The people who I know who currently seem most impressive spent a lot of time earlier on gaining a bunch of skill. I don’t know anyone who seems impressive by virtue of having gained lots of status which they are now free to divert to good ends. Perhaps I just don’t hang around such people, but for this reason I’m much less convinced of John’s arguments when you replace status with skill.
I meant that while gaining status might be a questionable first step in a plan to have impact, gaining skill is pretty much an essential one, and in particular getting an ML PhD or working at a big lab seem like quite solid plans for gaining skill.
i.e. if you replace status with skill I agree with the quotes instead of John.
+1, “gain a bunch of skill and then use it to counterfactually influence things” seems very sensible. If the plan is to gain a bunch of skill by leading a parade, then I’m somewhat more skeptical about whether that’s really the best strategy for skill gain, but I could imagine situations where that’s plausible.
The people who I know who currently seem most impressive spent a lot of time earlier on gaining a bunch of skill. I don’t know anyone who seems impressive by virtue of having gained lots of status which they are now free to divert to good ends. Perhaps I just don’t hang around such people, but for this reason I’m much less convinced of John’s arguments when you replace status with skill.
Sorry, yeah, my comment was quite ambiguous.
I meant that while gaining status might be a questionable first step in a plan to have impact, gaining skill is pretty much an essential one, and in particular getting an ML PhD or working at a big lab seem like quite solid plans for gaining skill.
i.e. if you replace status with skill I agree with the quotes instead of John.
+1, “gain a bunch of skill and then use it to counterfactually influence things” seems very sensible. If the plan is to gain a bunch of skill by leading a parade, then I’m somewhat more skeptical about whether that’s really the best strategy for skill gain, but I could imagine situations where that’s plausible.