Most PhDs fit these category and yet they are miserable financially, physically, emotionally. At the core, we need to be doing something that is useful to a significant number of people in atleast one way be it physically, financially, cognitively or emotionally. Yet most of these expertise demonstrated in thick jacketed thesis books just collects dust with no tangible use. So, no don't become an expert in something specific and boring unless it has the potential to be useful for a significant number of people.
I don't agree. PhDs are misable yes, but this is due to the way PhDs work in isolation, to the fact that many PhDs do it because they need the PhD not because they want to do it (and, in some countries, poor working conditions and salaries).
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.
> Most PhDs fit these category and yet they are miserable financially, physically, emotionally
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].
If you are getting a PhD without a stipend (~3k usd/month) and even paying tuition on top of that, you are doing something egregiously wrong. The financial opportunity cost is very high though especially in CS.
This strategy is rare ex ante because it's irrational for most young people to follow.
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.
I don't think many people deliberately choose to get into something boring, it's usually because the job requires it. Then suddenly you become an expert and don't find it boring anymore, because at that point you see the inner layers and the opportunities. So the better advice is to get into a field (in this case politics) you find interesting and keep an open mind.
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.
I don't think experts in specific things think their field is boring. You're not going to get far if the reason you're trying to become an expert is because a blog said so instead of because you love the field
I did some work for a civil engineer with a professional engineer credential. He worked as an expert witness and on the interpretation of ASME code for boilers and pressure vessels. He could turn around a report on a code interpretation in hours to a day or two for around $50k USD. He had/has about a $15M home and never hurt for coin.
The title of the article doesn’t really line up with what you probably think it contains. It’s more about learning a highly specific regulatory framework or bureaucratic process. Here’s an example:
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.)
> I don’t think this actually works in reality, as many EA examples have shown.
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.
I was mostly making a reference to SBF, but sure, certainly there are large scale projects that require boring bureaucratic knowledge. But I am assuming that the audience of the post is not people that want to build a career in policy. Because if that’s the case, this advice is a little too obvious - of course you should become an expert in X thing if you want to build a career in X field.
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.
Probably not a good idea to judge all of EA but SBF. EA long predates SBF and had some huge wins by seriously asking the question "which charities save the most lives per dollar?" (technically: Quality Adjusted Years of Life, or QUALY). Really helped the world realize that things like mosquito nets in Africa were _grossly_ underfunded[0].
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.
Linking to a grab-bag of random claims by people with their own axes to grind is not terribly convincing or conducive to productive discussion. Do you think EA people haven't saved as many lives as they claim (just in the here and now, disregarding the minority of funding going to speculative future causes), or that this is not as important as they claim?
I linked to a number of critiques of EA and of utilitarianism.
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.
By modified form i think you mean "implemented" form. Unlike pretty much every other ethical theory they actually practice what they believe in, which is really their defining characteristic. Even Christians don't do that much charitable giving nowadays.
Also, frankly, it's really strange to see people rushing to attack them. Are mosquito nets and 3rd world children really so hated?
No, I mean modified. EA is clearly drawing on a lot of utilitarian ideas, but it’s not exactly the same thing.
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.
> The comment on implementation is neither here nor there.
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.
Ah, i see. That makes more sense, although the focus on abstract problems was not the lesson i gathered from the post. In fact, my impression was that this post was actually saying more of the opposite. Don't "dream up novel UN structures, spend time in abstract game theory", but instead get a job in some concrete and simple (i.e non-abstract) field that allows you to then be involved in policy making in some way, either as a policy making leader or an expert who can assist with making said policy. I mean, it's examples of Privacy / data protection laws and Biochemical supply chains are pretty concrete and encourage pragmatic solutions if it's literally your job.
Agreed. This first item is quite entertaining: "I’m especially interested in how liability law would handle spreading infohazards, e.g. if a bio lab publishes a virus sequence that is then used for bioterrorism"
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 would agree with you if that knowledge wasn't the stuff industrial organization was made of. That is expertise many countries currently lack and have experts come in from overseas to deploy.
I much prefer to toil away in secret. I'd rather be a king-maker than a king. The lack of scrutiny affords me greater latitude and latitude is very valuable. Begrudgingly I had to open a social media account a few years ago to do some in-public stuff, but I'd rather not have.
It might be the narrative bias of revisionist history but it seems like there’s a trend of bombastic good-for-nothing leaders against get-stuff-done lackeys and quiet leaders.
I almost despair at hearing what i want to hear now because it probably means what i want isn’t actually being done.
I know a great real world example of this. A friend of mine is an expert in economics, specifically Georgism and Modern Monetary Theory (although he has orthodox economics training as well). He's worked in policy in a range of institutions, and now works at the Australian Federal Treasury on policy. It's taken something like 8 years for that to happen. He's not a radical revolutionary, he's not a sleeper cell or a Trojan horse for some ideology, and he hasn't made any secret of the schools of economics in which he's trained when applying for any of his roles.
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]).
You can't be serious referencing that hack, MacLean.
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.
Have you read it or have you only read libertarian rebuttals of it?
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”.
As someone who learns quickly and gets bored this has been true.
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.
For me, I haven't had a problem specialized in healthcare regulation. I have a favorite stack, but my preferred stack is the ship of theseus if we start from the beginning of my care. That said, I've worked in all sorts of stacks. The only throughline is healthcare regulation with the occasion side steps into other highly regulated fields. I've spent my career automating bureaucracy. Employers just like that they don't have to explain their situation to me. As everyone knows tech stack is fast to pick up, but domain takes much later. I'm coming up on 15 years doing this. It's working for me thus far.
Ok, I'm racking my brain (and tried a couple of searches) ... but, I don't know that space almost at all, and I just can't come up with a way to "un-Mad Lib" "ship of theseus".
He's saying the tech stack changes over time and gets updated. Probably going from on-prem to cloud with some saas sprinkled in, as many other industry. What does not change as rapidly is the strict regulations and particular needs of the healthcare domain.
It's bad advice in software. Software that's "boring" tends to be replaced with flashy new things. If you were an expert in JQery in 2010, unless you've learned the new frameworks you would be nearly unemployable today.
I was an "expert" in OSGi, a Java framework... it went out of fashion in the early 2010's. My knowledge of that became nearly useless, the only "utility" I got out of it today is understanding modularity and dynamic services much better than I would otherwise (which can be frustrating though, as you see new flashy thhings making the same mistakes you've seen before, but try telling them that and they'll just call you a dinosaur who doesn't get it).
The Lindy Effect is in play here I think. That is, if a language has been around and in business use for a long time, it’s likely that it will be in the future. Stuff like jQuery was trendy and new at the time, so it’s not super surprising that it hasn’t been long-lived.
B2B SaaS is not the only way. If it takes too long to get to market because of a refusal to take investment, then a venture can miss the timing and remain too small to be valuable. OTOH if a venture raises money it doesn't know what to do with (to accelerate things), grows costs without a strategy, and/or gives away too much equity, then it's also headed to crash into a reef.
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.
Yes, your chances of building something thats actually going to make money are way higher. Most obvious ideas have been tried a million times. Its the smaller businesses relying on some random problem, charge 5k a year for it, get 100 customers, sell the business and semi retire.
Data scientists in insurance. Merging the fields of CS, decision support, and actuarial. Not a product per se, but consulting services and productish APIs and managed systems.
It depends. I've known people who were arguably the world experts in things no one really cared about any longer (e.g. legacy computer architecture performance optimizations)--and certainly weren't willing to pay to optimize.
There are also boring business software systems that hang around a long time.
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.
What you say rings true, but the opposite is also often true.
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.
If saying some crazy things means everything they say is wrong then you'd have to be a Christian Atheist once you put the bible and the complete works of Thomas Paine together.
It's not clear she's not just trolling against abortion. Is that what the article is? Because I looked up the author and she was disabled her entire life to to a genetic disease. It seems pretty reasonable to allow abortion for cases like this. Which is why it IS legal and even recommended in most of the western world.
I disagree with Harriet Johnson in at least a few cases, but the entire thrust of that piece and her argument within is "it's insane that people make judgements on my quality of life, without asking me, and say that I should not be born". You can make that argument and also believe that abortion is an appropriate tool for some cases.
Can you explain your opposition to Singer's views? I understand he argues in favor of legalising voluntary euthanasia, and increased abortion rights. As a non-religious person, his arguments generally seem quite rational to me, but I'm keen to understand more.
> 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.
Personally, I have a few issues with the philosophy of EA that I believe are reflected in the community.
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.
