My answer to this one is going to be a pretty boring “it depends” unfortunately. I was speaking to my own experience in responding to the top level question, and since I do a pretty “generalist”-y job, improving at general reasoning is likely to be more important for me. At least when restricting to areas that seem highly promising from a long-termist perspective, I think questions of personal fit and comparative advantage will end up determining the degree to which someone should be specialized in a particular topic like machine learning or biology.
I also think that often someone who is a generalist in terms of topic areas still specializes in a certain kind of methodology, e.g. researchers at Open Phil will often do “back of the envelope calculations” (BOTECs) in several different domains, effective “specializing” in the BOTEC skillset.
My answer to this one is going to be a pretty boring “it depends” unfortunately. I was speaking to my own experience in responding to the top level question, and since I do a pretty “generalist”-y job, improving at general reasoning is likely to be more important for me. At least when restricting to areas that seem highly promising from a long-termist perspective, I think questions of personal fit and comparative advantage will end up determining the degree to which someone should be specialized in a particular topic like machine learning or biology.
I also think that often someone who is a generalist in terms of topic areas still specializes in a certain kind of methodology, e.g. researchers at Open Phil will often do “back of the envelope calculations” (BOTECs) in several different domains, effective “specializing” in the BOTEC skillset.