A very small fraction of MDs are admitted to joint MD-PhDs. [...] in many other degrees a similar fraction of students would be publishing papers with supervisors. And the PhD that a medic does will not necessarily be as relevant as those of a computer scientist. <
It being a small fraction doesn’t make it less viable for an EA approach to studying med school. Every EA approach to uni will incorporate some tight admission rate..
It might not be relevant for AI safety but it will be super relevant for e. g. neartermist EAs or EAs that don’t rank AI risk as high and want to focus on biorisk.
I believe you’re overthinking it. From a zoomed out view, medical classes are approximately useless, and this talk of a specialised class becoming useful by being “embedded in a translational framework” is basically waffle.<
We do not have ‘medical classes’. We have classes on systems of the body: foundational classes (biochemistry, molecular biology, physics, physiology)
and classes that incorporate practical info, where you would argue they’re approximately useless such as pharmacology. I disagree that they are entirely useless as it teaches you on a daily basis how the fancy science translates to practice, a skill that I will continue to argue is highly important (and at the core of any problem solving inside and beyond academia) and a skill that a pure fundamental science degree is ‘approximately useless’ for.
funding
Fair points, as I said, I reserve my judgements here for now..
It being a small fraction doesn’t make it less viable for an EA approach to studying med school. Every EA approach to uni will incorporate some tight admission rate.. It might not be relevant for AI safety but it will be super relevant for e. g. neartermist EAs or EAs that don’t rank AI risk as high and want to focus on biorisk.
We do not have ‘medical classes’. We have classes on systems of the body: foundational classes (biochemistry, molecular biology, physics, physiology) and classes that incorporate practical info, where you would argue they’re approximately useless such as pharmacology. I disagree that they are entirely useless as it teaches you on a daily basis how the fancy science translates to practice, a skill that I will continue to argue is highly important (and at the core of any problem solving inside and beyond academia) and a skill that a pure fundamental science degree is ‘approximately useless’ for.
Fair points, as I said, I reserve my judgements here for now..