I’m not an expert in this space; @Grace B, who I’ve spoken to a bit about this, runs the AIxBio fellowship and probably has much better takes than I do. Fwiw, I think I have a different perspective to the post.
My rough view is: 1. Historically, we have done a bad job at fieldbuilding in biosecurity (for nuanced reasons, but I guess that we made some bad calls). 2. As of a few months ago, we have started to do a much better job at fieldbuilding e.g. the AIxBio fellowship that you mentioned is ~the first of it’s kind. The other fellowships you mentioned iiuc aren’t focused on biosecurity.
3. Most people who want to enter the space are already doing sensible things—not that many people are leaving their undergrad degrees to start PPE companies, many people are doing PhDs and are figuring out what to do—seems good to focus resources on PhDs/postdocs etc. or other people with more experience, whilst that’s extremely undertapped 4. AI safety has done an extremely good job at field building over the past ~4 years. Most of it was the result of the hard work of a bunch of great people fighting hard—rather than being particularly overdetermined by ChatGPT or whatever. 5. There are, in fact, a bunch of great things that one can do in biosecurity at various levels of experience, and outside of sustained 1:1 conversations, it’s really hard for more experienced people to figure out what some specific person should do [1]. My impression is that most users of the EA Forum, based on their current skills, “could” very quickly make useful contributions to the biosecurity space, but will likely get bottlenecked on motivation, strategy, grit etc. [2] I don’t think we should have that expectation of everyone. Still, I speak to people on approximately a weekly basis who I believe could make ambitious contributions, but psych themselves out or have standards that are too low for themselves and idk whether it’s helpful to act more conservatively. 6. I’m not sure where the dishonesty is really coming from, I don’t think there is much in the way of resources/community etc. pushing people to enter the space (yet).
I’ve occasionally wondered whether someone entreprenurial should try being a “career strategist” and charge people say $1000/hour (paid back over a few years once they start a role they think is particularly useful) to help them figure out how to have an outsized impact. This might look a little like a cross between 80k career coaching/AIM (charity entrepreneurship)/exec coaching with sustained engagement over a few weeks and a lot of time outside of sessions spent researching and hustling (from both the coach and user). Part of the reason to have a large charge is (1) you want to attract people taking impact extremely seriously, and (2) this kind of coaching is probably really hard and you’d need someone great. @Nina Friedrich🔸 you come to mind as someone that could do this!
Standard disclaimer of optimising hard for impact straight away is not the same as optimising hard for impact over the course of your career. Often it is better to build skills and become insanely leveraged before going hard at the most important problems.
For 4), I agree that the AI safety world has done a really good job field-building, both because of funders in/out of the EA space, and I wonder how much of it truly is transferable to biosecurity/climate/other x-risk fields. Perhaps someone should write a piece on that.
1 & 6) I don’t mean to say that people are intentionally giving bad advice or that it’s dishonest on purpose. However, when it comes to asking people for advice, I agree that 5) that it’s hard for experienced folks to know exactly how to help young people without a ton of context. Regardless, I don’t think there’s a consensus on how the average young person should navigate the field. (And interesting idea about the ‘career strategist’! I wonder who would be the best audience for this sort of coaching?)
I don’t think there’s a consensus on how the average young person should navigate the field
Yeah that sounds right, I agree that people should have a vibe “here is a take, it may work for some and not others—we’re still figuring this out” when they are giving career advice (if they aren’t already. Though I think I’d give that advice for most fieldbuilding, including AI safety so maybe that’s too low a bar.
I’m not an expert in this space; @Grace B, who I’ve spoken to a bit about this, runs the AIxBio fellowship and probably has much better takes than I do. Fwiw, I think I have a different perspective to the post.
My rough view is:
1. Historically, we have done a bad job at fieldbuilding in biosecurity (for nuanced reasons, but I guess that we made some bad calls).
2. As of a few months ago, we have started to do a much better job at fieldbuilding e.g. the AIxBio fellowship that you mentioned is ~the first of it’s kind. The other fellowships you mentioned iiuc aren’t focused on biosecurity.
3. Most people who want to enter the space are already doing sensible things—not that many people are leaving their undergrad degrees to start PPE companies, many people are doing PhDs and are figuring out what to do—seems good to focus resources on PhDs/postdocs etc. or other people with more experience, whilst that’s extremely undertapped
4. AI safety has done an extremely good job at field building over the past ~4 years. Most of it was the result of the hard work of a bunch of great people fighting hard—rather than being particularly overdetermined by ChatGPT or whatever.
5. There are, in fact, a bunch of great things that one can do in biosecurity at various levels of experience, and outside of sustained 1:1 conversations, it’s really hard for more experienced people to figure out what some specific person should do [1]. My impression is that most users of the EA Forum, based on their current skills, “could” very quickly make useful contributions to the biosecurity space, but will likely get bottlenecked on motivation, strategy, grit etc. [2] I don’t think we should have that expectation of everyone. Still, I speak to people on approximately a weekly basis who I believe could make ambitious contributions, but psych themselves out or have standards that are too low for themselves and idk whether it’s helpful to act more conservatively.
6. I’m not sure where the dishonesty is really coming from, I don’t think there is much in the way of resources/community etc. pushing people to enter the space (yet).
I’ve occasionally wondered whether someone entreprenurial should try being a “career strategist” and charge people say $1000/hour (paid back over a few years once they start a role they think is particularly useful) to help them figure out how to have an outsized impact. This might look a little like a cross between 80k career coaching/AIM (charity entrepreneurship)/exec coaching with sustained engagement over a few weeks and a lot of time outside of sessions spent researching and hustling (from both the coach and user). Part of the reason to have a large charge is (1) you want to attract people taking impact extremely seriously, and (2) this kind of coaching is probably really hard and you’d need someone great. @Nina Friedrich🔸 you come to mind as someone that could do this!
Standard disclaimer of optimising hard for impact straight away is not the same as optimising hard for impact over the course of your career. Often it is better to build skills and become insanely leveraged before going hard at the most important problems.
You make some great points!
For 4), I agree that the AI safety world has done a really good job field-building, both because of funders in/out of the EA space, and I wonder how much of it truly is transferable to biosecurity/climate/other x-risk fields. Perhaps someone should write a piece on that.
1 & 6) I don’t mean to say that people are intentionally giving bad advice or that it’s dishonest on purpose. However, when it comes to asking people for advice, I agree that 5) that it’s hard for experienced folks to know exactly how to help young people without a ton of context. Regardless, I don’t think there’s a consensus on how the average young person should navigate the field. (And interesting idea about the ‘career strategist’! I wonder who would be the best audience for this sort of coaching?)
I don’t think there’s a consensus on how the average young person should navigate the field
Yeah that sounds right, I agree that people should have a vibe “here is a take, it may work for some and not others—we’re still figuring this out” when they are giving career advice (if they aren’t already. Though I think I’d give that advice for most fieldbuilding, including AI safety so maybe that’s too low a bar.