I like your framing of PhDs “as more like an entry-level graduate researcher job than ‘n more years of school’”. Many people outside of academia don’t understand this, and think of graduate school as just an extension of undergrad when it is really a completely different environment. The main reason to get a PhD is if you want to be a professional researcher (either within or outside of academia), so from this perspective, you’ll have to be a junior researcher somewhere for a few years anyway.
In the context of short timelines: if you can do direct work on high impact problems during your PhD, the opportunity cost of a 5-7 year program is substantially lower.
However, in my experience, academia makes it very hard to focus on questions of highest impact; instead people are funneled into projects that are publishable by academic journals. It is really hard to escape this, though having a supportive supervisor (e.g., somebody who already deeply cares about x-risks, or an already tenured professor who is happy to have students study whatever they want) gives you a better shot at studying something actually useful. Just something to consider even if you’ve already decided you’re a good personal fit for doing a PhD!
Now posted as a top-level post here.
I like your framing of PhDs “as more like an entry-level graduate researcher job than ‘n more years of school’”. Many people outside of academia don’t understand this, and think of graduate school as just an extension of undergrad when it is really a completely different environment. The main reason to get a PhD is if you want to be a professional researcher (either within or outside of academia), so from this perspective, you’ll have to be a junior researcher somewhere for a few years anyway.
In the context of short timelines: if you can do direct work on high impact problems during your PhD, the opportunity cost of a 5-7 year program is substantially lower.
However, in my experience, academia makes it very hard to focus on questions of highest impact; instead people are funneled into projects that are publishable by academic journals. It is really hard to escape this, though having a supportive supervisor (e.g., somebody who already deeply cares about x-risks, or an already tenured professor who is happy to have students study whatever they want) gives you a better shot at studying something actually useful. Just something to consider even if you’ve already decided you’re a good personal fit for doing a PhD!