Look, I don’t know you at all. So please do ignore me if what I’m saying doesn’t seem right, or just if you want to, or whatever.
I’m a bit worried that you’re seeking approval, not advice? If this is so, know that I for one approve of your chosen path. You are allowed to spend a few years focusing on things that you are passionate about, which (if it works out) may result in you being happy and productive and possibly making the world better.
If you are in fact seeking advice, you should explain what your goal is. If your goal is to make the maximum impact possible — it’s worth at least hundreds of hours trying to see if you can learn more & motivate yourself along a path which seems like it combines high impact with personal resonance. I wouldn’t discount philosophy along this angle, but (for example) it sounds like you may not know that much about the potential of policy careers; there are plenty that do not require particularly strong mathematical skills (… or even any particularly difficult skills beyond some basic extraversion, resistance to boredom and willingness to spend literal decades grinding away within bureaucracies).
If your goal is to be happy, I think you will be happy doing philosophy, and I think you have a potential to make a huge impact that way. Certainly there are a decent number of full-time philosophers within effective altruism who I have huge respect for (Macaskill, Ord, Bostrom, Greaves, and Trammell jump to mind). Plus, you can save a few hundred hours, which seems pretty important if you might already know the outcome of your experimentation!
Thank you for the response, Lincoln. I don’t think approval per se is what I am looking for (though obviously, if someone who knows all of the descriptive and moral facts thinks you have chosen your best option, you would be doing what is right). When writing this post I did wonder whether I should include information about my goals and moral views. For what it’s worth, I accept many of the core claims made by longtermists regarding career choice, and arguments to the effect that AGI is a very real possibility this century seem pretty strong.
I think my main motivation in writing this post is to see if anyone has devastating counterarguments to a statement like “people who aren’t good at maths can nevertheless be good candidates for theoretical research on rationality, and there aren’t any options which are clearly superior in terms of impact.”
Regarding careers in politics, I have mixed feelings about whether people who are bad at maths should be wielding political power. On the one hand, perhaps they can safely outsource economic decisions and so on to experts? On the other, I have in my mind a caricature of a charismatic politician who gets elected by being good at public speaking and so on, but this is actually worse than the counterfactual scenario where a less charismatic, more ‘wonkish’ person with a deep understanding of economics gets elected. Finally, if you live in a small country, I have to wonder whether even spectacular success in politics is likely to have a large impact on say, the AI policy of the US or China.
I’m less optimistic about ‘civil servant’ careers for those who are bad at maths. Aren’t jobs in such bureaucracies mostly about analyzing data, or performing economic analyses? I find it hard to imagine that many bureaucrats spend their days putting forward or reviewing philosophical arguments, but perhaps this is because I have the wrong idea about what these jobs are like.
Look, I don’t know you at all. So please do ignore me if what I’m saying doesn’t seem right, or just if you want to, or whatever.
I’m a bit worried that you’re seeking approval, not advice? If this is so, know that I for one approve of your chosen path. You are allowed to spend a few years focusing on things that you are passionate about, which (if it works out) may result in you being happy and productive and possibly making the world better.
If you are in fact seeking advice, you should explain what your goal is. If your goal is to make the maximum impact possible — it’s worth at least hundreds of hours trying to see if you can learn more & motivate yourself along a path which seems like it combines high impact with personal resonance. I wouldn’t discount philosophy along this angle, but (for example) it sounds like you may not know that much about the potential of policy careers; there are plenty that do not require particularly strong mathematical skills (… or even any particularly difficult skills beyond some basic extraversion, resistance to boredom and willingness to spend literal decades grinding away within bureaucracies).
If your goal is to be happy, I think you will be happy doing philosophy, and I think you have a potential to make a huge impact that way. Certainly there are a decent number of full-time philosophers within effective altruism who I have huge respect for (Macaskill, Ord, Bostrom, Greaves, and Trammell jump to mind). Plus, you can save a few hundred hours, which seems pretty important if you might already know the outcome of your experimentation!
Thank you for the response, Lincoln. I don’t think approval per se is what I am looking for (though obviously, if someone who knows all of the descriptive and moral facts thinks you have chosen your best option, you would be doing what is right). When writing this post I did wonder whether I should include information about my goals and moral views. For what it’s worth, I accept many of the core claims made by longtermists regarding career choice, and arguments to the effect that AGI is a very real possibility this century seem pretty strong.
I think my main motivation in writing this post is to see if anyone has devastating counterarguments to a statement like “people who aren’t good at maths can nevertheless be good candidates for theoretical research on rationality, and there aren’t any options which are clearly superior in terms of impact.”
Regarding careers in politics, I have mixed feelings about whether people who are bad at maths should be wielding political power. On the one hand, perhaps they can safely outsource economic decisions and so on to experts? On the other, I have in my mind a caricature of a charismatic politician who gets elected by being good at public speaking and so on, but this is actually worse than the counterfactual scenario where a less charismatic, more ‘wonkish’ person with a deep understanding of economics gets elected.
Finally, if you live in a small country, I have to wonder whether even spectacular success in politics is likely to have a large impact on say, the AI policy of the US or China.
I’m less optimistic about ‘civil servant’ careers for those who are bad at maths. Aren’t jobs in such bureaucracies mostly about analyzing data, or performing economic analyses? I find it hard to imagine that many bureaucrats spend their days putting forward or reviewing philosophical arguments, but perhaps this is because I have the wrong idea about what these jobs are like.