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.
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.