most of them seem to have PhDs and academic careers, so I guess I should do that too.
But it may be very difficult to put the resources you get from these positions to use in order to solve important problems, without a gears-level model of how those scientists use those resources to do so.
“Working backwards” type thinking is indeed a skill! I find it plausible a PhD is a good place to do this. I also think there might be other good ways to practice it, like for example seeking out the people who seem to be best at this and trying to work with them.
+1 on this same type of thinking being applicable to gathering resources. I don’t see any structural differences between these domains.
Just to clarify, it sounds like you are:
Encouraging PhD students to be more strategic about how they pursue it
Discouraging longtermist EA PhD-holders from going on to pursue a faculty position in a university, thus implying that they should pursue some other sector (perhaps industry, government, or nonprofits)
I also wanted to encourage you to add more specific observations and personal experiences that motivate this advice. What type of grad program are you in now (PhD or master’s), and how long have you been in it? Were you as strategic in your approach to your current program as you’re recommending to others? What are some specific actions you took that you think others neglect? Why do you think that other sectors outside academia offer a superior incentive structure for longtermist EAs?
I am doing 1. 2 is an incidental from the perspective of this post, but is indeed something I believe (see my response to bhalperin). I think my attempt to properly flag my background beliefs may have led to the wrong impression here. Or alternatively my post doesn’t cover very much on pursuing academia, when the expected post would have been almost entirely focused on this, thereby seeming like it was conveying a strong message?
In general I don’t think about pursuing “sectors” but instead about trying to solve problems. Sometimes this involves trying to get a particular government gig to influence a policy, or needing to write a paper with a particular type of credibility that you might get from an academic affiliation or a research non-profit, or needing to build and deploy a technical system in the world, which maybe requires starting an organization.
I’d encourage folks to work backwards from problems, to possible solutions, to what would need to happen on an object level to realize those solutions, to what you do with your PhD and other career moves. “Academia” isn’t the most useful unit of analysis in this project, which is partly why I wasn’t primarily trying to comment on it.
Regarding specific observations and personal experiences: I agree this post could be better with more things like this. Unfortunately, I don’t feel like including them. Open invite to DM me if you are thinking about a PhD or already in one and want to talk more, including about my strategy.
That makes sense. I like your approach of self-diagnosing what sort of resources you lack, then tailoring your PhD to optimize for them.
One challenge with the “work backwards” approach is that it takes quite a bit of time to figure out what problems to solve and how to solve them. As I attempted this planning my own immanent journey into grad school, my views gained a lot of sophistication, and I expect they’ll continue to shift as I learn more. So I view grad school partly as a way to pursue the ideas I think are important/good fits, but also as a way to refine those ideas and gain the experience/network/credentials to stay in the game.
The “work backwards” approach is equally applicable to resource-gathering as finding concrete solutions to specific world problems.
I think it’s important for career builders to develop gears-level models of how a PhD or tenured academic career gives them resources + freedom to work on the world problems they care about; and also how it compares to other options.
Often, people really don’t seem to do that. They go by association: scientists solve important problems, and most of them seem to have PhDs and academic careers, so I guess I should do that too.
But it may be very difficult to put the resources you get from these positions to use in order to solve important problems, without a gears-level model of how those scientists use those resources to do so.
“Working backwards” type thinking is indeed a skill! I find it plausible a PhD is a good place to do this. I also think there might be other good ways to practice it, like for example seeking out the people who seem to be best at this and trying to work with them.
+1 on this same type of thinking being applicable to gathering resources. I don’t see any structural differences between these domains.