Computer science student at UCL. Previously finance lead at CEA, Nov 2019 - Aug 2021.
Ben
Karma: 1,067
Have you tried applying for any roles in clean energy? It’s an absolutely booming sector, especially if Biden gets the US to rejoin and more things start happening in the US.
Sounds interesting! I’d say it’s worth doing the easy and reversible things first (e.g. trying out stuff within your company), and maybe put in a few applications to jobs like these. You could study international development, but you might get some job offers without needing the masters course. You can always apply to some masters’ courses anyway and see what happens.
They seem like fairly different job offers—are there any other things you might prefer to do? This should depend on how much runway you have and how much income you think you need, but of those two roles it sounds like you’re more interested in the health care one (“I’m just not passionate about being in a consumerism industry”) and you might learn a lot there. Also if after two years you get bored, then you could always move on, and your role might be quite different if they go through an IPO.
My rough guess is that option 2 would be more fun and since a lot of these areas have quite a lot of funding, maybe it’d be more your comparative advantage. You mention general management and operations, but I wonder if you have any health/lab-specific knowledge that could be used to work in these areas. I guess Covid has changed this a bit but my guess is that pandemic preparedness, especially in the developing world, is still terribly neglected.
Yep—Lucius Caviola and Stefan Schubert, and also Joshua Greene at Harvard. Lucius and Stefan have a bunch of their videos on YouTube. Also have you considered applying to GPI?
I would say don’t get an MBA unless you are really really sure, as they are mega-expensive and I think marketed very broadly to people who often don’t benefit from them
Hey Jeremy! Myself and Joan Gass at CEA, and Markus Anderljung at FHI, all use skills like the ones you mention above, from our consulting backgrounds, at non-profits.
I sometimes look at this filter on the 80K job board and one example of a role you might like is this one. I also think that working in government is often a good thing to do, and so maybe there could be some US trade/aid organisations which you might find interesting, and also this talk. If you think that consulting means you can boost the productivity of companies and lead to economic growth overall, then that could be interesting.
It’s great that you’ve been so persistent! It seems like you’re fairly set on politics—what is it that motivates you to work on that, and are there any other routes to do something similar?
On a) I think it depends on how well suited you are to the role and on b) Have you tried applying for roles in emerging technologies or security? This could be a cheap test to see if you might like working there, and whether you’d actually need to do further study.
R&D is a public good, and so we’d expect it to be systemically underfunded by the private sector and provided in some part at least by governments. Some economists, such as Mariana Mazzucato argue that government plays a key role in both funding R&D and in applying it for public benefit. Lant Pritchett argues that development comes through interlocking transformations, including the build-up of state capability.
But in your comments below, and from having read through your blog, it seems like you’re not such a fan of government or even alliances between the public and private sectors.
A root-cause analysis on most human suffering, if it went deep enough, would blame government and cultures that don’t foster science, invention, industry, and business. It seems that the most high-leverage long-term plan to reduce human suffering would be to spread global rationality and capitalism.
Do you think governments have a role to play in improving human progress? And if not, why not?
By the way EA Funds now includes the Founders Pledge climate fund which I think is a bit more straightforward than the animal welfare argument
In my view yes, for the reasons Ben Todd gives below. I also did some brief back of the envelope calculations using Danny’s Bressler’s mortality cost of carbon here. This is also something Will MacAskill has been talking about a lot more recently, and he talks about the long-term importance of climate change here. And also as Ben Todd and Max say below—I also agree that it’s possible there’s longtermist work, e.g. on GCBRs and maybe AI, that has a higher expected impact. But I think climate change is a fairly straightforward longtermist bet. We’ve recently added the Founders Pledge climate fund to EA Funds here.
I’ve been learning to code with Python and I did my first tiny bit of machine learning—I figured out how to do a polynomial regression to look at global average sea surface temperatures!
What jobs are you thinking about? You could always post some of your thoughts in a forum post and people might be keen offer suggestions.
Oops meant to add that—it’s now in the first paragraph!
Paris-compliant offsets—a high leverage climate intervention?
I personally don’t find the ITN framework useful and agree with most of John Halstead’s criticism of the framework here. Cost-effectiveness seems better if you want to make something numerical, within a particular cause area.
In fact, for me, I think both cost-effectiveness and ITN as intellectual frameworks fall down because they mask what I see as a fundamentally philosophical set of questions, if you’re trying to do something like compare mental health with health interventions with animal welfare with more longtermist interventions.
If there’s an underlying question: how does one prioritise causes? From my own perspective, I just gravitated towards a more longtermist cause prioritisation over time as I found the arguments quite convincing, but I agree that many other areas are extremely worthwhile.
Different people in the community will have different views, but my own take is that the capitalism and markets can be great for growth and improving productive capacity but you want to make sure that the benefits are spread throughout society (see the book Why Nations Fail).
I’m sorry to hear that you’re feeling overwhelmed by things. I’ve felt the same way at time. It’s important to look after yourself, take time off, and connect with other people. For me, I love watching the Simpsons, going for runs with my friends, and drinking coffee!
My own take on this is that the world is big and messy, and there are lot of bad things we each as individuals have to accept we can’t control. But if you can find a niche doing something which hits the sweet spot of being both enjoyable and improving the world, then you can have a pretty good time!
I suspect you might be able to find lots of ways to use AI to make things better—I’ve seen some great work in improving agricultural production using machine learning which seems pretty good. And I’m sure there are lots of businesses and charities that would be interested in someone with your skillset.