Become an expert in something specific and boring
forum.effectivealtruism.org
forum.effectivealtruism.org
You really want to know what's causing the talent shortage? The attitude that being behind the scenes is worthless toil.
There's hundreds of applicants for every position even lowballed ones.
Also, surely the author would agree you should become an expert in something that is useful for many people, boring as it is. I mean, that's his whole point.
Do you mean prior to, or after they graduate? Getting a PhD is a miserable slog, especially if your tuition fees are exorbitant, but if you are able to afford the unjustly steep mental and financial cost, it has been shown to lead to enjoyable and gainful employment on average [0].
Explore/exploit advises us to start out with a vast swath of interests, and then to home in ever deeper on whatever seems to provide the most bang for our buck -- the problem is, being inherently interesting is its own reward, and a terribly powerful attractor for the youth in particular. Just because you know that e.g. there are only maybe 50 IAM architects worth their salt in the entire Northern European area doesn't mean you can capitalize on it if you think AuthN and AuthZ are dull as dirt.
(Which I don't! But I'm also not willing, or even really sure of how to go about acquiring the necessary years of practice to get there. That's part of what the problem feels like on the ground!)
Nevertheless, I love getting into the weeds of boring niche topics. From a business perspective they're a pretty good deal once you start to get older and have dealt with the surfaces of some of them out of necessity.
The opposite can also happen. A friend of mine is a pilot for commercial airliners. Nowadays he compares his job to being a bus driver in the sky.
There is a severe lack of qualified driver in many places, and the drivers that continue doing their job even as the pay is low and their clients aren't all pleasing to serve. I think they're more often than not the quiet heroes of their communities.
The specifics of congressional appropriations, federal funding, and procurement: what sorts of things does the government purchase, how does this relate to biotech or AI (software)? Related to this, becoming an expert on the Strategic National Stockpile and understanding the mechanisms of how a vendor managed inventory could work.
I guess it depends on the context, but I think if your goal is to “make the world a better place” (which is ostensibly what EA is aiming at) this is probably bad advice. The attitude here is a very technocratic one, in which the solution to problems is to understand them abstractly and then manipulate societal machinery to solve them. I don’t think this actually works in reality, as many EA examples have shown.
Instead, if you interpret the title to be a little more straightforward, I do think it’s actually good advice. Just make that “something” be something useful in-itself. Become an expert at building computers from scratch, or hydroponics, or repairing diesel engines, or installing solar panels. A world full of people that know how to do stuff is almost certainly better than one full of “experts” that have only abstract knowledge, especially when it comes to things like 3D printing or the security of voting machines. (Mentioned as examples in the article.)
Can you give some examples of this failing? Naively many examples of things improving that i know of were either very boring bureaucratic endeavors or required heavily involvement in bureaucracy. The Clean Air and Water Act, the FDA, the Civil Rights Act, all required people at the level of government or some other large social group to organize and plan things and make them happen. And thus you need people with the specific area knowledge and group connections in that area to make those things happen.
Or is this a mis-reading of your claim?
More generally though, my claim is just that solutions tend to be better when they are implemented locally and pragmatically, and not when thought of as abstract problems that can be solved by study and thought.
While I'm not an EA myself, accomplishments like Givewell[1] have really helped me keep respect for the movement - walking the walk is always orders of magnitude harder and more complex than talking the talk after all.
[0] https://www.effectivealtruism.org/articles/ea-global-2018-am... [1] https://www.givewell.org/
https://www.reddit.com/r/askphilosophy/comments/z93koy/what_...
https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/the-new-moral-mathemat...
Also, frankly, it's really strange to see people rushing to attack them. Are mosquito nets and 3rd world children really so hated?
The comment on implementation is neither here nor there. Plenty of people implement their ethical theories. I don’t know how implementing something is an argument for the correctness of that thing. Certainly it’s good that a lot of people don’t implement their ethical theories.
Even Christians don't do that much charitable giving nowadays.
Every source I can find says exactly the opposite.
About as much here or there as the statement that they are implementing utilitarianism at all.
> Every source I can find says exactly the opposite.
There was a post here recently about this exact thing. Detailing the rise of megachurches, how they are stealing away the majority of Christmas from small churches, and how they don't do any charity.
I’m not super interested in debating the specifics of it, I am just highly skeptical of movements that place abstract formulas at the center, especially ones that have extensive funding from ethically dubious characters.
That’s all I have to say about it. Better critiques are listed in the links I shared.
Well, if that happens, it would seem legal liability is not the most important topic or the first line of business...? Fighting the pandemic would be a little more urgent? Is it possible we need more biologists than lawyers?
I almost despair at hearing what i want to hear now because it probably means what i want isn’t actually being done.
The more people working in government who understand what money is and how it works, the better off society will be. Where as many in the MMT or heterodox economics community generally seek to make as much noise as possible outside the building, I have a hunch that quietly and dilligently doing work inside the building is much more effective even though it's less cathartic (and there is documentary evidence that this has been the approach by libertarian economics adherents for quite some time![1]).
[1] https://www.amazon.com.au/Democracy-Chains-Nancy-MacLean/dp/...
Too much nonsense in her "QANON conspiracy for the Left" writing but this paragraph from the Amazon page is illustrative:
> Without Buchanan's ideas and Koch's money, the libertarian right would not have succeeded in its stealth takeover of the Republican Party as a delivery mechanism. Now, with Mike Pence as Vice President, the cause has a longtime loyalist in the White House, not to mention a phalanx of Republicans in the House, the Senate, a majority of state governments, and the courts, all carrying out the plan.
What planet is this lady on that she looks at the Republican Party of the last 8 years and sees the effective culmination of a libertarian plot? Trump's presidency can be called a lot of things but presenting it as a "triumph for libertarian ideals" is absolutely absurd. I almost feel bad for her, she published that dross in mid-2017 and probably started working on it 5 years earlier when it could at least plausibly have been claimed to be accurate but then Trump got elected and showed her claim that libertarianism was any sort of dominant belief system in the Republican party is an absolute farce. Trump was pure statist protectionism in his economics and Pence did diddly squat overall.
Libertarianism is utterly dead in the Western World, both the left and right are completely onboard with the government controlling or regulating as much of the economy as possible. In regards to Australia, the govt literally banned Qatar airlines recently from opening routes to Aus because the pollies are in bed with Qantas.....how is that remotely libertarian?
May as well blame Catholic fundamentalism for the world we live in as Libertarianism, both are completely dead ideologies with no support at any level of power.
I found that book because when Trump was ascendant I all of a sudden had this bizarre realisation that libertarians were supporting fascists.
That book made a lot of outwardly contradictory concepts make a whole lot of sense.
Libertarians don’t think of themselves as fascists but fascism or more accurately neo-feudalism is the purest expression of libertarianism.
The most apt tweet I remember seeing on the topic was (paraphrasing) “no matter how you look at it libertarianism boils down to: the role of the state is to protect me from my slaves”.
I went very deep into a few products used by the Enterprises and Open source community. So deep as to read their source, their associated library source, and talk to their SMEs and partners.
If you can do beyond Tier 2 or 3 without being employed, you can leverage that knowledge to adjacent realms.
Now my questions require "that one person" on the internal product design teams to answer.
I have never been "known at the city's gates" but for one or two products I am.
People who have been especially successful in their careers as e.g. software engineers, is this also a good path?
Unless you're being more metaphorical ...?
There are millions of professional class people who have "lifestyle" consulting and service businesses who make a living that's widely variable more so than a salary full-time job with an employer.
A primary way (there is no "the way") to become richer is to have equity in something valuable, which is usually something that is difficult for others to perform and replicate, essential, usable, defensible, and likely to be profitable, either created by your team or your investees. Ownership isn't the game, it's the only game.
There are also boring business software systems that hang around a long time.
I’m still at it.
Seems to work for me (and thousands of others, around the world).
Obviously our boy SBF was not doing that, so he probably doesn't count, regardless of what he said he was doing.
I think I'll become an expert in running a retail cryptocurrency exchange and hedge fund. Maybe move the operation to the Bahamas as a tax optimization.
Anything Sam Altman is near, I stay away from.
The community is a piece of work but the founding ideas are worth learning from.
Will MacAskill, nope.
Eg the founding ideas of almost all religions are nuts [0], but the communities are often worth learning from.
[0] Most religions' ideas are mutually exclusive, so at most one or zero can be true. The rest must be nuts. Figuring out which, if any, religion is not nuts is left as an exercise for the reader.
> Yet this crisis also creates an opportunity. * Effective altruism, the movement, is not the same thing as effective altruism, the practice of financially maximalist and rigorously data-driven philanthropy. * Divorcing the latter from the former would benefit everyone on the planet.
I've been wondering why you guys care about some guy who ran a crypto exchange and what that has to do the with the core philosophy of effective altruism but it seems like you've all linked the movement with the philosophy to my chagrin.
1) I believe the thought leaders behind the philosophy severely downplay the downsides of making money amorally. It’s considered a completely legitimate approach to find the highest paying job you can and donate lots of your salary. High paying jobs that attract EA believers (finance in particular, many areas of tech as well) tend to destabilize the economy, oppress people, and contribute to unreasonable expectations about economic growth that kill our planet.
2) The movement is culturally weak, doesn’t really attempt to branch out of a few men with similar finance/tech backgrounds with huge egos and savior complexes. This, to me, is not how change occurs. Culture is a necessary part of change. Sure, you can provide mosquito nets to malaria-ridden areas of the world, but that doesn’t change a culture of corruption or encourage the next generation to solve the local systemic issues that only they’re capable of fixing. Real movements attempt to change hearts and minds and incorporate different types of people. In other words, movements are inseparable from their community. Any philosophy that doesn’t incorporate community building is not going to be the most effective way of creating positive change.