To answer the two questions: For me as a philosopher, I think this is where I can have greatest impact, compared to writing technical stuff on very niche subjects, which might probably not matter much. Think how the majority of the impact that Peter Singer, Will MacAskill, Toby Ord, Richard Chappell, or Bentham’s Bulldog have been a mix of new ideas and public advocacy for them. I could say similar thing about other types of intellectuals like Eliezer Yudkowsky, Nick Bostrom, or Anders Sandberg.
I think polymathy is also where the comparative advantage often lies for a philosopher. Particularly for me, I’m not so good at technical topics that I would greatly excel at a niche thing such as population ethics. I can, however, draw from other fields and learn how particular moral intuitions might be unreliable, for example. And what might feel like a advocating for a relatively small change in moral beliefs (e.g. what we do about insect suffering, or the potential suffering of digital minds) could change future societies greatly.
Yet I don’t disregard specializing into one thing. I’m currently working on my PhD, which a very specialized project.
And I would give very different advice if I was working on AI safety directly. If that were the case, maybe digging deep into a topic to become a world expert or have a breakthrough might be the best way to go.
To answer the two questions: For me as a philosopher, I think this is where I can have greatest impact, compared to writing technical stuff on very niche subjects, which might probably not matter much. Think how the majority of the impact that Peter Singer, Will MacAskill, Toby Ord, Richard Chappell, or Bentham’s Bulldog have been a mix of new ideas and public advocacy for them. I could say similar thing about other types of intellectuals like Eliezer Yudkowsky, Nick Bostrom, or Anders Sandberg.
I think polymathy is also where the comparative advantage often lies for a philosopher. Particularly for me, I’m not so good at technical topics that I would greatly excel at a niche thing such as population ethics. I can, however, draw from other fields and learn how particular moral intuitions might be unreliable, for example. And what might feel like a advocating for a relatively small change in moral beliefs (e.g. what we do about insect suffering, or the potential suffering of digital minds) could change future societies greatly.
Yet I don’t disregard specializing into one thing. I’m currently working on my PhD, which a very specialized project.
And I would give very different advice if I was working on AI safety directly. If that were the case, maybe digging deep into a topic to become a world expert or have a breakthrough might be the best way to go.