I agree with you that practising medicine is not very impactful, and that community building in medical schools in some countries (e.g. Australia/DE) is useful. However, I think you’re way overoptimistic about the value of a medical degree. Since that’s our disagreement, that’ll be the focus of my comment. Most of it will be line-by-line reactions to your arguments, and then I sum up a bit, and comment on outreach at the end.
Line-by-line comments
Impact of EAs after med school is more robust to EA meta risks (e.g. cause X existing, EA running out of funding,...) than when specializing earlier during university on cause areas (80%)
Specialising into EA is very non-robust to new cause areas, because it is a severe narrowing that happens early. And how many more billions do EAs have to make before you stop worrying about it running out of funding?
Is becoming a doctor a high impact career path? No, I personally don’t think so
I’m not sure it’s a matter of personal opinion. Greg has convincingly argued the opposite.
In contrast to specific knowledge of pathologies, the fundamental knowledge treated in med school of natural sciences, biological sciences but also sociology/psychology will likely be highly relevant for all of the above cause areas.
A medical degree is about 1⁄4 as dense in fundamental science as a science degree, because it only makes up about half of the non-clinical years, which in turn make up only about half of the program.
Furthermore, it is possibly taught with better signal-to-noise ratio than in other degrees as med school has to focus on the parts of the knowledge relevant for translational (i.e. practical big-picture) applications in humans and medical systems. (again, with large variation)
Most of the EA roles need biomedical science, and there’s much less of this in med than in a science degree, because the medical degree is busy teaching you how to be a doctor. What’s not spent on clinical medicine is often spent on memorising things that are not very broadly relevant, like anatomy, pharmacology, maybe medical ethics, medical law. So I would say the signal-to-noise is much worse.
This kind of big-picture thinking and problem-solving is fundamental in medicine and in my experience often overlooked in other hyperspecialized degrees, despite being highly relevant for any impactful EA endeavor.
Basically every degree can arguably give you special translational skills that help you to be a good EA. Math, law, and philosophy degrees “teach you how to think”. Med, engineering, and business “teach you how to solve problems”. But what is actually relevant is usually science and computer science.
a PhD usually takes another 3-5 years after Bachelor/Master studies in other career paths.
This is not the right comparison. A medical degree doesn’t help you to do many of the things that a doctorate does.
in some careers [a medical degree] will offer a notable amount of additional credential boost just by being considered ‘a physician’ or even ‘a doctor’ such as e.g. in public or political work
It’s not actually that useful in my experience, especially outside Australia/DE. People care a lot more about whether you can actually do the job.
All three of these are largely independent of the specific choice of your degree if you are the type of person open to networking and meeting people outside of university classes, so I would say that the choice of the city/town that you will be studying in matters more than the degree itself.
But all things being equal, it’s much better to build a network of people who study higher-impact topics.
‘Standard EA advice’[4] for high school graduates (never go to med school, go do something more directly relevant for known x-risks) is currently based on a lot of assumptions: - we are right about the current setting of priorities and cause areas - we have not missed any further cause X
It definitely doesn’t rely on these assumptions. If we new that the most impactful causes would by currently unknown to us, I think they would be more likely to be far away from med, which is a relatively narrow field. Think of previous crucial considerations: AI risk, anthropics, simulation argument. Not things that are particularly amenable to approach by a medic!
- EA will continue being able to pay all people wishing to do so for work in niche and formerly neglected causes
It doesn’t assume EA will be able to pay all. But EA will be able to fund most who are smart enough to be admitted to a medical degree in Australia or Germany. The contrary was reasonable to worry about a decade ago, but the funding base has grown and diversified so much since then that it’s really not defensible anymore.
- EA will continue being able to raise funds faster than people
Even if we gather a lot more people, we could allocate them to do things like policy that are funding-neutral and very useful, before we allocated people toward med.
indefinitely have quasi-unlimited funding by a handful of software dev philantropists (which assumes:)
The crisis would have to reduce the holdings of half a dozen billionaires by 95% all at once. And even then, there’s things like Founders Pledge, GWWC pledge, and finance people, that also collectively hold billions of dollars of wealth. Not plausible.
While I generally remain cautious while optimistic when eyeing the above, I would propose that a medical degree and the breadth it provides can make your positive impact more robust...
No, once again, medicine is a very narrow degree.
Furthermore, the incredible job safety of a medical degree always offering a comfortable plan B can be a source of confidence when later engaging in high risk high reward career paths such as EA-aligned charity or biotech entrepreneurship.
In my experience, all that was useful was to earn a year’s runway, and funds or . I spent about two years doing that. Then, I had to leave Australia to study. I maintained my medical registration for another year, by travelling back and practising briefly, but around that point it became clear that I was not going back to it. If I could have the time again, I would definitely have tried harder to apply for funds to drop out of my medical degree and study something useful. All up, this would have saved me about six years. Now that we are in an environment of such persistent and robust funding abundance, there is really no excuse!
Summing up on Medical Degrees
First, let’s look at your summary, then I’ll give mine.
So—Is going to medical school generally a high impact choice? What I have been aiming to show is that it is not as clear-cut. If medical school prepares you for a high impact career or not will largely depend on the country, city and specific university that you are doing it in: the extent to which course content is transferable to high impact careers, the workload, the extent to which you will be forced to study irrelevant knowledge (largely specific pathologies), the degree which you can be getting in the end, the opportunities for extracurricular activities, the networking opportunities.
I would say the main advantages of medicine are that you’ll meet some smart students (some network), and a steady income stream. But it’s far worse than the best courses. It’s a narrow course, with less than average transferable knowledge. So it provides you with less optionality than, for example, a science degree. The workload is among the highest, so you will have fewer opportunities for EA-related pursuits. The content usually has less elective material than other courses, so you will be forced to study more irrelevant material. Your network will be suffering from these problems too, so they will be somewhat less likely to pursue high-impact roles than the smartest kids from a science degree.
For folks who are already in a medical degree and are very into longtermist EA, I think it depends to a fair degree how suited you are to working on biosecurity. If you are, then you might want to finish the degree. If you’re not, you might not—you should check that you’re not going to run into visa-related problems, but instead you could pursue a direct-work role, a startup project, or a masters degree. Other caveats include that you often need an undergraduate degree to enter a masters program, and to get a visa for some countries, so this is worth checking into, and existing with a BMedSci is often desirable, if possible.
Thoughts on Medical Student Outreach
I think outreach to medical students is not a bad idea. If you’re going to allocate 3% of EA’s outreach efforts to Harvard, then you probably should allocate at least 0.1% of efforts to medical students in Germany and Australia, or something. The point is that in these countries, there is a nationwide school-leaving grade, and the most competetive courses tend to be medical degrees, so they attract a lot of top talent—the sort of people who would go to Harvard or Oxford if they were born in those respective coutnries. Naturally, many of these folks will be interested in EA ideas, and could benefit from being connected to them. And biorisk is something they can help with (although by my reckoning it seems >30x less important than AI risk), along with perhaps other brain-related topics. But it’s tricky, because you’re naturally pitching these students on something that goes quite against-the-grain for their cohort—leaving their degree, leaving their field, and so on. Much moreso than what we ask of computer scientists, for example. But still, it seems worth a shot.
Great to hear that you agree with most of the post (two out of its three main points), let me focus on the disagreements regarding the impact potential of choosing to go to med school:
As far as I can see, you raise three general points of disagreement. (do let me know if you don’t feel like I represented your points well)
Disagreements based on personal experiences with studying medicine in Australia
Disagreements regarding the value/transferability of knowledge taught in med school for high impact work
Disagreements regarding the relevance of EA meta risks (funding dependencies, cause X, etc.) and whether a medical degree actually makes you resilient against these
Regarding 1) Disagreements based on personal experiences with studying medicine in Australia:
I think some of the negative aspects you describe about med school are very important but might not be general to all medical degrees. I’ll give some personal examples just to show that I disagree that your descriptions are generally accurate, of course you might actually be right in the majority of cases.. I do not have a good intuition if the median medical school internationally is more similar to the one that you describe or to the counterexamples I offer!
You write of highest workloads, few electives, all for a medical degree with no doctorate. (and that networking opportunities suffer from all that) I see how all of this is generally sub-optimal for high impact career paths, such as the research career in AI safety that you’re currently pursuing.
Credentials
This is not the right comparison. A medical degree doesn’t help you to do many of the things that a doctorate does.
In Germany, as an option additional to the medical degree (‘Staatsexamen’) , most medical schools offer a Dr. med. (MD) degree track and some offer an advanced MD/PhD track (e.g. here). Both of these are considered a doctorate and are a very good foundation on which to build a career in research/academia or to go into industry. (given sufficiently good grades on either, with the MD/PhD generally being more valuable)
Electives and workload
15% of my modules are wholly elective, two further semesters offer longitudinal electives. I am sure that a lot of degrees offer way more, but I consider general workload being reasonable to be even more important.
Because, in my experience the workload is actually not that high in some medical schools, such as mine. A lot of my friends/acquaintances studying fundamental/applied sciences degree at elite universities such as Oxford or ETH Zurich have much higher workload. This means that the majority of my time is ‘elective’ in that I currently have enough of it to use it for 1) being main organizer and founder at my uni, 2) a research assistant job at a lab and for 3) things such as writing this post (and I am currently actually in the most time-intensive year). I know that this would not possible to this extent in all other courses that I could be doing.
2) value/transferability of knowledge taught in med school
It is hard to say how much of the disagreement here arises from uni to uni differences in course structure and how much is more about theories of value of knowledge.
First, regarding uni to uni differences: Of the 40 modules during my 5 theoretical years, only 9 focus on specific pathologies (and related pharmacology, etc.). A lot of the rest does contain knowledge on pathologies, pharmacology, etc. but always embedded in a general, translational framework which furthers understanding of the human. It might be that this is more focus on transferable knowledge than in the median course.
Re theories of value of knowledge: Since you focus mostly on transferable knowledge for research: From the experience that I gathered so far, academic research requires deep specialization in very specific methods researching very thin slices of reality, all of which with a depth that goes far beyond any course curriculum. This means that learning and special knowledge beyond uni material will always be necessary for academic research. While fundamental science degrees may arguably make this easier (especially the more fundamental the research is), knowledge from a medical degree will rarely make this further work impossible! It would be interesting to know how much harder you’ll have it with a medical degree and thus how big this cost is but right now I am not convinced it is big enough to make me update! (The fact that you did manage to specialize in AI safety at FHI, Oxford with a medical degree is a nice anecdote in this regard that I couldn’t help noticing)
Furthermore, over here there is the option of specializing into research and starting your doctorate as early as 2-3 years into the course, which could arguably make your specialized knowledge & fit for a specific research direction by the end of med school much better than that of someone with a general fundamental science degree. This is again of course something that will vary from uni to uni.
Lastly, when it comes to potential high impact career paths outside of research such as policy, entrepreneurship, (industry?) I suspect that we have a similar general picture:
Some more specific degrees could have arguably been an even better fit in terms of knowledge, but some aspects could yet again be in favor of the medical degree: e.g. translational understanding and firsthand experience of health systems on all levels, trained social skills, credentials of being a doctor (which is might be more of a thing in fields outside academia), job/income security allowing for time for other things etc.
And of course, the last point about income/job security is dependent on:
3), Disagreements regarding the relevance of EA meta risks (funding dependencies, cause X, etc.) and whether a medical degree actually makes you resilient against these:
Funding
You might be right that there’s nothing to worry about in being dependent on EA funding due to historic successes in getting funds and the funding diversity you speak of. However, my own prior is generally quite low when it comes to placing trust in getting funds without problems, even when being ‘smart enough to be admitted to a medical degree’. I’ve got some more to say about this topic but I to some more research/thinking on this specific aspect and then write another post discussing it in a more general context!
Cause X / Resilience
I think you might have changed my mind on this point while I was writing this reply. Here are my thoughts: Regarding the question of how well a medical degree prepares you for cause X:
I agree that we can not assume that a medical school graduate is magically better suited for cause x, however I personally believe that EA right now is too focused on narrow quantifiable causes (due to inherent uncertainty of anything that’s broader) and focused too little on general resilience-building. (Here are my rough thoughts regarding this)
I was going to say here that while potential future high impact resilience building efforts don’t necessarily have to relate to medical fields, a broad degree such as medicine will be more likely to be valuable for them than a narrower one such as a specific fundamental sciences degree. However I think you raised a good point in that some fundamental science degrees such as e.g. physics or biology are actually broader than medicine in important ways and might thus arguably be more valuable/applicable to future high impact resilience building efforts. (at least in my current abstract understanding of the term)
This is something that I would like to think more about and that I will reserve my judgement on for now!
I hope I could give some more perspective as to why we disagree on some points, overall you did cause me to update regarding my views on a medical degree resilience, potentially causing me to update on the value of spending time to apply for unis abroad after all! Let’s see! ;)
PS:
I’m not sure it’s a matter of personal opinion. Greg has convincingly argued the opposite.
A very small fraction of MDs are admitted to joint MD-PhDs. A medical degree is the only one that can come with optional extras—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. Basically, it seems like a way of avoiding an apples-with-apples comparison.
15%-elective is terribly little.
Note that the workload may skyrocket in the clinical years
Regarding (2) transferability: 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.
You understate the case for the usefulness of useful subjects. If I’d studied computer science for undergrad, I could’ve got where I am now 5+ years earlier. Even dropping out of medical school could have accelerated things. In such a scenario, I could’ve been a somewhat more credible applicant for things like top professor positions than is currently the case. (Of course, skill is the main thing, but getting promptly educated, and building a stellar CV at a young age does help, vs studying irrelevant subjects).
Regarding (3) funding
my own prior is generally quite low when it comes to placing trust in getting funds without problems, even when being ‘smart enough to be admitted to a medical degree’.
What kind of evidence would make you update your prior? Many funders say they are willing to fund any person doing excellent longtermist work, and many orgs are continually growing and hiring. To take one extreme example, $50k fellowships are being given out to interested teenagers. It’s a movement that’s >10 years old, with its funding-base growing double-digits per year. If you’re smart enough to get into a German medical degree, and dedicated, then it should be possible to do excellent work...
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..
I agree with you that practising medicine is not very impactful, and that community building in medical schools in some countries (e.g. Australia/DE) is useful. However, I think you’re way overoptimistic about the value of a medical degree. Since that’s our disagreement, that’ll be the focus of my comment. Most of it will be line-by-line reactions to your arguments, and then I sum up a bit, and comment on outreach at the end.
Line-by-line comments
Specialising into EA is very non-robust to new cause areas, because it is a severe narrowing that happens early. And how many more billions do EAs have to make before you stop worrying about it running out of funding?
I’m not sure it’s a matter of personal opinion. Greg has convincingly argued the opposite.
A medical degree is about 1⁄4 as dense in fundamental science as a science degree, because it only makes up about half of the non-clinical years, which in turn make up only about half of the program.
Most of the EA roles need biomedical science, and there’s much less of this in med than in a science degree, because the medical degree is busy teaching you how to be a doctor. What’s not spent on clinical medicine is often spent on memorising things that are not very broadly relevant, like anatomy, pharmacology, maybe medical ethics, medical law. So I would say the signal-to-noise is much worse.
Basically every degree can arguably give you special translational skills that help you to be a good EA. Math, law, and philosophy degrees “teach you how to think”. Med, engineering, and business “teach you how to solve problems”. But what is actually relevant is usually science and computer science.
This is not the right comparison. A medical degree doesn’t help you to do many of the things that a doctorate does.
It’s not actually that useful in my experience, especially outside Australia/DE. People care a lot more about whether you can actually do the job.
But all things being equal, it’s much better to build a network of people who study higher-impact topics.
It definitely doesn’t rely on these assumptions. If we new that the most impactful causes would by currently unknown to us, I think they would be more likely to be far away from med, which is a relatively narrow field. Think of previous crucial considerations: AI risk, anthropics, simulation argument. Not things that are particularly amenable to approach by a medic!
It doesn’t assume EA will be able to pay all. But EA will be able to fund most who are smart enough to be admitted to a medical degree in Australia or Germany. The contrary was reasonable to worry about a decade ago, but the funding base has grown and diversified so much since then that it’s really not defensible anymore.
Even if we gather a lot more people, we could allocate them to do things like policy that are funding-neutral and very useful, before we allocated people toward med.
The crisis would have to reduce the holdings of half a dozen billionaires by 95% all at once. And even then, there’s things like Founders Pledge, GWWC pledge, and finance people, that also collectively hold billions of dollars of wealth. Not plausible.
No, once again, medicine is a very narrow degree.
In my experience, all that was useful was to earn a year’s runway, and funds or . I spent about two years doing that. Then, I had to leave Australia to study. I maintained my medical registration for another year, by travelling back and practising briefly, but around that point it became clear that I was not going back to it. If I could have the time again, I would definitely have tried harder to apply for funds to drop out of my medical degree and study something useful. All up, this would have saved me about six years. Now that we are in an environment of such persistent and robust funding abundance, there is really no excuse!
Summing up on Medical Degrees
First, let’s look at your summary, then I’ll give mine.
I would say the main advantages of medicine are that you’ll meet some smart students (some network), and a steady income stream. But it’s far worse than the best courses. It’s a narrow course, with less than average transferable knowledge. So it provides you with less optionality than, for example, a science degree. The workload is among the highest, so you will have fewer opportunities for EA-related pursuits. The content usually has less elective material than other courses, so you will be forced to study more irrelevant material. Your network will be suffering from these problems too, so they will be somewhat less likely to pursue high-impact roles than the smartest kids from a science degree.
For folks who are already in a medical degree and are very into longtermist EA, I think it depends to a fair degree how suited you are to working on biosecurity. If you are, then you might want to finish the degree. If you’re not, you might not—you should check that you’re not going to run into visa-related problems, but instead you could pursue a direct-work role, a startup project, or a masters degree. Other caveats include that you often need an undergraduate degree to enter a masters program, and to get a visa for some countries, so this is worth checking into, and existing with a BMedSci is often desirable, if possible.
Thoughts on Medical Student Outreach
I think outreach to medical students is not a bad idea. If you’re going to allocate 3% of EA’s outreach efforts to Harvard, then you probably should allocate at least 0.1% of efforts to medical students in Germany and Australia, or something. The point is that in these countries, there is a nationwide school-leaving grade, and the most competetive courses tend to be medical degrees, so they attract a lot of top talent—the sort of people who would go to Harvard or Oxford if they were born in those respective coutnries. Naturally, many of these folks will be interested in EA ideas, and could benefit from being connected to them. And biorisk is something they can help with (although by my reckoning it seems >30x less important than AI risk), along with perhaps other brain-related topics. But it’s tricky, because you’re naturally pitching these students on something that goes quite against-the-grain for their cohort—leaving their degree, leaving their field, and so on. Much moreso than what we ask of computer scientists, for example. But still, it seems worth a shot.
Hi Ryan, thank you for your comment!
Great to hear that you agree with most of the post (two out of its three main points), let me focus on the disagreements regarding the impact potential of choosing to go to med school:
As far as I can see, you raise three general points of disagreement. (do let me know if you don’t feel like I represented your points well)
Disagreements based on personal experiences with studying medicine in Australia
Disagreements regarding the value/transferability of knowledge taught in med school for high impact work
Disagreements regarding the relevance of EA meta risks (funding dependencies, cause X, etc.) and whether a medical degree actually makes you resilient against these
Regarding 1) Disagreements based on personal experiences with studying medicine in Australia:
I think some of the negative aspects you describe about med school are very important but might not be general to all medical degrees. I’ll give some personal examples just to show that I disagree that your descriptions are generally accurate, of course you might actually be right in the majority of cases.. I do not have a good intuition if the median medical school internationally is more similar to the one that you describe or to the counterexamples I offer!
You write of highest workloads, few electives, all for a medical degree with no doctorate. (and that networking opportunities suffer from all that) I see how all of this is generally sub-optimal for high impact career paths, such as the research career in AI safety that you’re currently pursuing.
Credentials
In Germany, as an option additional to the medical degree (‘Staatsexamen’) , most medical schools offer a Dr. med. (MD) degree track and some offer an advanced MD/PhD track (e.g. here). Both of these are considered a doctorate and are a very good foundation on which to build a career in research/academia or to go into industry. (given sufficiently good grades on either, with the MD/PhD generally being more valuable)
Electives and workload
15% of my modules are wholly elective, two further semesters offer longitudinal electives. I am sure that a lot of degrees offer way more, but I consider general workload being reasonable to be even more important.
Because, in my experience the workload is actually not that high in some medical schools, such as mine. A lot of my friends/acquaintances studying fundamental/applied sciences degree at elite universities such as Oxford or ETH Zurich have much higher workload. This means that the majority of my time is ‘elective’ in that I currently have enough of it to use it for 1) being main organizer and founder at my uni, 2) a research assistant job at a lab and for 3) things such as writing this post (and I am currently actually in the most time-intensive year). I know that this would not possible to this extent in all other courses that I could be doing.
2) value/transferability of knowledge taught in med school
It is hard to say how much of the disagreement here arises from uni to uni differences in course structure and how much is more about theories of value of knowledge.
First, regarding uni to uni differences: Of the 40 modules during my 5 theoretical years, only 9 focus on specific pathologies (and related pharmacology, etc.). A lot of the rest does contain knowledge on pathologies, pharmacology, etc. but always embedded in a general, translational framework which furthers understanding of the human. It might be that this is more focus on transferable knowledge than in the median course.
Re theories of value of knowledge: Since you focus mostly on transferable knowledge for research: From the experience that I gathered so far, academic research requires deep specialization in very specific methods researching very thin slices of reality, all of which with a depth that goes far beyond any course curriculum. This means that learning and special knowledge beyond uni material will always be necessary for academic research. While fundamental science degrees may arguably make this easier (especially the more fundamental the research is), knowledge from a medical degree will rarely make this further work impossible! It would be interesting to know how much harder you’ll have it with a medical degree and thus how big this cost is but right now I am not convinced it is big enough to make me update! (The fact that you did manage to specialize in AI safety at FHI, Oxford with a medical degree is a nice anecdote in this regard that I couldn’t help noticing)
Furthermore, over here there is the option of specializing into research and starting your doctorate as early as 2-3 years into the course, which could arguably make your specialized knowledge & fit for a specific research direction by the end of med school much better than that of someone with a general fundamental science degree. This is again of course something that will vary from uni to uni.
Lastly, when it comes to potential high impact career paths outside of research such as policy, entrepreneurship, (industry?) I suspect that we have a similar general picture:
Some more specific degrees could have arguably been an even better fit in terms of knowledge, but some aspects could yet again be in favor of the medical degree: e.g. translational understanding and firsthand experience of health systems on all levels, trained social skills, credentials of being a doctor (which is might be more of a thing in fields outside academia), job/income security allowing for time for other things etc.
And of course, the last point about income/job security is dependent on:
3), Disagreements regarding the relevance of EA meta risks (funding dependencies, cause X, etc.) and whether a medical degree actually makes you resilient against these:
Funding
You might be right that there’s nothing to worry about in being dependent on EA funding due to historic successes in getting funds and the funding diversity you speak of. However, my own prior is generally quite low when it comes to placing trust in getting funds without problems, even when being ‘smart enough to be admitted to a medical degree’. I’ve got some more to say about this topic but I to some more research/thinking on this specific aspect and then write another post discussing it in a more general context!
Cause X / Resilience
I think you might have changed my mind on this point while I was writing this reply. Here are my thoughts:
Regarding the question of how well a medical degree prepares you for cause X:
I agree that we can not assume that a medical school graduate is magically better suited for cause x, however I personally believe that EA right now is too focused on narrow quantifiable causes (due to inherent uncertainty of anything that’s broader) and focused too little on general resilience-building. (Here are my rough thoughts regarding this)
I was going to say here that while potential future high impact resilience building efforts don’t necessarily have to relate to medical fields, a broad degree such as medicine will be more likely to be valuable for them than a narrower one such as a specific fundamental sciences degree.
However I think you raised a good point in that some fundamental science degrees such as e.g. physics or biology are actually broader than medicine in important ways and might thus arguably be more valuable/applicable to future high impact resilience building efforts. (at least in my current abstract understanding of the term)
This is something that I would like to think more about and that I will reserve my judgement on for now!
I hope I could give some more perspective as to why we disagree on some points, overall you did cause me to update regarding my views on a medical degree resilience, potentially causing me to update on the value of spending time to apply for unis abroad after all! Let’s see! ;)
PS:
I agree, I updated the wording on this
Just to rebut a few points there.
On (1) credentials/electives/workload:
A very small fraction of MDs are admitted to joint MD-PhDs. A medical degree is the only one that can come with optional extras—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. Basically, it seems like a way of avoiding an apples-with-apples comparison.
15%-elective is terribly little.
Note that the workload may skyrocket in the clinical years
Regarding (2) transferability: 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.
You understate the case for the usefulness of useful subjects. If I’d studied computer science for undergrad, I could’ve got where I am now 5+ years earlier. Even dropping out of medical school could have accelerated things. In such a scenario, I could’ve been a somewhat more credible applicant for things like top professor positions than is currently the case. (Of course, skill is the main thing, but getting promptly educated, and building a stellar CV at a young age does help, vs studying irrelevant subjects).
Regarding (3) funding
What kind of evidence would make you update your prior? Many funders say they are willing to fund any person doing excellent longtermist work, and many orgs are continually growing and hiring. To take one extreme example, $50k fellowships are being given out to interested teenagers. It’s a movement that’s >10 years old, with its funding-base growing double-digits per year. If you’re smart enough to get into a German medical degree, and dedicated, then it should be possible to do excellent work...
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..