I’m leaning towards the view that “don’t follow your passion” and “try do really high-leverage intellectual work” are both good pieces of advice in isolation, but that they work badly in combination. I suspect that there are very few people doing world-class research who aren’t deeply passionate about it, and also that EA needs world-class research in more fields than it may often seem.
Another related thing that isn’t discussed enough is the immense difficulty of actually doing good research, especially in a pre-paradigmatic field. I’ve personally struggled to transition from engineer mindset, where you’re just trying to build a thing that works (and you’ll know when it does), to scientist mindset, where you need to understand the complex ways in which many different variables affect your results.
This isn’t to say that only geniuses make important advances, though—hard work and persistence go a long way. As a corollary, if you’re in a field where hard work doesn’t feel like work, then you have a huge advantage. And it’s also good for building a healthy EA community if even people who don’t manage to have a big impact are still excited about their careers. So that’s why I personally place a fairly high emphasis on passion when giving career advice (unless I’m talking to someone with exceptional focus and determination).
Then there’s the question of how many fields it’s actually important to have good research in. Broadly speaking, my perspective is: we care about the future; the future is going to be influenced by a lot of components; and so it’s important to understand as many of those components as we can. Do we need longtermist sociologists? Hell yes! Then we can better understand how value drift might happen, and what to do about it. Longtermist historians to figure out how power structures will work, longtermist artists to inspire people—as many as we can get. Longtermist physicists—Anders can’t figure out how to colonise the galaxy by himself.
If you’re excited about something that poses a more concrete existential risk, then I’d still advise that as a priority. But my guess is that there’s also a lot of low-hanging fruit for would-be futurists in other disciplines.
I’m leaning towards the view that “don’t follow your passion” and “try do really high-leverage intellectual work” are both good pieces of advice in isolation, but that they work badly in combination. I suspect that there are very few people doing world-class research who aren’t deeply passionate about it, and also that EA needs world-class research in more fields than it may often seem.
Another related thing that isn’t discussed enough is the immense difficulty of actually doing good research, especially in a pre-paradigmatic field. I’ve personally struggled to transition from engineer mindset, where you’re just trying to build a thing that works (and you’ll know when it does), to scientist mindset, where you need to understand the complex ways in which many different variables affect your results.
This isn’t to say that only geniuses make important advances, though—hard work and persistence go a long way. As a corollary, if you’re in a field where hard work doesn’t feel like work, then you have a huge advantage. And it’s also good for building a healthy EA community if even people who don’t manage to have a big impact are still excited about their careers. So that’s why I personally place a fairly high emphasis on passion when giving career advice (unless I’m talking to someone with exceptional focus and determination).
Then there’s the question of how many fields it’s actually important to have good research in. Broadly speaking, my perspective is: we care about the future; the future is going to be influenced by a lot of components; and so it’s important to understand as many of those components as we can. Do we need longtermist sociologists? Hell yes! Then we can better understand how value drift might happen, and what to do about it. Longtermist historians to figure out how power structures will work, longtermist artists to inspire people—as many as we can get. Longtermist physicists—Anders can’t figure out how to colonise the galaxy by himself.
If you’re excited about something that poses a more concrete existential risk, then I’d still advise that as a priority. But my guess is that there’s also a lot of low-hanging fruit for would-be futurists in other disciplines.