Suggestion for how people go about developing this expertise from ~scratch, in a way that should be pretty adaptable to e.g. the context of an undergraduate or grad-level course, or independent research (a much better/stronger version of things I’ve done in the past, which involved lots of talking and take-developing but not a lot of detail and publication, which I think are both really important):
Figure out who, both within the EA world and not, would know at least a fair amount about this topic—maybe they just would be able to explain why it’s useful in more context than you have, maybe they know what papers you should read or acronyms you should familiarize yourself with—and talk to them, roughly in increasing order of scariness/value of their time, such that you’ve at least had a few conversations by the time you’re talking to the scariest/highest-time-value people. Maybe this is like a list of 5-10 people?
During these conversations, take note of what’s confusing you, ideas that you have, connections you or your interlocutors draw between topics, takes you find yourself repeating, etc.; you’re on the hunt for a first project.
Use the “learning by writing” method and just try to write “what you think should happen” in this area, as in, a specific person (maybe a government agency, maybe a funder in EA) should take a specific action, with as much detail as you can, noting a bunch of ways it could go wrong and how you propose to overcome these obstacles.
Treat this proposal as a hypothesis that you then test (meaning, you have some sense of what could convince you it’s wrong), and you seek out tests for it, e.g. talking to more experts about it (or asking them to read your draft and give feedback), finding academic or non-academic literature that bears on the important cruxes, etc., and revise your proposal (including scrapping it) as implied by the evidence.
Try to publish something from this exercise—maybe it’s the proposal, maybe it’s “hey, it turns out lots of proposals in this domain hinge on this empirical question,” maybe it’s “here’s why I now think [topic] is a dead end.” This gathers more feedback and importantly circulates the information that you’ve thought about it a nonzero amount.
Honestly, my biggest recommendation would be just getting a job in policy! You’ll get to see what “everyone knows”, where the gaps are, and you’ll have access to a lot more experts and information to help you upskill faster if you’re motivated.
You might not be able to get a job on the topic you think is most impactful but any related job will give you access to better information to learn faster, and make it easier to get your next, even-more-relevant policy job.
In my experience getting a policy job is relatively uncorrelated with knowing a lot about a specific topic so I think people should aim for this early. You can also see if you actually LIKE policy jobs and are good at them before you spend too much time!
Agree, basically any policy job seems to start teaching you important stuff about institutional politics and process and the culture of the whole political system!
Though I should also add this important-seeming nuance I gathered from a pretty senior policy person who said basically: “I don’t like the mindset of, get anywhere in the government and climb the ladder and wait for your time to save the day; people should be thinking of it as proactively learning as much as possible about their corner of the government-world, and ideally sharing that information with others.”
Suggestion for how people go about developing this expertise from ~scratch, in a way that should be pretty adaptable to e.g. the context of an undergraduate or grad-level course, or independent research (a much better/stronger version of things I’ve done in the past, which involved lots of talking and take-developing but not a lot of detail and publication, which I think are both really important):
Figure out who, both within the EA world and not, would know at least a fair amount about this topic—maybe they just would be able to explain why it’s useful in more context than you have, maybe they know what papers you should read or acronyms you should familiarize yourself with—and talk to them, roughly in increasing order of scariness/value of their time, such that you’ve at least had a few conversations by the time you’re talking to the scariest/highest-time-value people. Maybe this is like a list of 5-10 people?
During these conversations, take note of what’s confusing you, ideas that you have, connections you or your interlocutors draw between topics, takes you find yourself repeating, etc.; you’re on the hunt for a first project.
Use the “learning by writing” method and just try to write “what you think should happen” in this area, as in, a specific person (maybe a government agency, maybe a funder in EA) should take a specific action, with as much detail as you can, noting a bunch of ways it could go wrong and how you propose to overcome these obstacles.
Treat this proposal as a hypothesis that you then test (meaning, you have some sense of what could convince you it’s wrong), and you seek out tests for it, e.g. talking to more experts about it (or asking them to read your draft and give feedback), finding academic or non-academic literature that bears on the important cruxes, etc., and revise your proposal (including scrapping it) as implied by the evidence.
Try to publish something from this exercise—maybe it’s the proposal, maybe it’s “hey, it turns out lots of proposals in this domain hinge on this empirical question,” maybe it’s “here’s why I now think [topic] is a dead end.” This gathers more feedback and importantly circulates the information that you’ve thought about it a nonzero amount.
Curious what other approaches people recommend!
Honestly, my biggest recommendation would be just getting a job in policy! You’ll get to see what “everyone knows”, where the gaps are, and you’ll have access to a lot more experts and information to help you upskill faster if you’re motivated.
You might not be able to get a job on the topic you think is most impactful but any related job will give you access to better information to learn faster, and make it easier to get your next, even-more-relevant policy job.
In my experience getting a policy job is relatively uncorrelated with knowing a lot about a specific topic so I think people should aim for this early. You can also see if you actually LIKE policy jobs and are good at them before you spend too much time!
Agree, basically any policy job seems to start teaching you important stuff about institutional politics and process and the culture of the whole political system!
Though I should also add this important-seeming nuance I gathered from a pretty senior policy person who said basically: “I don’t like the mindset of, get anywhere in the government and climb the ladder and wait for your time to save the day; people should be thinking of it as proactively learning as much as possible about their corner of the government-world, and ideally sharing that information with others.”