tog comments on Another Critique of Effective Altruism - Less Wrong

19 Post author: jsteinhardt 05 January 2014 09:51AM

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Comment author: tog 05 January 2014 09:25:21PM 1 point [-]

The goal is to get direct impact by doing high-impact research.

Can you expand on that a little, to spell out some concrete high-impact research opportunities that you think some EAs should be focusing their careers on?

Comment author: jsteinhardt 06 January 2014 08:19:33AM 2 points [-]

If you're asking about me personally, I work on artificial intelligence; an (out of date) research statement can be found here. My research also sometimes branches out into nearby fields such as statistics, program analysis, and theoretical computer science.

More generally, if I found myself switching fields then some major contenders would be bioinstrumentation, neuroscience, materials science, synthetic biology, and political science. Of course, the particular choice of problem within a field is in many ways more important than the field itself, so in some sense this list is just cataloguing my biases.