I think this is a really well-written piece, and personally I’ve shared it with my interns and in general tentatively think I am more inclined to share this with my close contacts than most 80k articles for “generic longtermist EA career advice” (though obviously many 80k articles /podcasts have very useful details about specific questions).
2 things that I’m specifically confused about:
As Max_Daniel noted, an underlying theme in this post is that “being successful at conventional metrics” is an important desiderata, but this doesn’t reflect the experiences of longtermist EAs I personally know. For example, anecdotally, >60% of longtermists with top-N PhDs regret completing their program, and >80% of longtermists with MDs regret it.
(Possible ways that my anecdata is consistent with your claims:
These people are often in the “Conceptual and empirical research on core longtermist topics” aptitudes camp, and success at conventional metrics is a weaker signal here than in other domains you listed.
Your notions of “success”/excellence are a much higher bar than completing a PhD at a top-N school.
My friends are wrong to think that getting a PhD/MD was a mistake.
You mention that a crazy amount of total hours is necessary to become world-class excellent at things. I agree with the sentiment that a) fit/talent is very important and b) college and other “normal/default” practices acclimate people to wrongly believing that success is easier and hard work is less critical than is true. But when I think about things that matter for longtermist EAs (rather than success at well-defined prestige ladders in fields with established paradigms), I think a lot of outlier success comes from extremely (arguably unsustainably) intense periods with relatively small calendar time or total hours invested. eg
A lot of success in early cryptocurrency trading (pre-2019, say) comes from people a) very talented b) willing to see the opportunity and c) be willing to make radical life changes to realize the once-in-a-decade event and immediately jump on it.
This seems to have happened a bunch during the pandemic. Eg amateur short-term forecasts, Youyang Gu’s modeling, patio11′s work with VaccinateCA, etc, all seemed to have been broadly better in most cases than similar work by established experts.
Obviously there are important exceptions like the mRNA vaccines and a lot of the testing/sequencing work.
My impression (from outside the field) is that a lot of the mostimportant work in AI Safety is done by people who are fairly junior, and without a lot of experience in the field.
I imagine “crunch time” for EAs in longtermist causes to look a lot more like “be a generically competent person who has your shit together + is willing to drop everything to work on the hard things that aren’t really your specialty but somebody has to do it and nobody else well” than “prepare for 10-20 years working very hard for the exact thing you prepared for, and then emergency times will look pretty close to your specialty so you’re well-placed.”
Perhaps a crux here is that either your mental image of “crunch time” looks more like the latter scenario?
or maybe more that “crunch time” is just much less important relatively speaking?
A caveat here is that I do agree that a) excellence is very important and b) many EAs (myself included) are perhaps not working hard enough to achieve true excellence.
I also agree that a) general excellence and b) hard work specifically is somewhat transferable (eg many of the successful crypto people were great finance traders or great programmers before crypto trading, at least one of which requires insane hours, patio11 was a world-class software evangelizer before his covid work). But I think the importance of being world-class here is “just” building a) the general skillset of becoming world-class and b) the mental fortitude, flexibility, etc of willingness to sacrifice other things when the stakes are high enough, rather than either the direct benefits of your expertise or the network advantages of being around other prestigious/high-status/etc. people.
One way in which our models cash out to different actions:
If my intuition/heuristic is correct, this points to sometimes doing crunch-time work in less important eras as being the right way to prepare, rather than steadily climbing towards excellence in very competitive domains.
Being in “crunch mode” all the time may be actively bad, to the extent that it makes you miss out on great opportunities because you’re too zoned into your specific work.
On the other hand, if we assume most of the benefits of excellence comes from the networking, etc, benefits of steady excellence, this points much more towards “spend 5-20 years becoming world-class at something that society thinks of as hard and important.”
An obvious caveat to these points is that you have much more experience with excellence than I do, and your “closing thoughts on advice” aside, I’m mostly willing to defer to you if you think my heuristics/intuitions here are completely off.
Response on point 1: I didn’t mean to send a message that one should amass the most impressive conventional credentials possible in general—only that for many of these aptitudes, conventional success is an important early sign of fit and potential.
I’m generally pretty skeptical by default of advanced degrees unless one has high confidence that one wants to be on a track where the degree is necessary (I briefly give reasons for this skepticism in the “political and bureaucratic aptitudes” section). This piece only mentions advanced degrees for the “academia,” “conceptual and empirical research” and “political and bureaucratic” aptitudes. And for the latter two, these aren’t particularly recommended, more mentioned as possibilities.
More generally, I didn’t mean to advocate for “official credentials that anyone could recognize from the outside.” These do seem crucial for some aptitudes (particularly academia and political/bureaucratic), but much less so for other aptitudes I listed. For org running/building/boosting, I emphasized markers of success that are “conventional” (i.e., they’re not contrarian goals) but are also not maximally standardized or legible to people without context—e.g., raises, promotions, good relationships.
Response on point 2: this is interesting. I agree that when there is some highly neglected (often because “new”) situation, it’s possible to succeed with a lot less time invested. Crypto, COVID-19, and AI safety research of today all seem to fit that bill. This is a good point.
I’m less sure that this dynamic is going to be reliably correlated with the things that matter most by longtermist lights. When I picture “crunch time,” I imagine that generalists whose main asset is their “willingness to drop everything” will have opportunities to have impact, but I also imagine that (a) their opportunities will be better insofar as they’ve developed the sorts of aptitudes listed in this piece; (b) a lot of opportunities to have impact will really rely on having built aptitudes and/or career capital over the long run.
For example, I imagine there will be a lot of opportunities for (a) people who are high up in AI labs and government; (b) people who know how to run large projects/organizations; (c) people with large existing audiences and/or networks; (d) people who have spent many years working with large AI models; (e) people who have spent years developing rich conceptual and empirical understanding of major potential risk factors, and that these opportunities won’t exist for generalists.
“Drop everything and work hard” doesn’t particularly seem to me like the sort of thing one needs to get practice with (although it is the sort of thing one needs to be prepared for, i.e., one needs not to be too attached to their current job/community/etc.) So I guess overall I would think most people are getting “better prepared” by building the sorts of aptitudes described here than by “simulating crunch time early.” That said, jumping into areas with unusually “short climbs to the top” (like the examples you gave) could be an excellent move because of the opportunity to build outsized career capital and take on outsized responsibilities early in one’s career. And I’ll reiterate my reservations about “advice,” so wouldn’t ask you to defer to me here!
As Max_Daniel noted, an underlying theme in this post is that “being successful at conventional metrics” is an important desiderata, but this doesn’t reflect the experiences of longtermist EAs I personally know. For example, anecdotally, >60% of longtermists with top-N PhDs regret completing their program, and >80% of longtermists with MDs regret it.
Your examples actually made me realize that “successful at conventional metrics” maybe isn’t a great way to describe my intuition (i.e., I misdescribed my view by saying that). Completing a top-N PhD or MD isn’t a central example—or at least not sufficient for being a central example, and certainly not necessary for what I had in mind.
I think the questions that matter according to my intuition are things like:
Do you learn a lot? Are you constantly operating near the boundaries of what you know how to do and have practiced?
Are the people around you impressed by you? Are there skills where they would be like “off the top of my head, I can’t think of anyone else who’s better at this than <you>”?
At least some top-N PhDs will correlate well with this. But I don’t think the correlation will be super strong: especially in some fields, I think it’s not uncommon to end up in a kind of bad environment (e.g., advisor who isn’t good at mentoring) or to be often “under-challenged” because tasks are either too easy or based on narrow skills one has already practiced to saturation or because there are too few incentives to progress fast.
[ETA: I also think that many of the OP’s aptitudes are really clusters of skills, and that PhDs run some risk of only practicing too small a number of skills. I.e., being considerably more narrow. Again this will vary a lot by field, advisor, other environmental conditions, etc.]
What I feel even more strongly is that these (potential) correlates of doing a PhD are much more important than the credential, except for narrow exceptions for some career paths (e.g., need a PhD if you want to become a professor).
I also think I should have said “being successful at <whatever> metric for one of these or another useful aptitude” rather than implying that “being successful at anything” is useful.
Even taking all of this into account, I think your anecdata is a reason to be somewhat more skeptical about this “being successful at <see above>” intuition I have.
Completing a top-N PhD or MD isn’t a central example—or at least not sufficient for being a central example
As an aside, if you’re up for asking your friends/colleagues a potentially awkward question, I’d be interested in seeing how much of my own anecdata about EAs with PhDs/MDs replicates in your own (EA) circles (which is presumably more Oxford-based than mine). I think it’s likely that EAs outside of the Bay Area weigh the value of a PhD/other terminal degrees more, but I don’t have a strong sense of how big the differences are quantitatively.
I find your crypto trading examples fairly interesting, and I do feel like they only fit awkwardly with my intuitions—they certainly make me think it’s more complicated.
However, one caveat is that “willing to see the opportunity” and “willing to make radical life changes” don’t sound quite right to me as conditions, or at least like they omit important things. I think that actually both of these things are practice-able abilities rather than just a matter of “willingness” (or perhaps “willingness” improves with practice).
And in the few cases I’m aware of it seems to me the relevant people were world-class excellent at some relevant inputs, in part clearly because did spend significant time “practicing” them.
The point is just that these inputs are broader than “ability to do cryptocurrency trading”. On the other hand, they also don’t fit super neatly into the aptitudes from the OP, though I’d guess the entrepreneurial aptitude would cover a lot of it (even if it’s not emphasized in the description of it).
However, one caveat is that “willing to see the opportunity” and “willing to make radical life changes” don’t sound quite right to me as conditions, or at least like they omit important things.
I agree with this! Narrowly,”chance favors the prepared mind” and being in either quant trading or cryptography (both competitive fields!) before the crypto boom presumably helps you see the smoke ahead of time, and like you some of the people I know in the space were world-class at an adjacent field like finance trading or programming. Though I’m aware of other people who literally did stuff closer to fly a bunch to Korea and skirt the line on capital restrictions, which seems less reliant on raw or trained talent.
Broadly, I agree that both seeing the opportunity (serendipity?) and willingness to act on crazy opportunities are rare skillsets that are somewhat practicable rather than just a pure innate disposition. This is roughly what I mean by
But I think the importance of being world-class here is “just” building a) the general skillset of becoming world-class and b) the mental fortitude, flexibility, etc of willingness to sacrifice other things when the stakes are high enough, rather than either the direct benefits of your expertise or the network advantages of being around other prestigious/high-status/etc. people.
But I also take your point that maybe this is its own skillset (somewhat akin to/a subset of “entrepreneurship”) rather than a general notion of excellence.
Narrowly,”chance favors the prepared mind” and being in either quant trading or cryptography (both competitive fields!) before the crypto boom presumably helps you see the smoke ahead of time, and like you some of the people I know in the space were world-class at an adjacent field like finance trading or programming. Though I’m aware of other people who literally did stuff closer to fly a bunch to Korea and skirt the line on capital restrictions, which seems less reliant on raw or trained talent.
(I agree that having knowledge of or experience in adjacent domains such as finance may be useful. But to be clear, the claim I intended to make was that the ability to do things like “fly a bunch to Korea” is, as you later say, a rare and somewhat practiceable skillset.
Looking back, I think I somehow failed to read your bullet point on “hard work being somewhat transferable” etc. I think the distinction you make there between “doing crunch-time work in less important eras” vs. “steadily climbing towards excellence in very competitive domains” is very on-point, that the crypto examples should make us more bullish on the value of the former relative to the latter, and that my previous comment is off insofar as it can be read as me arguing against this.)
(I agree that having knowledge of or experience in adjacent domains such as finance may be useful. But to be clear, the claim I intended to make was that the ability to do things like “fly a bunch to Korea” is, as you later say, a rare and somewhat practiceable skillset.
Got it!
and that my previous comment is off insofar as it can be read as me arguing against this
Thanks for the clarification! Though I originally read your comment as an extension of my points rather than arguing against them, so no confusion on my end (though of course I’m not the only audience of your comments, so these clarifications may still be helpful).
I think this is a really well-written piece, and personally I’ve shared it with my interns and in general tentatively think I am more inclined to share this with my close contacts than most 80k articles for “generic longtermist EA career advice” (though obviously many 80k articles /podcasts have very useful details about specific questions).
2 things that I’m specifically confused about:
As Max_Daniel noted, an underlying theme in this post is that “being successful at conventional metrics” is an important desiderata, but this doesn’t reflect the experiences of longtermist EAs I personally know. For example, anecdotally, >60% of longtermists with top-N PhDs regret completing their program, and >80% of longtermists with MDs regret it.
(Possible ways that my anecdata is consistent with your claims:
These people are often in the “Conceptual and empirical research on core longtermist topics” aptitudes camp, and success at conventional metrics is a weaker signal here than in other domains you listed.
Your notions of “success”/excellence are a much higher bar than completing a PhD at a top-N school.
My friends are wrong to think that getting a PhD/MD was a mistake.
You mention that a crazy amount of total hours is necessary to become world-class excellent at things. I agree with the sentiment that a) fit/talent is very important and b) college and other “normal/default” practices acclimate people to wrongly believing that success is easier and hard work is less critical than is true. But when I think about things that matter for longtermist EAs (rather than success at well-defined prestige ladders in fields with established paradigms), I think a lot of outlier success comes from extremely (arguably unsustainably) intense periods with relatively small calendar time or total hours invested. eg
A lot of success in early cryptocurrency trading (pre-2019, say) comes from people a) very talented b) willing to see the opportunity and c) be willing to make radical life changes to realize the once-in-a-decade event and immediately jump on it.
This seems to have happened a bunch during the pandemic. Eg amateur short-term forecasts, Youyang Gu’s modeling, patio11′s work with VaccinateCA, etc, all seemed to have been broadly better in most cases than similar work by established experts.
Obviously there are important exceptions like the mRNA vaccines and a lot of the testing/sequencing work.
My impression (from outside the field) is that a lot of the most important work in AI Safety is done by people who are fairly junior, and without a lot of experience in the field.
I imagine “crunch time” for EAs in longtermist causes to look a lot more like “be a generically competent person who has your shit together + is willing to drop everything to work on the hard things that aren’t really your specialty but somebody has to do it and nobody else well” than “prepare for 10-20 years working very hard for the exact thing you prepared for, and then emergency times will look pretty close to your specialty so you’re well-placed.”
Perhaps a crux here is that either your mental image of “crunch time” looks more like the latter scenario?
or maybe more that “crunch time” is just much less important relatively speaking?
A caveat here is that I do agree that a) excellence is very important and b) many EAs (myself included) are perhaps not working hard enough to achieve true excellence.
I also agree that a) general excellence and b) hard work specifically is somewhat transferable (eg many of the successful crypto people were great finance traders or great programmers before crypto trading, at least one of which requires insane hours, patio11 was a world-class software evangelizer before his covid work). But I think the importance of being world-class here is “just” building a) the general skillset of becoming world-class and b) the mental fortitude, flexibility, etc of willingness to sacrifice other things when the stakes are high enough, rather than either the direct benefits of your expertise or the network advantages of being around other prestigious/high-status/etc. people.
One way in which our models cash out to different actions:
If my intuition/heuristic is correct, this points to sometimes doing crunch-time work in less important eras as being the right way to prepare, rather than steadily climbing towards excellence in very competitive domains.
Being in “crunch mode” all the time may be actively bad, to the extent that it makes you miss out on great opportunities because you’re too zoned into your specific work.
On the other hand, if we assume most of the benefits of excellence comes from the networking, etc, benefits of steady excellence, this points much more towards “spend 5-20 years becoming world-class at something that society thinks of as hard and important.”
An obvious caveat to these points is that you have much more experience with excellence than I do, and your “closing thoughts on advice” aside, I’m mostly willing to defer to you if you think my heuristics/intuitions here are completely off.
Thanks for the thoughtful comments, Linch.
Response on point 1: I didn’t mean to send a message that one should amass the most impressive conventional credentials possible in general—only that for many of these aptitudes, conventional success is an important early sign of fit and potential.
I’m generally pretty skeptical by default of advanced degrees unless one has high confidence that one wants to be on a track where the degree is necessary (I briefly give reasons for this skepticism in the “political and bureaucratic aptitudes” section). This piece only mentions advanced degrees for the “academia,” “conceptual and empirical research” and “political and bureaucratic” aptitudes. And for the latter two, these aren’t particularly recommended, more mentioned as possibilities.
More generally, I didn’t mean to advocate for “official credentials that anyone could recognize from the outside.” These do seem crucial for some aptitudes (particularly academia and political/bureaucratic), but much less so for other aptitudes I listed. For org running/building/boosting, I emphasized markers of success that are “conventional” (i.e., they’re not contrarian goals) but are also not maximally standardized or legible to people without context—e.g., raises, promotions, good relationships.
Response on point 2: this is interesting. I agree that when there is some highly neglected (often because “new”) situation, it’s possible to succeed with a lot less time invested. Crypto, COVID-19, and AI safety research of today all seem to fit that bill. This is a good point.
I’m less sure that this dynamic is going to be reliably correlated with the things that matter most by longtermist lights. When I picture “crunch time,” I imagine that generalists whose main asset is their “willingness to drop everything” will have opportunities to have impact, but I also imagine that (a) their opportunities will be better insofar as they’ve developed the sorts of aptitudes listed in this piece; (b) a lot of opportunities to have impact will really rely on having built aptitudes and/or career capital over the long run.
For example, I imagine there will be a lot of opportunities for (a) people who are high up in AI labs and government; (b) people who know how to run large projects/organizations; (c) people with large existing audiences and/or networks; (d) people who have spent many years working with large AI models; (e) people who have spent years developing rich conceptual and empirical understanding of major potential risk factors, and that these opportunities won’t exist for generalists.
“Drop everything and work hard” doesn’t particularly seem to me like the sort of thing one needs to get practice with (although it is the sort of thing one needs to be prepared for, i.e., one needs not to be too attached to their current job/community/etc.) So I guess overall I would think most people are getting “better prepared” by building the sorts of aptitudes described here than by “simulating crunch time early.” That said, jumping into areas with unusually “short climbs to the top” (like the examples you gave) could be an excellent move because of the opportunity to build outsized career capital and take on outsized responsibilities early in one’s career. And I’ll reiterate my reservations about “advice,” so wouldn’t ask you to defer to me here!
Related to this discussion, Paul Graham has a recent article called “How to Work Hard,” which readers here might find valuable.
Your examples actually made me realize that “successful at conventional metrics” maybe isn’t a great way to describe my intuition (i.e., I misdescribed my view by saying that). Completing a top-N PhD or MD isn’t a central example—or at least not sufficient for being a central example, and certainly not necessary for what I had in mind.
I think the questions that matter according to my intuition are things like:
Do you learn a lot? Are you constantly operating near the boundaries of what you know how to do and have practiced?
Are the people around you impressed by you? Are there skills where they would be like “off the top of my head, I can’t think of anyone else who’s better at this than <you>”?
At least some top-N PhDs will correlate well with this. But I don’t think the correlation will be super strong: especially in some fields, I think it’s not uncommon to end up in a kind of bad environment (e.g., advisor who isn’t good at mentoring) or to be often “under-challenged” because tasks are either too easy or based on narrow skills one has already practiced to saturation or because there are too few incentives to progress fast.
[ETA: I also think that many of the OP’s aptitudes are really clusters of skills, and that PhDs run some risk of only practicing too small a number of skills. I.e., being considerably more narrow. Again this will vary a lot by field, advisor, other environmental conditions, etc.]
What I feel even more strongly is that these (potential) correlates of doing a PhD are much more important than the credential, except for narrow exceptions for some career paths (e.g., need a PhD if you want to become a professor).
I also think I should have said “being successful at <whatever> metric for one of these or another useful aptitude” rather than implying that “being successful at anything” is useful.
Even taking all of this into account, I think your anecdata is a reason to be somewhat more skeptical about this “being successful at <see above>” intuition I have.
As an aside, if you’re up for asking your friends/colleagues a potentially awkward question, I’d be interested in seeing how much of my own anecdata about EAs with PhDs/MDs replicates in your own (EA) circles (which is presumably more Oxford-based than mine). I think it’s likely that EAs outside of the Bay Area weigh the value of a PhD/other terminal degrees more, but I don’t have a strong sense of how big the differences are quantitatively.
I find your crypto trading examples fairly interesting, and I do feel like they only fit awkwardly with my intuitions—they certainly make me think it’s more complicated.
However, one caveat is that “willing to see the opportunity” and “willing to make radical life changes” don’t sound quite right to me as conditions, or at least like they omit important things. I think that actually both of these things are practice-able abilities rather than just a matter of “willingness” (or perhaps “willingness” improves with practice).
And in the few cases I’m aware of it seems to me the relevant people were world-class excellent at some relevant inputs, in part clearly because did spend significant time “practicing” them.
The point is just that these inputs are broader than “ability to do cryptocurrency trading”. On the other hand, they also don’t fit super neatly into the aptitudes from the OP, though I’d guess the entrepreneurial aptitude would cover a lot of it (even if it’s not emphasized in the description of it).
I agree with this! Narrowly,”chance favors the prepared mind” and being in either quant trading or cryptography (both competitive fields!) before the crypto boom presumably helps you see the smoke ahead of time, and like you some of the people I know in the space were world-class at an adjacent field like finance trading or programming. Though I’m aware of other people who literally did stuff closer to fly a bunch to Korea and skirt the line on capital restrictions, which seems less reliant on raw or trained talent.
Broadly, I agree that both seeing the opportunity (serendipity?) and willingness to act on crazy opportunities are rare skillsets that are somewhat practicable rather than just a pure innate disposition. This is roughly what I mean by
But I also take your point that maybe this is its own skillset (somewhat akin to/a subset of “entrepreneurship”) rather than a general notion of excellence.
(I agree that having knowledge of or experience in adjacent domains such as finance may be useful. But to be clear, the claim I intended to make was that the ability to do things like “fly a bunch to Korea” is, as you later say, a rare and somewhat practiceable skillset.
Looking back, I think I somehow failed to read your bullet point on “hard work being somewhat transferable” etc. I think the distinction you make there between “doing crunch-time work in less important eras” vs. “steadily climbing towards excellence in very competitive domains” is very on-point, that the crypto examples should make us more bullish on the value of the former relative to the latter, and that my previous comment is off insofar as it can be read as me arguing against this.)
Got it!
Thanks for the clarification! Though I originally read your comment as an extension of my points rather than arguing against them, so no confusion on my end (though of course I’m not the only audience of your comments, so these clarifications may still be helpful).