I’m an academic economist doing global priorities research. I work full time at Univ. of Texas Austin and am an affiliate of the Global Priorities Institute at Oxford. I work on macro-, welfare, and population economics.
Kevin Kuruc
Karma: 545
Hi Linda! I’m excited to see experienced people bringing hard earned career capital (especially in underrepresented fields) here.
This is a bit of an obvious answer, but my sense is that a ton of people in the community and at the orgs you’re hoping to reach read this forum. If you write something up that looks more like a sales pitch than a question-style post, I’d guess that be the easiest place to start. There is even a ‘consultancy’ tag, and I saw a recent call here for more EA-consultancies that you could piggy back on.
Good luck!
Writing about my job: Economics Professor
Thanks! Makes sense.
Hi Stijn! Thanks for writing this—I completely agree that getting population ethics on surer footing is an important issue for the EA community. And I agree with your diagnosis that it’s super difficult.
I’m wondering if there is a similar dominance argument you could apply to John Broome’s argument against the “Intuition of Neutrality”. Basically, imagine we’re in some World A, where Worlds B & C are available and they only differ in that 1 extra person exists with utility within this range of indifference (“neutrality” in Broome’s words) in both worlds, however in World C her utility is higher than in B. Standing at the vantage point of A, we’re indifferent between B and C (since her utility doesn’t count in either); but C is dominated by B in that this new person has a better life and no one is affected. Very curious if layering the ‘range of indifference’ with a dominance criteria can be shown to always escape conclusions like the one above where C>B when compared to one another, but C~B when compared from A.
Apologies if that wasn’t clear! And perhaps your dynamic consistency problem is analogous… I just didn’t see it as immediately obvious and haven’t spent enough time thinking through the details. Thanks again for writing such a detailed post on this!
Wow, really well done! Thanks for doing great work :)
Thank you for taking the time—and having the courage—to write this. I appreciate learning about others’ experiences from personal accounts.
Hi George,
I haven’t yet dug into the details, but I am very much looking forward to doing so. Thanks for doing great work and sharing it here!
Hi! I agree with basically everything written here, in particular about their lives probably not being worth living. My sense is that this depends less on differences in intensity of experiences across species, which makes it a useful starting point for my thinking. I admittedly know less about on-the-ground conditions than activists in this area, but if their lives are void of good experiences, and include at least some subjectively bad ones, its hard to come up with a rationale for how they could have worthwhile lives.
So, conditional on focusing on near-term problems, I think there is a very good case for prioritizing factory farming (and many EAs do!). I’m less certain about the longtermist point you make. If factory farming phases out eventually without EA effort (which seems likely to me), then your efforts aren’t counterfactually ending an indefinite future of factory farming, just speeding this transition up. Preventing extinction or totalitarian lock-in really would create a counterfactual stream of goodness that’s (approximately) indefinite. Though this also assumes the future is likely to be a stream of goodness, rather than badness; here’s a related discussion on this point you might find useful.
Hi Madhav,
That feeling has never completely left me—I still have varied interests and share your fear that I’m not digging into any single topic deep enough. The thing I’ve learned is that even if you pick something that feels narrow at the time (economics, for me) there are infinitely many interesting subtopics within that field to keep you interested, excited, and learning. Maybe that helps take some fear out of difficult-to-reverse decisions—like fields of study—if you’re worried you may get bored with it. This may not be true for all fields, but there are plenty where it is the case if that’s a concern of yours.
Figuring out the most useful skills to build is beyond my expertise, but you should certainly retain the belief that eventually you can and will build skills to create value! (And of course, check out 80000 hours if you haven’t).