FWIW, without having thought systematically about this, my intuition is to agree. I’d be particularly keen to see:
More explicit models for what trainable skills and experiences are useful for improving the long-term future, or will become so in the future (as new institutions such as CSET are being established).
More actionable advice on how to train these skills.
My gut feeling is that in many places we could do a better job at utilizing skills and experiences people can get pretty reliably in the for-profit world, academia, or from other established ‘institutions’.
I’m aware this is happening to some extent already, e.g. GPI trying to interface with academia or 80K’s guide on US policy. I think both are great!
NB this is different from the idea that there are many other career paths that would be high-impact to stay in indefinitely. I think this is also true, but at least if one has a narrow focus on the long-term future I feel less sure if there are ‘easy wins’ left here.
(An underlying disagreement here might be: Is this feasible, or are we just too much bottlenecked by something like what Carrick Flynn has called ‘disentanglement’. Very crudely, I tend to agree that we’re bottlenecked by disentanglement but that there are still some improvements we can make along the above lines. A more substantive underlying question might be how important domain knowledge and domain-specific skills are for being able to do disentanglement, where my impression is that I place an unusually high value on them whereas other EAs are closer to ‘the most important thing is to hang out with other EAs and absorb the epistemic norms, results, and culture’.)
FWIW, without having thought systematically about this, my intuition is to agree. I’d be particularly keen to see:
More explicit models for what trainable skills and experiences are useful for improving the long-term future, or will become so in the future (as new institutions such as CSET are being established).
More actionable advice on how to train these skills.
My gut feeling is that in many places we could do a better job at utilizing skills and experiences people can get pretty reliably in the for-profit world, academia, or from other established ‘institutions’.
I’m aware this is happening to some extent already, e.g. GPI trying to interface with academia or 80K’s guide on US policy. I think both are great!
NB this is different from the idea that there are many other career paths that would be high-impact to stay in indefinitely. I think this is also true, but at least if one has a narrow focus on the long-term future I feel less sure if there are ‘easy wins’ left here.
(An underlying disagreement here might be: Is this feasible, or are we just too much bottlenecked by something like what Carrick Flynn has called ‘disentanglement’. Very crudely, I tend to agree that we’re bottlenecked by disentanglement but that there are still some improvements we can make along the above lines. A more substantive underlying question might be how important domain knowledge and domain-specific skills are for being able to do disentanglement, where my impression is that I place an unusually high value on them whereas other EAs are closer to ‘the most important thing is to hang out with other EAs and absorb the epistemic norms, results, and culture’.)