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.
A standard advice would be: do what you are good at and enjoy doing, and keep an eye on the potential applications to LW-style rationality, should you find it interesting (or post-rationality, as is the fashion). For example, working on multi-agent models of agency/self can probably yield a lot of low-hanging fruit, especially if you do your research on the margins (like people whose sense of self is different from average, outward manifestations of self-ness in ML, etc.). You don't have to get math-heavy and still figure out a lot of new insights.
As I come to the end of my undergraduate degree in philosophy, I am now faced with the decision of what to do next. I have spent a lot of time reading 80 000 hours, but have begun to wonder whether parts of their advice might not apply to me, or if they might be undervaluing certain kinds of research. For example, in their article on philosophy academia, they suggest that many people who are thinking about going to grad school for philosophy should instead study something like computer science, economics, or pursue a career in public policy. The problem is that I am much stronger verbally than I am quantitatively, and my scores on aptitude tests reflect this. So, subjects like computer science and economics are off the table, and I assume that one’s success in policy careers is going to depend (at least in part) on mathematical skills. The fact that I live in a smaller, less influential country could also affect the impact I would have if I went into politics or public policy.
I recently stumbled on a few LessWrong resources, such as What are the open problems in Human Rationality?, and some of the problems in this thread seem really interesting. It also seems that a person might make progress on these without strong quantitative abilities (though I will consider a counterargument to this point below). For instance, some people think that akrasia could be a promising problem to work on, and a recurring issue in the LessWrong literature is whether it makes sense to conceive of oneself as containing multiple sub-agents (in some sense), and if so, what the advantages and disadvantages of different theoretical views on this are. This is also the kind of thing you can get funding to work on for a couple of years in my country (from a philosophy department), without taking on any debt.
One advantage of doing so would be that certain aspects of this path could be really motivating. Though it is unlikely that I could rise to the level of certain heroic figures in the LessWrong community, even a small chance of one day becoming like some of my heroes would be really exciting. If I went to law school or worked for a government agency, I think this would be much less likely (though I welcome pushback on this idea— maybe I am underestimating the impact I could have on these paths).
I will now consider what I take to be the strongest counterargument to me pursuing this kind of research. As I noted earlier, my aptitude for maths is quite poor.[1] But what if breakthroughs in theoretical research on rationality will only come from those who are good at maths? For example, parts of cognitive science involve simulating computation using mathematical models. Alternatively, one could think that making progress on these problems will involve analyzing huge troves of empirical data. If so, a person with a talent for maths will probably be faster at skimming through papers that involve statistical analysis. One could say: ‘Sure, the SEP article on akrasia is mostly conceptual analysis. But this traditional kind of philosophy isn’t what we need right now.’ However, even if this were correct,[2] it seems possible that there are ways of integrating conceptual and empirical work which (bad at math) philosophical types could be good at. I don’t know how far this is true, so I am interested to hear your thoughts on this.
A final point I have been considering: even if I am less likely to make a breakthrough than somebody with a talent for maths, could spending a couple of years on this kind of research be my best option anyway? It seems like doing so would give me a better understanding of several LessWrong ideas, which could be good in all sorts of ways. For example, it might make me better at (responsibly) ‘spreading the word’ about said ideas. When discussing EA issues for instance, I have found that knowing common counterarguments in advance (and being ready with responses), has helped me engage with people immensely. It also helped me understand which parts of EA are slam dunks that I can confidently argue for, and which parts I think are on shakier ground or outright disagree with. I am much more of a ‘baby’ when it comes to the ideas of LessWrong (and epistemology, cog sci., phil. of psych, etc.— thus far I have mostly focused on ethics), so assuming that the material here (and in these areas in general) is worth critically engaging with, going through this process could yield great benefits.
Thank you to everyone who gives me career advice in this thread!
Even though I may be ‘above average’ compared to the general population, I am significantly worse than the average CS/econ student.
Though a lot of traditional philosophy seems to me to be really worthwhile, I don't have a deep enough understanding of metaphilosophy to say exactly how valuable this methodology will be in the future, compared to other approaches. Further, if it is true that some research employing the methods of traditional philosophy will continue to be really valuable, I don't have a solid position on how many people should be conducting such research.