ASB—thanks for sparking a fascinating discussion, and to the many comment-writers who contributed.
I’m left with mixed feelings about the pros and cons of developing narrow, ‘boring’, expertise in specific policy topics, versus more typical EA-style big-picture thinking.
The thing is, there are important and valuable roles for people who specialize in connecting these two approaches, in serving as ‘middle men’ between the specialist policy wonks and the EA strategists. This requires some pro-active networking, some social skills, a capacity for rapid getting-up-to-speed in new areas, a respect for subject matter experts, and an ability to understand what can help policy experts do their jobs, and advance their careers, more effectively. This intermediary role could probably benefit from a few years of immersion in the gov’t/policy/think tank world—but not such deep immersion that one soaks up all of the conventional wisdom and groupthink and unexamined assumptions that tend to characterize many policy subcultures. So, the best intermediaries may still keep one foot in the EA subculture and one foot in a very specialized policy subculture.
(I say this as someone who’s spent most of his academic career trying to connect specialist knowledge in evolutionary and genetic theory to bigger-picture issues in human psychology.)
ASB—thanks for sparking a fascinating discussion, and to the many comment-writers who contributed.
I’m left with mixed feelings about the pros and cons of developing narrow, ‘boring’, expertise in specific policy topics, versus more typical EA-style big-picture thinking.
The thing is, there are important and valuable roles for people who specialize in connecting these two approaches, in serving as ‘middle men’ between the specialist policy wonks and the EA strategists. This requires some pro-active networking, some social skills, a capacity for rapid getting-up-to-speed in new areas, a respect for subject matter experts, and an ability to understand what can help policy experts do their jobs, and advance their careers, more effectively. This intermediary role could probably benefit from a few years of immersion in the gov’t/policy/think tank world—but not such deep immersion that one soaks up all of the conventional wisdom and groupthink and unexamined assumptions that tend to characterize many policy subcultures. So, the best intermediaries may still keep one foot in the EA subculture and one foot in a very specialized policy subculture.
(I say this as someone who’s spent most of his academic career trying to connect specialist knowledge in evolutionary and genetic theory to bigger-picture issues in human psychology.)