Among my friends interested in rationality, effective altruism, and existential risk reduction, I often hear: "If you want to have a real positive impact on the world, grad school is a waste of time. It's better to use deliberate practice to learn whatever you need instead of working within the confines of an institution."
While I'd agree that grad school will not make you do good for the world, if you're a self-driven person who can spend time in a PhD program deliberately acquiring skills and connections for making a positive difference, I think you can make grad school a highly productive path, perhaps more so than many alternatives. In this post, I want to share some advice that I've been repeating a lot lately for how to do this:
- Find a flexible program. PhD programs in mathematics, statistics, philosophy, and theoretical computer science tend to give you a great deal of free time and flexibility, provided you can pass the various qualifying exams without too much studying. By contrast, sciences like biology and chemistry can require time-consuming laboratory work that you can't always speed through by being clever.
- Choose high-impact topics to learn about. AI safety and existential risk reduction are my favorite examples, but there are others, and I won't spend more time here arguing their case. If you can't make your thesis directly about such a topic, choosing a related more popular topic can give you valuable personal connections, and you can still learn whatever you want during the spare time a flexible program will afford you.
- Teach classes. Grad programs that let you teach undergraduate tutorial classes provide a rare opportunity to practice engaging a non-captive audience. If you just want to work on general presentation skills, maybe you practice on your friends... but your friends already like you. If you want to learn to win over a crowd that isn't particularly interested in you, try teaching calculus! I've found this skill particularly useful when presenting AI safety research that isn't yet mainstream, which requires carefully stepping through arguments that are unfamiliar to the audience.
- Use your freedom to accomplish things. I used my spare time during my PhD program to cofound CFAR, the Center for Applied Rationality. Alumni of our workshops have gone on to do such awesome things as creating the Future of Life Institute and sourcing a $10MM donation from Elon Musk to fund AI safety research. I never would have had the flexibility to volunteer for weeks at a time if I'd been working at a typical 9-to-5 or a startup.
- Organize a graduate seminar. Organizing conferences is critical to getting the word out on important new research, and in fact, running a conference on AI safety in Puerto Rico is how FLI was able to bring so many researchers together on its Open Letter on AI Safety. It's also where Elon Musk made his donation. During grad school, you can get lots of practice organizing research events by running seminars for your fellow grad students. In fact, several of the organizers of the FLI conference were grad students.
- Get exposure to experts. A top 10 US school will have professors around that are world-experts on myriad topics, and you can attend departmental colloquia to expose yourself to the cutting edge of research in fields you're curious about. I regularly attended cognitive science and neuroscience colloquia during my PhD in mathematics, which gave me many perspectives that I found useful working at CFAR.
- Learn how productive researchers get their work done. Grad school surrounds you with researchers, and by getting exposed to how a variety of researchers do their thing, you can pick and choose from their methods and find what works best for you. For example, I learned from my advisor Bernd Sturmfels that, for me, quickly passing a draft back and forth with a coauthor can get a paper written much more quickly than agonizing about each revision before I share it.
- Remember you don't have to stay in academia. If you limit yourself to only doing research that will get you good post-doc offers, you might find you aren't able to focus on what seems highest impact (because often what makes a topic high impact is that it's important and neglected, and if a topic is neglected, it might not be trendy enough land you good post-doc). But since grad school is run by professors, becoming a professor is usually the most salient path forward for most grad students, and you might end up pressuring yourself to follow that standards of that path. When I graduated, I got my top choice of post-doc, but then I decided not to take it and to instead try earning to give as an algorithmic stock trader, and now I'm a research fellow at MIRI. In retrospect, I might have done more valuable work during my PhD itself if I'd decided in advance not to do a typical post-doc.
That's all I have for now. The main sentiment behind most of this, I think, is that you have to be deliberate to get the most out of a PhD program, rather than passively expecting it to make you into anything in particular. Grad school still isn't for everyone, and far from it. But if you were seriously considering it at some point, and "do something more useful" felt like a compelling reason not to go, be sure to first consider the most useful version of grad that you could reliably make for yourself... and then decide whether or not to do it.
Please email me (lastname@thisdomain.com) if you have more ideas for getting the most out of grad school!
It's striking how much value there is in academia that I didn't notice, and that a base-level rational person would've noticed if they'd asked "what are the main blind spots of the rationality community, and how can I steelman the opposing positions?". Not a good sign about me, certainly.
Also, is that your actual email address?
I have been talking about this very issue for ages here on LW. "Rationalists" (the tribe, not the ideal platonic type) share a ton of EY's biases, including anti-academic sentiment.
Go ahead and object that "nothing is really free", but "free at point of use", once we're being specific, is useful. It means, "This service is accessible without paying up-front, because the costs are being paid elsewhere." Of course there are still costs to be paid, but there are a couple of whole fields of study devoted to finding the most socially desirable ways of paying them.
So for instance, we have reason to believe that if, on top of the existing journal-subscription-and-paywall system, we added additional up-front fees for reading academic research papers, this would raise the costs of scientific research, in terms of dollars and labor-hours spent to obtain the outputs we care about.
Also, please, not every LW comment necessitates conceptual nitpicking. If I start with "academia publishes a lot of useful research which can be obtained and read for free by people who know how to do literature searches", please do not respond with, "Well what is free anyway? Shouldn't we digress into the entire field of welfare economics?"
I have some questions about step 1 (find a flexible program):
My understanding is that there are two sources of inflexibility for PhD programs: A. Requirements for your funding source (e.g. TA-ing) and B. Vague requirements of the program (e.g. publish X papers). I'm excluding Quals, since you just have to pass a test and then you're done.
Elsewhere in the comments, someone wrote:
... (read more)Bolding the parts to which I object.
I have never seen anyone in a rigorous postgraduate program who had a lot of free time and could pass their quals without large amounts of studying.
Of course, I could just be, like magic, on the lower part of the intelligence curve for graduate school, but given that my actual measured IQ numbers ar... (read more)
I am of the opinion that if you do grad school and you don't attach yourself to a powerful and wise mentor in the form of your academic adviser, you're doing it wrong. Mentorship is a highly underrated phenomenon among rationalists.
I mean, if you're ~22, you really don't know what the hell you're doing. That's why you're going to grad school, basically. To get some further direction in how to cultivate your professional career.
If you happen to have access to an adviser who won a Nobel or whose adviser won a Nobel, they would make a good choice. The implici... (read more)
I think there'd be value in just listing graduate programs in philosophy, economics, etc., by how relevant the research already being done there is to x-risk, AI safety, or rationality. Or by whether or not they contain faculty interested in those topics.
For example, if I were looking to enter a philosophy graduate program it might take me quite some time to realize that Carnegie Melon probably has the best program for people interested in LW-style reasoning about something like epistemology.
That makes good sense over on your own domain whence this is cross-posted, but not here on LW. Here you might either want to describe your email address differently, or encourage people to PM you using the LW message system instead of emailing you.
Economics also has good opinion among the EA/rationality crowd:
Is there any way to do these things without paying a large pricetag? Could you just lurk around campus or something? Only half-joking here.
Planning fallacy is going to eat you alive if you use this technique.
Yeah, this was much more valuable than I realized at the time. I think it's a better way to learn to speak than most, because you have something to communicate, and you get to measure later on how well you communicated it. You don't have time to worry about being nervous.
Me previously on the topic of getting a PhD.