The ‘any decent shot’ is doing a lot of work in that first sentence, given how hard the field is to get into. And even then you only say ‘probably stop’.
There’s a motte/bailey thing going on here, where the motte is something like ‘AI safety researchers probably do a lot more good than doctors’ and the bailey is ‘all doctors who come into contact with EA should be told to stop what they are doing and switch to becoming (e.g.) AI safety researchers, because that’s how bad being a doctor is’.
I don’t think we are making the world a better place by doing the second; where possible we should stick to ‘probably’ and communicate the first, nuance and all, as you did do here but as Khorton is noting people often don’t do in person.
The “probably” there is just for the case of becoming an AI safety researcher. The argument for why being a doctor seems rarely the right choice does of course not just route through AI Alignment being important. It routes through a large number of alternative careers that seem more promising, many of which are analyzed and listed on 80k’s website. That is what my second paragraph was trying to say.
I think if you take into account all of those alternatives, the “probably” turns into a “very likely” and conditioning on “any decent shot” no longer seems necessary to me.
The ‘any decent shot’ is doing a lot of work in that first sentence, given how hard the field is to get into. And even then you only say ‘probably stop’.
There’s a motte/bailey thing going on here, where the motte is something like ‘AI safety researchers probably do a lot more good than doctors’ and the bailey is ‘all doctors who come into contact with EA should be told to stop what they are doing and switch to becoming (e.g.) AI safety researchers, because that’s how bad being a doctor is’.
I don’t think we are making the world a better place by doing the second; where possible we should stick to ‘probably’ and communicate the first, nuance and all, as you did do here but as Khorton is noting people often don’t do in person.
The “probably” there is just for the case of becoming an AI safety researcher. The argument for why being a doctor seems rarely the right choice does of course not just route through AI Alignment being important. It routes through a large number of alternative careers that seem more promising, many of which are analyzed and listed on 80k’s website. That is what my second paragraph was trying to say.
I think if you take into account all of those alternatives, the “probably” turns into a “very likely” and conditioning on “any decent shot” no longer seems necessary to me.