Hi Jeff, thanks for posting about this—I feel that we clearly don’t talk enough about biorisks. Could you share how much background knowledge was necessary for you to do the switch? Was it an interest of yours as a hobby, or did you follow fellowships? I understand very much how your skills were highly transferrable, but I wonder about the background knowledge part since this is something many of my working professionals worry about when thinking about making a switch (since they have not been in academia before they worry that they won’t be good enough despite having similar skills to yours).
I didn’t have much background in biorisk. My last formal bio training was 9th grade bio, though I’ve also paid attention to news etc and knew more than I got from that class. I read some about the overall problem area from the 80k problem profile and reading lists, but the specific domain knowledge has almost all been on-the-job learning. Which isn’t a new experience for me, or I suspect most programmers: it’s also how I learned web performance optimization, the advertising ecosystem, and all the other domains I’ve worked in.
I think this approach does require a high enough fraction of people with real training, but a senior person with transferable skills (hi!) can still be very useful matched with domain experts who are either busy or have fewer of those skills.
That’s what I felt! Do you feel that people with experience in management or leadership could be useful, even if they come from a background of sales or consulting?
Hi Jeff, thanks for posting about this—I feel that we clearly don’t talk enough about biorisks. Could you share how much background knowledge was necessary for you to do the switch? Was it an interest of yours as a hobby, or did you follow fellowships? I understand very much how your skills were highly transferrable, but I wonder about the background knowledge part since this is something many of my working professionals worry about when thinking about making a switch (since they have not been in academia before they worry that they won’t be good enough despite having similar skills to yours).
I didn’t have much background in biorisk. My last formal bio training was 9th grade bio, though I’ve also paid attention to news etc and knew more than I got from that class. I read some about the overall problem area from the 80k problem profile and reading lists, but the specific domain knowledge has almost all been on-the-job learning. Which isn’t a new experience for me, or I suspect most programmers: it’s also how I learned web performance optimization, the advertising ecosystem, and all the other domains I’ve worked in.
I think this approach does require a high enough fraction of people with real training, but a senior person with transferable skills (hi!) can still be very useful matched with domain experts who are either busy or have fewer of those skills.
That’s what I felt! Do you feel that people with experience in management or leadership could be useful, even if they come from a background of sales or consulting?
I think it depends a lot on the organization, but potentially!