This seems to be a well thought out article though not the kind of thing I usually read . (I’m the type of person who can sort of read some mid-level academic literature (not quantum field theory or number theory, but not ‘american studies’ either—more like ‘complexity theory’ (though some of that is basically at the ‘high end’ of math) but i can’t even type a resume , tax return , or fill out a college application without help.
I am looking for a job but don’t know if this article will help me. (My #1 job qualification I would list as ‘unemployable’. I am sort of planning to apply for a job I saw listed on 80,000 hours but instead of trying to put together a resume I am writing comments on articles like this one. I’d have to link to some ‘google docs’ i have written to include in my resume, but am too lazy or stupid to know how to do it. These are on foundations of physics, alternative economic systems, etc. ---written for essay contests and grant proposals, but were rejected due to poor formatting and missed deadlines.)
I see the options listed are government, advocacy, coordination, technical skills , and consultancy. Only thing i could possibly do is ‘technical skills’ (except my technical skills, if I have any, are not in the mainstream—the mainstream is ‘deep learning’ and other very technical approaches to ‘multiobjective optimization’ (algorithms)).
I guess i could call my technical work ‘consultancy’. (I’ll tell people what to use their ‘deep learning’ algorithm to model—though i can’t write the code.)
I mostly grew up in a government town (half the people worked for the government) so I’m allergic to that kind of beurocratic organization. I deal as little with the government as i can (and most of that is with either US mailperson and the local police, who i just say hello to. I did vote in 2016--for cannabis legalization and green party (my area was 85% democratic so i voted just to keep GP on the ballot—i didn’t like the candidate, though i support GP principles—but i think GP helped Trump get elected).
I’ve participated in some ‘environmental’ and ‘social justice’ advocacy (activism—occassionaly for (low) pay ) --its like being a door to door salesperson and not my style or preference.
I’ve helped ‘coordinate’ some projects in the past (e.g. help put out little magazines (some online) on local environmental and social justice issues (though both of these have global aspects) but too often this is like crowd control so you are a bouncer. And my superiors were also bouncers who disciplined me so i dropped out. (As they said, while our project has a specific mission (usually involving science, ecology, and justice) since there was no way the people involved could agree on any specifics of what to do, they just decided we are not going to discuss that and simply let everyone do want they want and put it together into a product.
Since I was an exception, I was the only one who could not do what they wanted—i had to do what i was told to do, which included promoting the project i was in
Consultancy has similar issues—consultants are brought in to advise you not to worry about the content of your product—just explain how to get the product out from lab to market. (This can be seen in current legal cases involving the US ‘opiate epidemic’. Consultants helped get the product to market, and are long gone—moved onto another consultancy. Others have to deal with the consequenceso of that product. Don’t sweat the small stuff, or details.
Technical research is more difficult to judge—some is highly redundant, some very speculative . (I’ve known people who do field biology cataloging changes in species numbers over time—i’ve done some of that myself. This is often used to make the case that human induced climate change is an issue. My view is to an extent this is already known, so its almost like going to a battlefield, counting casualties, and then using this to say war is a problem.
(another possible technical problem is the question ‘is climate change more complex than global poverty?’ While the answer given above (yes) is reasonable, in a way its like asking if a human, or a society is more complex than a bacteria. Are voting patterns or economic time series (eg the stock market, or income distribution and social mobility ) more complex than time series for global temperature data or ones for biodiversity over millenia? Often the statistical signatures seem similar from what I’ve read.
I’d also say for a flip answer they are the same problem, and modeled by basically the same equations (lorentz equations, Lotka-Volterra , Navier Stokes....) . Turbulence everywhere; at the edge of chaos.
notes .
(I sort of dislike the term ‘high impact career’ ---- i view my life as my career even if i’m unemployed as I am—and ‘high impact’ sounds like being a ‘rock star’, major politician, or major scientist—i just want a low profile ‘niche career’. (I also play ‘non-commercial’, ‘niche’ music—it will never make it on the radio or charts, but can bring in a little money, and some such ‘niche music’ eventually turns out to be highly influential or impactful. The musicians who do get on the radio have often studied niche music; most silicon valley billionaires have not studied condensed matter physics, but those often unknown people indirectly had high impacts since they made silicon valley possible. you don’t have to be a star to have some impact. a little asteroid might wipe out the earth. ) Since my background is partly in ecology, in that ‘fairly complex’ field while there are some plants and animals that are seen as ‘high impact’ or important (elephants, lions, polar bears, redwood trees...) there are many often unnoticed species which ecologically are just as important. )
The 4 things that struck me were
1) the essential point that there is a tradeoff between time/energy/effort /resources spent searching for the optimal ‘high impact’ career versus actually doing the work in a career.
This is similar to tradeoffs between searching for your ‘perfect soulmate’ versus deciding that the person you are with is ‘good enough’ or the best you can hope for (even if it wasn’t the ‘match made in heaven’ you expected because you thought you deserved it).
Economist Herbert Simon called this ‘satisficing’
This is also basically what EA is about—for example how much time do you devote to figuring out what causes or charities are worth supporting or donating to, versus just giving a donation so they can do the work. (One can easily envision a situation in which all donations are spent for research on figuring out what causes are worth donating to.)
Satisficing is a term I learned from a family member with a quite different view and approach to life than me—she learned it in an MBA program, which was paid for by her employer.
One of H Simon’s last papers was on altruism. (Science, 1990 ‘a mechanism for social selection and succesful altruism’) --economists and theoretical biologists—my area—were basically working on same ideas though without much contact.
Since I was in the sciences and have always basically been an ‘environmentalist’ I didn’t get along well with my relative who taught me that term. Her employer (a large company) was involved in some very environmentally destructive activities, and with others i protested against them. I also didn’t have much respect for things like MBA or law degrees. I view those as 50% a mixture of social control theory and rhetoric—itself a form of social control, via hypnotization. (of course science is also somewhat like that).
I became an environmentalist basically because i couldn’t compete in sports like normal boys , and was bullied, so i decided I to hang out by myself in the woods and allied my self with that ‘tribe’ and hence was sort of against sports and many businesses including the one my relative works for. I was in protests against construction of and using taxpayer funds to pay for new sports stadiums in my area (baseball, football, soccer) because some were built on what had been fairly pristine forests and ecosystems, and also because this area has alot of fairly extreme poverty (for USA) so there are continual drives to collect winter coats and school supplies for schoolkids, food donations and other support for seniors and disabled and other needy people, while the taxpayer subsidized sports stadiums make sports players and owners millionaires and billionaires. One of these multimillionaire sports team owners also cut alot of old trees down on National Park service land because they were obstructing his view. He got a 500$ fine.
This seems to be a well thought out article though not the kind of thing I usually read . (I’m the type of person who can sort of read some mid-level academic literature (not quantum field theory or number theory, but not ‘american studies’ either—more like ‘complexity theory’ (though some of that is basically at the ‘high end’ of math) but i can’t even type a resume , tax return , or fill out a college application without help.
I am looking for a job but don’t know if this article will help me. (My #1 job qualification I would list as ‘unemployable’. I am sort of planning to apply for a job I saw listed on 80,000 hours but instead of trying to put together a resume I am writing comments on articles like this one. I’d have to link to some ‘google docs’ i have written to include in my resume, but am too lazy or stupid to know how to do it. These are on foundations of physics, alternative economic systems, etc. ---written for essay contests and grant proposals, but were rejected due to poor formatting and missed deadlines.)
I see the options listed are government, advocacy, coordination, technical skills , and consultancy. Only thing i could possibly do is ‘technical skills’ (except my technical skills, if I have any, are not in the mainstream—the mainstream is ‘deep learning’ and other very technical approaches to ‘multiobjective optimization’ (algorithms)).
I guess i could call my technical work ‘consultancy’. (I’ll tell people what to use their ‘deep learning’ algorithm to model—though i can’t write the code.)
I mostly grew up in a government town (half the people worked for the government) so I’m allergic to that kind of beurocratic organization. I deal as little with the government as i can (and most of that is with either US mailperson and the local police, who i just say hello to. I did vote in 2016--for cannabis legalization and green party (my area was 85% democratic so i voted just to keep GP on the ballot—i didn’t like the candidate, though i support GP principles—but i think GP helped Trump get elected).
I’ve participated in some ‘environmental’ and ‘social justice’ advocacy (activism—occassionaly for (low) pay ) --its like being a door to door salesperson and not my style or preference.
I’ve helped ‘coordinate’ some projects in the past (e.g. help put out little magazines (some online) on local environmental and social justice issues (though both of these have global aspects) but too often this is like crowd control so you are a bouncer. And my superiors were also bouncers who disciplined me so i dropped out. (As they said, while our project has a specific mission (usually involving science, ecology, and justice) since there was no way the people involved could agree on any specifics of what to do, they just decided we are not going to discuss that and simply let everyone do want they want and put it together into a product.
Since I was an exception, I was the only one who could not do what they wanted—i had to do what i was told to do, which included promoting the project i was in
Consultancy has similar issues—consultants are brought in to advise you not to worry about the content of your product—just explain how to get the product out from lab to market. (This can be seen in current legal cases involving the US ‘opiate epidemic’. Consultants helped get the product to market, and are long gone—moved onto another consultancy. Others have to deal with the consequenceso of that product. Don’t sweat the small stuff, or details.
Technical research is more difficult to judge—some is highly redundant, some very speculative . (I’ve known people who do field biology cataloging changes in species numbers over time—i’ve done some of that myself. This is often used to make the case that human induced climate change is an issue. My view is to an extent this is already known, so its almost like going to a battlefield, counting casualties, and then using this to say war is a problem.
(another possible technical problem is the question ‘is climate change more complex than global poverty?’ While the answer given above (yes) is reasonable, in a way its like asking if a human, or a society is more complex than a bacteria. Are voting patterns or economic time series (eg the stock market, or income distribution and social mobility ) more complex than time series for global temperature data or ones for biodiversity over millenia? Often the statistical signatures seem similar from what I’ve read.
I’d also say for a flip answer they are the same problem, and modeled by basically the same equations (lorentz equations, Lotka-Volterra , Navier Stokes....) . Turbulence everywhere; at the edge of chaos.
notes .
(I sort of dislike the term ‘high impact career’ ---- i view my life as my career even if i’m unemployed as I am—and ‘high impact’ sounds like being a ‘rock star’, major politician, or major scientist—i just want a low profile ‘niche career’. (I also play ‘non-commercial’, ‘niche’ music—it will never make it on the radio or charts, but can bring in a little money, and some such ‘niche music’ eventually turns out to be highly influential or impactful. The musicians who do get on the radio have often studied niche music; most silicon valley billionaires have not studied condensed matter physics, but those often unknown people indirectly had high impacts since they made silicon valley possible. you don’t have to be a star to have some impact. a little asteroid might wipe out the earth. ) Since my background is partly in ecology, in that ‘fairly complex’ field while there are some plants and animals that are seen as ‘high impact’ or important (elephants, lions, polar bears, redwood trees...) there are many often unnoticed species which ecologically are just as important. )
The 4 things that struck me were
1) the essential point that there is a tradeoff between time/energy/effort /resources spent searching for the optimal ‘high impact’ career versus actually doing the work in a career.
This is similar to tradeoffs between searching for your ‘perfect soulmate’ versus deciding that the person you are with is ‘good enough’ or the best you can hope for (even if it wasn’t the ‘match made in heaven’ you expected because you thought you deserved it).
Economist Herbert Simon called this ‘satisficing’
This is also basically what EA is about—for example how much time do you devote to figuring out what causes or charities are worth supporting or donating to, versus just giving a donation so they can do the work. (One can easily envision a situation in which all donations are spent for research on figuring out what causes are worth donating to.)
Satisficing is a term I learned from a family member with a quite different view and approach to life than me—she learned it in an MBA program, which was paid for by her employer.
One of H Simon’s last papers was on altruism. (Science, 1990 ‘a mechanism for social selection and succesful altruism’) --economists and theoretical biologists—my area—were basically working on same ideas though without much contact.
Since I was in the sciences and have always basically been an ‘environmentalist’ I didn’t get along well with my relative who taught me that term. Her employer (a large company) was involved in some very environmentally destructive activities, and with others i protested against them. I also didn’t have much respect for things like MBA or law degrees. I view those as 50% a mixture of social control theory and rhetoric—itself a form of social control, via hypnotization. (of course science is also somewhat like that).
I became an environmentalist basically because i couldn’t compete in sports like normal boys , and was bullied, so i decided I to hang out by myself in the woods and allied my self with that ‘tribe’ and hence was sort of against sports and many businesses including the one my relative works for. I was in protests against construction of and using taxpayer funds to pay for new sports stadiums in my area (baseball, football, soccer) because some were built on what had been fairly pristine forests and ecosystems, and also because this area has alot of fairly extreme poverty (for USA) so there are continual drives to collect winter coats and school supplies for schoolkids, food donations and other support for seniors and disabled and other needy people, while the taxpayer subsidized sports stadiums make sports players and owners millionaires and billionaires. One of these multimillionaire sports team owners also cut alot of old trees down on National Park service land because they were obstructing his view. He got a 500$ fine.