Eukaryote Skips Town - Why I'm leaving DC

I’ve spent the past 7 years living in the DC area. I moved out there from the Pacific Northwest to go to grad school – I got my masters in Biodefense from George Mason University, and then I stuck around, trying to move into the political/governance sphere. That sort of happened. But I will now be sort of doing that from rural California rather than DC, and I’ll be looking for something else – maybe something more unusual – do to next.

A friend asked if this means I’m leaving biosecurity behind. No, I’m not, but only to the degree that I was ever actually in biosecurity in the first place. For the past few years I’ve been doing a variety of contracting and research and writing jobs, many of which were biosecurity related, many of which were not. Many of these projects, to be clear, were incredibly cool and interesting, and I’m honored to have been able to be part of them, and hopefully to do more of them in the future.

But when I moved to DC, I was kind of hoping to start a capitol-capital-C Career in biosecurity: in something having to do with policy and governance of emerging technology. This Career, which surely would include 9-5 hours, health insurance, a 401(k), an office with beige carpeting, and maybe a security clearance and wearing a suit all day, well, uh – it never happened.

I tried. But maybe I didn’t try hard enough, or I don’t have the temperament for it, or I faced Structural Oppression, or some combination of the above. I don’t know. So I got by in other ways and kept trying to get a foot in there, for a long time.

Maybe longer than I should have spent. I'm an optimist. But 3 things have happened:

1. True love called.
2. The administration switched out.
3. I think very intelligent AI might dramatically change the world very soon.

True love, and its invitation to move to California, speaks for itself. (Mine says things like “if you put a laboratory-style shaker machine in the oven, you wouldn’t have to stir the onions every five minutes for half an hour”, and then we discuss the logistics of this for an hour, and it’s great. Did you know they make shaking autoclaves? I didn't until yesterday.)

The administration – hoo boy. So I’m not permanently writing off a biosecurity capital-C Career, personally. But I’m kind of guessing that over the next 4 years, the kind of jobs I’d been looking for – junior analyst or research positions in thinktanks or nonprofits or federal agencies – are going to be either flush with great well-qualified candidates looking desperately for new work, or nonexistent. RFK? Fucking RFK in HHS? What the fuck were they thinking? Christ.

Strong AI is a discussion this margin is too narrow to contain. I might be totally wrong about this. It would be my dream to write a “how I got caught up in the AGI x-risk hype even though everything turned out fine” essay 20 years from now. Hell, I'll write a book. But a lot of very smart people are saying things might get weird very soon, and I can’t pretend that “enjoying the old world order while it lasts” isn’t a factor.

I went into biosecurity for utilitarian reasons, influenced by the effective altruism movement. And frankly, despite recent PR hits, I'm still completely on board with all of that. I’m hesitant to write this piece because it’s directly about my EA ambitions, and I’ve talked to a lot of EAs trying to get into biosecurity who want advice, and I have no idea what they should take away from my story or if any of this should be taken as any kind of advice.

I mean, public health in the US, as a political endeavor, is currently being broken into pieces with big hammers. The next four years aren’t a great time to move into biosecurity. But four years will pass and someone knowledgeable might be able to fix it later, right? Or if avian flu spills over into humans and it’s even fractionally as deadly as feared, maybe the political will to fight diseases will return. I don’t know.

And I’m also hesitant to give advice because I’m a sample size of 1 who clearly doesn’t know what went wrong. I really could have tried harder, and I legitimately feel like someone who’s a lot like me but 5% more ambitious or 5% less depressed, or even just 5% luckier, might have been able to make it work! A lot of people I know, who are weird and into effective altruism and depressed and more, have been able to make it work!

(If you're still here because you want career advice, I tentatively wave you towards "Want to make a difference on policy and governance? Become an expert in something specific and boring". Otherwise, this post of mine isn't really going to help you.)

A friend who I’ve had some professional interaction with came to my going-away party. Late into the evening and a little whiskey-warmed, they mentioned that they thought that my aspiring political career had stalled out because I didn’t do a good job of presenting myself as a serious professional, that I spent my weirdness points on things like “being a little awkward” and “being gender-nonconforming”.

I don’t know how right my friend is. I thought this was an interesting take. It's not like it hasn't crossed my mind.

At first glance, the notion fills me with a righteous fury – like, if the only way I could make public health better was by fulfilling my socially-condoned sex role like a good girl, maybe public health can suck it!

But public health is measured in lives, so I don’t actually believe that. If you told me right now that I could with 100% certainty swing the ideal biosecurity career if I just femmed it up in the workplace, I’d do it. It’s worth it, because it’s the entire goddamn future of humanity, or at the very least, some of humanity.

But I guess my model of classic DC early-career presentability, at a very basic level, still goes like this:

And you can have cons if you have enough pros to (in an employer’s eyes) outweigh them. This is, again, just a tailored version of weirdness points / idiosyncrasy credits. I guess I was hoping for employers who would be chill about the arbitrary and stupid cons, and/or that I’d be good enough at my work that the cons were outweighed by the pros.

Nobody ever gave me this advice unprompted, so maybe that’s something I can say – you will not necessarily know for sure.

But I had opportunities to ask, also – professors and DC-oriented college career advisors and colleagues and friends – ask them what kind of impression I was making, what was holding me back. And I didn’t, not really. That’s on me. It could have been any number of things. Doing more interview practice. Sending more cold emails. Not using "Times Sans Serif" in my resume even though it's a great font.

Now, in my defense: Even if I had asked them, any individual of them might not have a good understanding of what was happening (for instance, I was often the only gender-nonconforming person in a workspace or classroom – does a much older professor, who thinks of themself as accepting person, really know how much of a ding that is?) – so I’d have to ask a lot of people. Some causes are more tractable than others, like, I know roughly how to change “visibly queer” but not how to fix “awkward”. And all that sounds really unpleasant, especially since it’d be taking a lot of mental energy I could use to be better at the work instead.

Also, while we’re being honest here: can you imagine if you force-femmed yourself for five years to improve your career chances, and then your career still didn’t pan out? It’d be humiliating! I don’t know that my ego could stand it.

(If you’d be into that, then imagine pretending to be a proud card-carrying ideologue of a political party you hate. It's that kind of feeling.)

So, I’m out. Fuck that, fuck this, I’m off, I’m out, this eukaryote is heading west. I can do something useful somewhere else! If not, I can do something somewhere else!

Somewhere I can look at mountains.

Also, while I’m drawing my little lines in the sand: I’m bisexual, asexual^[1], polyamorous, and gender non-conforming. None of this will come as a surprise to anyone I’ve known well in the last few years, but I’ve avoided saying these hyper-publicly so far because of that silver specter of maximizing career capital. What if someone looks back at my work? Surely I'll want to be maximally unobjectionable?

But now I’m laying that ghost in its grave. I’m upset at a political tide that sees these as frivolous luxuries or imagined deviations from a true universal way of life or worse, when they have led to some of the best things in my life and I feel more myself than ever – and like, just when society was getting good about them too! Fuck hatred, fuck fear, fuck indifference, and to that end, fuck closets. I am who I am, a person whose preferences are a little weird and a little hard to explain but ultimately harmless, and no amount of haranguing over the Woke Left will change that.

I also have depression and ADHD. I felt weird about putting them in the same category as the queer stuff because, frankly, they're more clearly negatives. However, consider:

1. Hiring bias against people with disabilities continues to be hella illegal
2. People don’t talk about them enough and the political winds blowing toward these things is astonishingly bad
3. I’m the one getting the worst of my brain, not anyone else, and the facts will be true whether or not I say them out loud, so let’s say them out loud.

Hey guys? Depression sucks so bad! I don’t even have a severe case but the degree to which it drags down your entire quality of life is vast and insidious. If you know what it’s like, you know, and please be compassionate to yourself; if you don’t, please be compassionate to those around you.

Okay, now that we've gotten that out:

For better or worse, be it bravery or stupidity, I find it very hard to be someone other than who I am. I will continue to do what I love, which includes reading and writing and thinking about biosecurity and diseases and animals and the end of the world and all that, and I will scrape out my existence one way or another. I hope to write more often. Thanks for joining me, and I hope you’ll stay tuned.

(Also, if you want to rent a room in Arlington VA, hit me up.)

Crossposted to: [EukaryoteWritesBlog.com – Substack – LessWrong – Effective Altruism Forum]

1. ^{^}

   "How are you both bisexual and asexual?" Okay, I'm biromantic and asexual. I usually say "bisexual" because more people have heard of that one. This is the one terminology quibble you get with me. Hope it was all you wanted and more!