I found this post very useful to think about my own career, thanks for writing it up. My prospects also don’t fall neatly into the top recommended paths, so I’d be interested in more discussion how to train my “good judgement”.
Summarizing your ingredients of good judgment:
Spotting the important questions (e.g. what do I need to learn to improve my decision the most?)
Having good research intuitions (good quick guesses, think critically about evidence)
Having good sense about how the world works and what plans are likely to work.
Knowing when they’re out of their depth, knowing who to ask for help, knowing who to trust.
What do you think about participating in a forecasting platform, e.g. Good Judgement Open or Metaculus? It seems to cover all ingredients, and even be a good signal for others to evaluate your judgement quality. When I participated in GJO for a couple of months, I was demotivated by the lack feedback for the reasoning in my forecasts. I only could look at the reasoning of other forecasters and at my Brier score, of course.
P.S: Your thinking appears to be very clear and you appear rather competent, so I wonder if your bar of “good enough judgement” to reasonably pursue non-standard paths is too high. I also wonder if people whose judgement you trust would agree with your diagnosis that you wouldn’t have good enough judgement for a non-standard path.
What do you think about participating in a forecasting platform, e.g. Good Judgement Open or Metaculus? It seems to cover all ingredients, and even be a good signal for others to evaluate your judgement quality.
Seems pretty good for predicting things about the world that get resolved on short timescales. Sadly it seems less helpful for practicing judgement about things like the following:
judging arguments about things like the moral importance of wild animal suffering, plausibility of AI existential risk, and existence of mental illness
long-term predictions
predictions about small-scale things like how a project should be organized (though you can train calibration on this kind of question)
Re my own judgement: I appreciate your confidence in me. I spend a lot of time talking to people who have IMO better judgement than me; most of the things I say in this post (and a reasonable chunk of things I say other places) are my rephrasings of their ideas. I think that people whose judgement I trust would agree with my assessment of my judgement quality as “good in some ways” (this was the assessment of one person I asked about this in response to your comment).
I found this post very useful to think about my own career, thanks for writing it up. My prospects also don’t fall neatly into the top recommended paths, so I’d be interested in more discussion how to train my “good judgement”.
Summarizing your ingredients of good judgment:
Spotting the important questions (e.g. what do I need to learn to improve my decision the most?)
Having good research intuitions (good quick guesses, think critically about evidence)
Having good sense about how the world works and what plans are likely to work.
Knowing when they’re out of their depth, knowing who to ask for help, knowing who to trust.
What do you think about participating in a forecasting platform, e.g. Good Judgement Open or Metaculus? It seems to cover all ingredients, and even be a good signal for others to evaluate your judgement quality. When I participated in GJO for a couple of months, I was demotivated by the lack feedback for the reasoning in my forecasts. I only could look at the reasoning of other forecasters and at my Brier score, of course.
P.S: Your thinking appears to be very clear and you appear rather competent, so I wonder if your bar of “good enough judgement” to reasonably pursue non-standard paths is too high. I also wonder if people whose judgement you trust would agree with your diagnosis that you wouldn’t have good enough judgement for a non-standard path.
Seems pretty good for predicting things about the world that get resolved on short timescales. Sadly it seems less helpful for practicing judgement about things like the following:
judging arguments about things like the moral importance of wild animal suffering, plausibility of AI existential risk, and existence of mental illness
long-term predictions
predictions about small-scale things like how a project should be organized (though you can train calibration on this kind of question)
Re my own judgement: I appreciate your confidence in me. I spend a lot of time talking to people who have IMO better judgement than me; most of the things I say in this post (and a reasonable chunk of things I say other places) are my rephrasings of their ideas. I think that people whose judgement I trust would agree with my assessment of my judgement quality as “good in some ways” (this was the assessment of one person I asked about this in response to your comment).