Thank you Eirik. This certainly bears thinking about. At the moment I am struggling to see whether the counterarguments people raised in that thread (EG: the US federal government is more likely to follow decisions made by smaller state/local governments than overseas ones) go through or not. I ought to research this more before making my next career decision in a few months’ time!
When RyanCarey raised the issue of AI safety in that thread (and how influential smaller states would be regarding AI policy), I was interested to see Jakob respond:
’You’re right that if your main concern is linked to specific, urgent causes, you may prefer more direct routes to impact in the countries that matter most’
This sounds like me— at the moment (at least certain aspects of) longtermism seem pretty persuasive to me, as do the arguments that Ord and co. make regarding the probability of AGI happening within the next century.
Of course, it could be that I am failing to consider certain important points about Australia’s potential influence on AI development/safety.
John S
I suppose the trouble with tests in the context of the public service is that getting a good score on them is necessary to be hired. Further, I am skeptical that training can improve one’s skills on tasks like spatial rotation (as evidence for this, IQ scores are pretty stable across a person’s lifespan). I’m leaning towards agreeing with what Scott Alexander says in the article I linked here— he does a good job of humorously laying out what seems to be a common response to people claiming that they’re not as good at or interested in maths (and why he thinks this response misses the mark in his own case).
But even if I could scrape by, I have the following worry. To what extent is general policy work actually improved by areas which are to my comparative advantage? Yes, the point about precise writing is a good one. But to the extent that my understanding of ethics is better than the average person’s (which I would say is at least plausible of EAs in general), I’m not sure public service jobs present many opportunities to make use of that understanding. My general impression of the public service is that either you’re given quite specific tasks to perform (I doubt I would be exceptional at said tasks relative to other ambitious young public servants), or perhaps at higher levels you’re given some quite general end and then propose efficient means of achieving that end. In the second case, it seems like being good at economics and so on (which I am not) would be great.
I am more optimistic about some sort of political role, because intuitively, political parties spend more time putting forward ethical arguments than the public service. But I have another worry about politics— suppose you end up in one of the (perhaps uncommon) possible worlds where you gain some measure of political influence. Isn’t a large part of contemporary politics just improving the efficiency of basic services? If so, if you end up taking the place of someone who knew a lot about economics (suppose you got there by being charismatic, a good public speaker and so on), couldn’t this result in things being less efficient? Or is it your impression that politicians can pretty safely pass economic policy on to the experts, and spend most of their time putting forward ethical arguments and so on?
Thanks again for your responses!
Thanks for the response, Gavin. Interesting points. I sort of wonder though, what other impactful fields are there besides philosophy for people with IQ scores heavily polarized towards verbal reasoning? I use the term philosophy really broadly— it could be theoretical research in other disciplines. For instance, some people on LessWrong think that theoretical issues involving both psychology and philosophy could be really impactful, EG: Akrasia. However the kind of theoretical work in public policy/international relations and so on either seems related to philosophy of (social) science, political philosophy, and so on. On the empirical side, isn’t it fair to say that the way individuals and states actually behave would be best tackled by someone whose comparative advantage lay in areas such as economic and statistical analysis? I’m finding it difficult to imagine how someone who was verbally skewed could be especially good at the usual scientific description/prediction (wouldn’t doing this well involve either a lot of economic a priori stuff, or collecting huge amounts of data?)
Just a note about the public service in Australia, it seems like they may optimizing pretty hard to recruit people with quantitative ability (this is just based on some cursory research of mine, so don’t give my testimony too much weight). For example, when I took tests for Australian Public Service agencies, they emphasized the spatial rotation/arithmetic kind of questions. I’m mediocre at these, but score really high on the verbal measures. Anyway, based on such scores, I would end up working for some second tier agency (if that) after undergrad. I could go to law school of course, but I don’t know whether the kind of policy work that (traditional, not the new ‘law and economics’ stuff) lawyers do is likely to be more impactful than the sort that ethicists/political philosophers do.
The other thing which puts me (and probably lots of other ‘philosophy’ types) off the public service is, I don’t know how patient I could be performing mundane tasks for years without good opportunities to distinguish myself.
Also, thank you for the links, I will check them out later! I will give your points regarding the value of political/policy positions in smaller governments some thought. My initial (perhaps misguided) impression is that in areas like AI safety, countries like the US and China may not pay much attention to what Australian politicians say. But if an Australian helps the EA/LessWrong communities (or others) solve some sort of philosophical problem (even in a small way), the downstream effects of that might have a sizable effect on those countries.
How important are quantitative abilities and your country of citizenship for policy careers?
Thanks for such a detailed post, Jordan!
One thing that I wonder about China studies in general is: to what extent do existing language skills (or being really young) contribute to one’s comparative advantage?
For instance, consider a young person who was raised English/Chinese bilingual (presumably there are lots of people fitting this description who are interested in China studies, and this number is rapidly increasing) against say, a person in their late twenties or early thirties who has just studied politics/history/philosophy or whatever. Would you expect the former person to be far better suited to China studies overall?
Oh, just one other thing that I found interesting about your post: the article you linked (on the words ‘unsure sign’) takes some pretty pessimistic metaphilosophical positions. EG: ‘experimental philosophers have the right idea, because at least they’re not relying on intuitions’ (or words to that effect). On a related note, despite loving some of the content that comes out of LessWrong folks, I think I am more optimistic about traditional philosophy than they are. The impression I got from studying metaethics is that intuitions are indispensable when considering moral claims, for instance. I don’t think that evolutionary debunking arguments undermine (at least all of) those intuitions either. However, I will keep an open mind!
Anyway, the point of the above is: I wonder how much these questions regarding career advice depend on certain metaphilosophical views, like how optimistic one is about mainstream research in ethics?
(Though funnily enough, the authors of the 80K article aren’t such pessimists— EG: MacAskill has plenty of ethics papers which feature the method of reflective equilibrium).