weeatquince

• weeatquince 3 Feb 2020 10:04 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Matt_Lerner's comment on: What posts you are plan­ning on writ­ing?

  Hi, is be in­ter­ested and have been think­ing about similar stuff (meet­ing the im­pact of lob­by­ing, etc) from a uk policy per­spec­tive.

  If helpful happy to chat and share thoughts. Feel free to get in touch to: sam [at] appgfu­ture­gen­er­a­tions.com

• weeatquince 29 Jan 2020 13:02 UTC

  5 points

  on: Cot­ton‐Bar­ratt, Daniel & Sand­berg, ‘Defence in Depth Against Hu­man Ex­tinc­tion’

  This is ex­cel­lent. Very well done.

  
  

  It crossed my mind to pon­der on whether much can be said about where differ­ent cat­e­gories* of risk pre­ven­tion are un­der-re­sourced. For ex­am­ple it maybe that the globe spends enough re­sources on pre­vent­ing nat­u­ral risks as we have seen them in the past so un­der­stand them. It maybe that mil­i­tari­sa­tion of states means that we are pre­pared for mal­i­cious risk. It maybe that we un­der-pre­pare for large risks as they have less small scale analogues.

  Not sure how use­ful fol­low­ing that kind of think­ing is but it could po­ten­tially help with pri­ori­ti­sa­tion. Would be in­ter­ested to hear if the au­thors have though through this.

  
  

  *(The au­thors break down risks into differ­ent cat­e­gories: Nat­u­ral Risk /​ Ac­ci­dent Risk /​ Mal­i­cious Risk /​ La­tent Risk /​ Com­mons Risk, and Lev­er­age Risk /​ Cas­cad­ing Risk /​ Large Risk, and ca­pa­bil­ity risk /​ habitat risk /​ ubiquity risk /​ vec­tor risk /​ agency risk).

• weeatquince 22 Jan 2020 18:34 UTC

  7 points

  on: What are words, phrases, or top­ics that you think most EAs don’t know about but should?

  Op­ti­misers curse /​ Re­gres­sion to the mean

  On how try­ing to op­ti­mise can lead you to make mistakes

• weeatquince 22 Jan 2020 18:30 UTC

  7 points

  on: What are words, phrases, or top­ics that you think most EAs don’t know about but should?

  Knigh­tian un­cer­tainty /​ deep uncertainty

  a lack of any quan­tifi­able knowl­edge about some pos­si­ble oc­cur­rence

  This means any situ­a­tion where un­cer­tainty is so high that it is very hard /​ im­pos­si­ble /​ fool­ish to quan­tify the out­comes.

  To un­der­stand this it is use­ful to note the differ­ence be­tween un­cer­tainty (EG 1: The chance of a nu­clear war this cen­tury) and risk (EG 2: the chance of a coin com­ing up heads).

  The pro­cess for mak­ing de­ci­sions that rely on un­cer­tainty may be very differ­ent form the pro­cess for mak­ing de­ci­sion that rely on risk. The op­ti­mal tac­tic for mak­ing good de­ci­sions on situ­a­tions about deep un­cer­tainty may not be to just quan­tify the situ­a­tion.

  
  

  Why this matters

  This could dras­ti­cally change the causes EAs care about and the ap­proaches they take.

  This could al­ter how we judge the value of tak­ing ac­tion that af­fects the fu­ture.

  This could means that “ra­tio­nal­ist”/​LessWrong ap­proach of “shut up and mul­ti­ply” for mak­ing de­ci­sions might not be cor­rect.

  For ex­am­ple this could shift de­ci­sions away from a naive ex­acted value based on out­comes and prob­a­bil­ities and to­wards fa­vor­ing courses of ac­tions that are ro­bust to failure modes, have good feed­back loops, have short chains of af­fects, etc.

  (Or maybe not, I don’t know. I don’t know enough about how to make op­ti­mal de­ci­sions un­der deep un­cer­tainty but I think it is a thing I would like to un­der­stand bet­ter.)

  
  

  See also

  The differ­ence be­tween “risk” and “un­cer­tainty”. “Black swan events”. Etc

• weeatquince 13 Jan 2020 14:04 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: matthew.vandermerwe's comment on: Re­sponse to re­cent crit­i­cisms of EA “longter­mist” thinking

  Sec­tion 9.3 here: https://​​www.nick­bostrom.com/​​ex­is­ten­tial/​​risks.html

  (Dis­claimer: Not my own views/​crit­i­cism. I am just try­ing to steel­man a Face­book post I read. I have not looked into the wider con­text of these views or peo­ple’s cur­rent po­si­tions on these views.)

• weeatquince 13 Jan 2020 9:56 UTC

  24 points

  on: Re­sponse to re­cent crit­i­cisms of EA “longter­mist” thinking

  Hi,

  I down­voted this but I wanted to ex­plain why and hope­fully provide con­struc­tive feed­back. I felt that, hav­ing seen the origi­nal post this is refer­enc­ing, I re­ally do not think this post did a good/​fair job of rep­re­sent­ing (or steel­man­ning) the origi­nal ar­gu­ments raised.

  To try and make this feed­back more use­ful and help the de­bate here are some very quick at­tempts to steel­man some of the origi­nal ar­gu­ments:

  • His­tor­i­cally ar­gu­ments that jus­tify hor­ren­dous ac­tivi­ties have a high fre­quency of be­ing utopia based (ap­peal­ing to pos­si­ble but un­cer­tain fu­ture utopias). The long-ter­mist as­tro­nom­i­cal waste ar­gu­ment has this fea­ture and so we should be wary of it.

  • If an ar­gu­ment leads to some ridicu­lous /​ re­pug­nant con­clu­sions that most peo­ple would ob­ject too then it is worth be­ing wary of that ar­gu­ment. The philoso­phers who de­vel­oped the long-ter­mist as­tro­nom­i­cal waste ar­gu­ment openly use it to pro­mote a range of ab­hor­rent hawk­ish geopoli­ti­cal re­sponses (eg premp­tive nu­clear strikes). We should be wary of fol­low­ing and pro­mot­ing such ar­gu­ments and philoso­phers.

  • There are prob­lems with tak­ing a sim­ple ex­pected value ap­proach to de­ci­sion mak­ing un­der un­cer­tainty. Eg Pas­cal’s mug­ging prob­lems. [For more on this look up ro­bust de­ci­sion mak­ing un­der deep un­cer­tainty or knigh­tian un­cer­tainty]

  • The as­tro­nom­i­cal waste type ar­gu­ments are not ro­bust to a range of differ­ent philo­soph­i­cal and non-util­i­tar­ian eth­i­cal frame­works and (given eth­i­cal un­cer­tainty) this makes them not great arguments

  • Etc

  • The above are not ar­gu­ments against work­ing on x-risks etc (and the origi­nal poster does him­self work on x-risk is­sues) but are against overly rely­ing on, us­ing and pro­mot­ing the as­tro­nom­i­cal waste type ar­gu­ments for long-ter­mism.

• weeatquince 29 Dec 2019 14:16 UTC

  8 points

  on: 8 things I be­lieve about cli­mate change

  Hav­ing looked at your sources I am not sure they jus­tify the con­clu­sions.

  
  

  In par­tic­u­lar:

  • Your sources for point 1 seem to ig­nore the >10% case that the world warms sig­nifi­cantly more than ex­pected (they gen­er­ally look at mor­tal­ity in the busi­ness as usual case).

  • Your sources for point 2 fo­cus on whether cli­mate change is truly ex­is­ten­tial, but do seem to point to a pos­si­bly if it be­ing a global catas­tro­phe. (Point 2 ap­pears to be some­what cru­cial, the other points, es­pe­cially 1, 4, 5, 7 de­pend on this point.)
    
    It seems plau­si­ble from look­ing at your sources that there are tail risks of ex­treme warm­ing that could lead to huge global catas­tro­phe (maybe not quite at your cut-off the 10% chance of 10% mor­tal­ity level but huge).
    
    Eg Halstead:
    ”On cur­rent pledges and promises, we’ll prob­a­bly end up at around 700ppm by 2100 and in­creas­ing well be­yond that.”
    “at 700ppm, … there is an 11% chance of an even­tual >6 de­grees of warm­ing”
    ”at 1120ppm, there is be­tween a 10% and 34% chance of >9 de­grees of warm­ing”
    “Heat stress … seems like it would be a se­ri­ous prob­lem for warm­ing >6 de­grees for large por­tions of the planet … With 11–12 °C warm­ing, such re­gions would spread to en­com­pass the ma­jor­ity of the hu­man pop­u­la­tion as cur­rently dis­tributed”
    ”6 de­grees would dras­ti­cally change the face of the globe, with multi-me­tre sea level rises, mas­sive coastal flood­ing, and the un­in­hab­it­a­bil­ity of the trop­ics.” “10 de­grees … would be ex­tremely bad”
    
    

  Over­all I ex­pect these points 1 and 2 are quite pos­si­bly cor­rect, but, hav­ing looked through your sources and con­cluded that they do not jus­tify the points very well, I would have low epistemic sta­tus in these points.

  
  

  Also on points 4 and 7, I think they are de­pen­dent on what kind of skills and power you have and are us­ing. Eg: If you are long-term fo­cused and have poli­ti­cal in­fluence cli­mate is­sues might be a bet­ter thing to fo­cus on than AI safety risks which is not re­ally on the poli­ti­cal agenda much.

• weeatquince 24 Dec 2019 8:42 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: MichaelStJules's comment on: Where are you donat­ing this year and why – in 2019? Open thread for dis­cus­sion.

  Hi Michael, That all sounds re­ally sen­si­ble and well thought out. Good job :-)

• weeatquince 16 Dec 2019 19:03 UTC

  8 points

  in reply to: MichaelStJules's comment on: Where are you donat­ing this year and why – in 2019? Open thread for dis­cus­sion.

  Hi Michael,

  First year donat­ing is su­per ex­cit­ing!!

  Not an ex­pert but some feed­back that jumps to mind is:

  • Over­all this looks like a great dona­tion plan.

  • Giv­ing to the An­i­mal Welfare Fund or ACE’s top recom­mended char­i­ties seems like a pretty solid sure­fire bet /​ way to out­source dona­tions.

  • I am slightly less cer­tain about donat­ing di­rectly to RP or CE un­less you have a rea­son to think the An­i­mal Welfare Fund is not fund­ing these enough (which does hap­pen), but ei­ther way you are fol­low­ing the dona­tions of the An­i­mal Welfare Fund so there is re­ally not much in it and it is use­ful some­times to donate and see how the orgs are us­ing your money.

  • One ex­tra thing to con­sider is donat­ing to the char­i­ties be­ing cre­ated by Char­ity En­trepreneur­ship, (for ex­am­ple https://​​fo­rum.effec­tivealtru­ism.org/​​posts/​​iMofrSc86iSR7EiAG/​​in­tro­duc­ing-fish-welfare-ini­ti­a­tive-1 ). I cant talk for CE but I think CE be­lieve dona­tions to their new char­i­ties are a bit more ur­gent than dona­tions di­rectly to CE. Maybe one of the fish peo­ple can say if they are look­ing for funds.

  • I en­dorse solv­ing col­lec­tive ac­tion prob­lems that benefit you and other donors. You are prob­a­bly bet­ter placed to eval­u­ate RC For­ward than us non-Cana­di­ans, and if RC For­ward is use­ful to help you donate more then sup­port­ing it with at least some of your dona­tion makes sense.

  Hope that helps,

  Sam

• weeatquince 16 Dec 2019 18:42 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: Denkenberger's comment on: Manag­ing risk in the EA policy space

  Hi, ditto what Khor­ton said. I don’t have a back­ground that has lead me to be able to opine wisely on this.

  My ini­tial in­tu­ition is: I am un­con­vinced by this. From a policy per­spec­tive you make a rea­son­able case that more im­mi­gra­tion to the US could be very good, but un­less you had more cer­tainty about this (more re­search, ev­i­dence, cases stud­ies, etc), I would worry about the cost of ac­tively push­ing out a US vs China mes­sage.

  But I have no ex­per­tise in US poli­tics so I would not put much faith in my judg­ment.

• weeatquince 11 Dec 2019 8:27 UTC

  10 points

  in reply to: utilitarian01's comment on: Where are you donat­ing this year and why – in 2019? Open thread for dis­cus­sion.

  Giv­ing What We Can’s im­pact re­ports (when I last read them) sug­gested they had raised for effec­tive char­i­ties £6 per £ spent us­ing pes­simistic as­sump­tions or £60 per £ best guess.

  The Life You Can Save raised $11 per $ spent for effec­tive charities

  Rais­ing for Effec­tive giv­ing has raised $24 per $ spent, for effec­tive char­i­ties.

  EA Lon­don (which does not do much fundrais­ing) roughly raised £2.5 per £.

  Re­think For­ward moves £7 per £.

  This are all post hoc analy­ses of money moved to date, not es­ti­mates of fu­ture im­pact. The qual­ity of the ev­i­dence for these is vari­able be­tween the differ­ent pro­grams and you can look into it. As well as mov­ing money I be­lieve all of cheese ALSO pur­port to have im­proved the effec­tive­ness of dona­tions given.

  If helpful to provide a baseline /​ prior against which to judge these suc­cesses note that the stan­dard fundrais­ing ra­tio in the char­ity sec­tor is that char­i­ties raise £4 per £ spent on fundrais­ing.

• weeatquince 11 Dec 2019 1:04 UTC

  39 points

  on: Where are you donat­ing this year and why – in 2019? Open thread for dis­cus­sion.

  Dona­tion: £5,000

  Cause: EA meta (+ global poverty)

  Main dona­tion: £3000 to Hap­pier Lives In­sti­tute (HLI)

  Other dona­tions: £500 to each of EA meta Fund, Let’s Fund, Re­think Pri­ori­ties, Against Malaria Foun­da­tion (AMF)

  
  

  Why EA Meta
  Lev­er­age: It seems em­piri­cally ev­i­dence to me that meta EA ac­tivity is in­fluenc­ing both the amount and the di­rec­tion of fund­ing at a ra­tio of at least £10 in­fluenced £1 in­putted.
  Ev­i­denced: I was skep­ti­cal of what EA meta work could achieve but over the last few years this kind of giv­ing has gone from be­ing an idea to hav­ing demon­strated im­pact.
  Un­der­funded: The EA Meta Fund has than other EA Funds and on its last pay-outs it only filled about 15% of the fund­ing gaps of the or­gani­sa­tions it was look­ing to sup­port.
  Col­lec­tive ac­tion: If ev­ery­one in EA funded meta work rather than pet causes more money would go to good places (or we may learn we were wrong about our pet causes).

  
  

  Why EA meta re­search not out­reach
  I think we are still learn­ing about how to do good and get­ting that right is more im­por­tant than get­ting more money moved. This has had most im­pact to date and I am very un­con­vinced that we are get­ting close to diminish­ing marginal re­turns on this.

  
  

  Why £3000 to HLI
  Hap­pier Lives In­sti­tute are do­ing in­no­va­tive and use­ful new re­search on sub­jec­tive wellbe­ing data that I be­lieve could sig­nifi­cantly change how peo­ple in the EA com­mu­nity think about what causes are most im­por­tant. I ex­pect this dona­tion com­bined with a dona­tion from a col­lab­o­ra­tor can fill their fund­ing gap at least un­til Au­gust 2020. I may donate more at a later date.

  
  

  Why £500 each EA Meta Fund, Let’s Fund and Re­think Pri­ori­ties
  I am not giv­ing ev­ery­thing to HLI partly be­cause I think HLI’s im­me­di­ate fund­ing gap can be filled and partly I want to in­fluence and keep up with these other pro­jects and partly just poor heuris­tics on my part. Note that my view that HLI is bet­ter than any of these 3 other dona­tion op­por­tu­ni­ties is very weak (al­though I ex­pect they have a more press­ing fund­ing gap).
  Th­ese 3 pro­jects are the other EA meta (re­search) pro­jects that I think it is worth sup­port­ing. Split­ting be­tween them be­cause not sure it is worth the time /​ en­ergy to eval­u­ate and com­pare them all given the amount of money I am giv­ing. I have not in­cluded GPI be­cause I have not been as im­pressed by the im­me­di­ate use­ful­ness of their re­search or re­search agenda.
  On Let’s Fund: They are not ac­tu­ally ask­ing for money but they are do­ing good work and always seem short of funds so will try to offer them funds. If they don’t take it will split the money be­tween other pro­jects.

  
  

  Why £500 to AMF
  I am not giv­ing ev­ery­thing to meta, partly I want to still force my­self to think about what is the most im­por­tant non meta cause and partly be­cause I think if I am give the amount I would likely have given to non-meta causes had I not come across EA /​ GWWC then I help avoid the meta trap.
  Against Malaria Foun­da­tion are an ex­cel­lent char­ity, con­tin­u­ously top-rated by GiveWell. (Giv­ing to AMF rather than to GiveWell to dis­tribute as not to­tally con­vinced that De­worm­ing or GiveDirectly are as good as AMF).
  I might al­ter­na­tively give the EA An­i­mal Fund – need to think about this more.

  
  

  Key un­cer­tain­ties
  Is it silly to split my dona­tions this much?
  Have I done enough due dili­gence of HLI?
  AMF or the EA An­i­mal Fund?

Where are you donat­ing this year and why – in 2019? Open thread for dis­cus­sion.

Manag­ing risk in the EA policy space

• weeatquince 5 Oct 2019 17:40 UTC

  41 points

  on: Some per­sonal thoughts on EA and sys­temic change

  In one key way this post very solidly com­pletely misses the point.
  
  The post makes a num­ber of very good points about sys­temic change. But bases all of the points on fi­nan­cial cost-effec­tive es­ti­mates. It is em­bed­ded in the lan­guage through­out, dis­cussing: op­tions that “out­performed GiveWell style char­i­ties”, the “cost … per marginal vote”, les­sons for “large-scale spend­ing” or for a “small donor”, etc.
  
  I think a way the EA com­mu­nity has ne­glected sys­temic change in ex­actly in this man­ner. Money is not the only thing that can be lev­er­aged in the world to make change (and in some cases money is not a thing peo­ple can give).
  I think this some part of what peo­ple are point­ing to when they crit­i­cise EA.
  
  To be con­struc­tive I think we should re­think cause pri­o­ti­sa­tion, but not from a fi­nan­cial point of view. Eg:
  - If you have poli­ti­cal power how best to spend it?
  - If you have a pub­lic voice how best to use it?
  - If you can or­ganise ac­tivism what should it fo­cus on?
  
  (PS. Happy to sup­port with money or time peo­ple do­ing this kind of re­search)
  
  I think we could get no­tice­ably differ­ent re­sults. I think things like fi­nan­cial sta­bil­ity (hard to donate to but very im­por­tant) might show up as more of a pri­or­ity in the EA space if we start look­ing at things this way.
  
  I think the EA com­mu­nity cur­rently has a limited amount to say to any­one with power. For ex­am­ple:
  • I met the civil ser­vant with over­sight of UK’s £8bn in­ter­na­tional de­vel­op­ment spend­ing who seemed in­ter­ested in EA but did not feel it was rele­vant to them – I think they were cor­rect, I had noth­ing to say they didn’t already know.
  • Another case is an EA I know who does not have a huge amount to donate but lots of ex­pe­rience in poli­ti­cal or­ganis­ing and ac­tivism, I doubt the EA com­mu­nity pro­vides them much use­ful di­rec­tion.
  
  It is not that the EA com­mu­nity does none of this, just that we are slow. It feels like it took 80000 Hours a while to start recom­mend­ing policy/​poli­tics as a ca­reer path and it is still un­clear what peo­ple should do once in po­si­tions of power. (HIPE.org.uk if do­ing some re­search on this for Govern­ment ca­reers)
  
  --
  Over­all a very in­ter­est­ing post. Thank you for post­ing.

  I note you men­tion a “rel­a­tive gap in long-ter­mist and high-risk global poverty work”. I think this is in­ter­est­ing. I would love it if any­one has the time to do some back of the en­velope eval­u­a­tions of in­ter­na­tional de­vel­op­ment gov­er­nance re­form or­gani­sa­tions (like Trans­parency In­ter­na­tional)

  What links here?

  • Manag­ing risk in the EA policy space by weeatquince (9 Dec 2019 13:32 UTC; 63 points)

• weeatquince 5 Oct 2019 16:44 UTC

  10 points

  on: [up­dated] Global de­vel­op­ment in­ter­ven­tions are gen­er­ally more effec­tive than Cli­mate change interventions

  Tl;dr: This as­sumes pure rate of time dis­count­ing. I cu­ri­ous how well your anal­y­sis works for any­one who do not think that we should dis­count harms in the fu­ture sim­ply by virtue of be­ing in the fu­ture.
  
  --
  1.
  THIS IS SO GOOD
  This is su­per good re­search and su­per de­tailed and I am hugely im­pressed and hope many many peo­ple donate to Let’s Fund and sup­port you with this kind of re­search!!!
  
  --
  2.
  LET’S BE MORE EXPLICIT ABOUT THE ETHICAL ASSUMPTIONS MADE
  
  I en­joyed read­ing Ap­pendix 3
  • I agree with Pindyck that mod­els of the so­cial cost of car­bon (SCC) re­quire a host of un­der­ly­ing eth­i­cal de­ci­sions and so can be highly mis­lead­ing.
  • I don’t how­ever agree with Pindyck that there is no al­ter­na­tive so we might as well ig­nore this prob­lem
  
  At least for the pur­poses of mak­ing de­ci­sions within the EA com­mu­nity, I think we can ap­ply mod­els but be ex­plicit about what eth­i­cal as­sump­tions have been made and how they af­fect the mod­els con­clu­sions. Many peo­ple on this fo­rum have a de­cent un­der­stand­ing of their eth­i­cal views and how that af­fects de­ci­sions and so be­ing more ex­plicit would sup­port good cause pri­ori­ti­sa­tion de­ci­sions of donors and oth­ers.
  
  Of course this is hold­ing peo­ple on this fo­rum to a higher stan­dard of rigor than pro­fes­sional aca­demic economists reach so should be seen as a nice to have rather than a de­fault, but lets see what we can do...
  
  --
  3.
  DISCOUNTING THE FUTURE, AND OTHER ASSUMPTIONS
  

  3.1
  My (very rough) un­der­stand­ing of cli­mate anal­y­sis is that the SCC is very highly de­pen­dent on the dis­count rate.

  (Ap­pendix 3 makes this point. Also the pa­per you link to on SCC per coun­try says “Dis­count­ing as­sump­tions have con­sis­tently been one of the biggest de­ter­mi­nants of differ­ences be­tween es­ti­ma­tions of the so­cial cost of car­bon”).

  The pa­per you draw your ev­i­dence from seems to uses a pure rate of time dis­count­ing of 1-2%. This ba­si­cally as­sumes that fu­ture peo­ple mat­ter less.
  I think many read­ers of this fo­rum do not be­lieve that fu­ture peo­ple mat­ter less than peo­ple to­day.

  I do not know how much this mat­ters for the anal­y­sis. A high so­cial cost of car­bon seems, from the num­bers in your ar­ti­cle, to make cli­mate in­ter­ven­tions of the same or­der of mag­ni­tude but slightly less effec­tive than cash trans­fers.
  
  3.2
  I also un­der­stand that es­ti­mates of the SCC is also de­pen­dent on the calcu­la­tion of the worse case tail-end effects and there is some con­cern among peo­ple in the x-risk re­search space that small chances of very catas­trophic af­fects are ig­nored in cli­mate eco­nomics. I do not know how much this mat­ters ei­ther.
  
  3.3
  I could also imag­ine that many peo­ple (es­pe­cially nega­tive lean­ing util­i­tar­i­ans) are more con­cerned by stop­ping the dam­age caused from cli­mate change than im­pressed by the benefits of cash trans­fers.
  
  SO:
  I do not have an­swers to what effects these things have on the anal­y­sis. I would love to get your views on this.
  
  Thank you for you work on this!!!

• weeatquince 3 Oct 2019 18:30 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: MichaelA's comment on: UK policy and poli­tics careers

  Hi,

  If I had to guess and (and I feel un­com­fortable do­ing so as not re­ally go­ing on any­thing here but my gut) I would say that at an en­try level it is all pretty similar but that an en­try level job in the civil ser­vice is likely slightly higher im­pact than an en­try level job as an MP’s re­search but the vari­a­tion be­tween jobs and MPs is likely more im­por­tant. I think your per­sonal ex­pected value is dom­i­nated by the jobs you get in later ca­reer rather than at an en­try level so this is small on the scale of your ca­reer.

  Value of in­for­ma­tion to the broader EA com­mu­nity is good, as is any other low-hang­ing-fruit benefits gained by be­ing an early EA mover into a space.

• weeatquince 2 Oct 2019 9:40 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: MichaelA's comment on: UK policy and poli­tics careers

  Hi, I think the 80K ad­vice is still fairly ap­pli­ca­ble (also I don’t think it would be a sec­ond opinion as my views were taken into ac­count in that 80K ar­ti­cle)

  Would prob­a­bly put the diplo­matic fast-stream on par with the gen­er­al­ist one (al­though not very sure about this)

  I would say that do not for­get you can go in di­rect en­try into a job and if you have a bit of ex­pe­rience (even a year or 2) get­ting an SEO job (or higher) may well be prefer­able to the FastStream.

• weeatquince 2 Oct 2019 9:39 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Pablo_Stafforini's comment on: UK policy and poli­tics careers

  This image dis­plays for me. I am not sure what I need to do to make it dis­play prop­erly for you or what has gone wrong. Can some­one ad­min-y in­ves­ti­gate?

• weeatquince 2 Oct 2019 9:32 UTC

  6 points

  in reply to: MichaelA's comment on: UK policy and poli­tics careers

  There are maybe 40 peo­ple who are in the EA com­mu­nity cur­rently in the UK civil ser­vice and none cur­rently in poli­tics. I think most peo­ple I know would agree that it is com­par­a­tively more use­ful and more ne­glected for EAs to move to­wards poli­tics.

  I also think it is gen­er­ally more im­pact­ful to do well in poli­tics than to do well in the civil ser­vice, as ul­ti­mately poli­ti­ci­ans make the de­ci­sions. Although I do know EAs would dis­agree with this and point out that peo­ple do not have po­si­tions of poli­ti­cal power for very long.

  I think poli­tics is more challeng­ing: I think it is more com­pet­i­tive to do very well in. Also I think if you want to go into poli­tics you need to re­ally com­mit to that path and spend your time en­gaged in party poli­tics whereas I think it is eas­ier to move in and out of the civil ser­vice.