I think karma is awarded more by generality of subject matter than writing style per se? This post I spent a few hours on (including the hour I spent rereading the book) has x3 the karma of another post I put up around the same time that represents the outcome of about a year of part-time research. 

And this is perfectly natural! Everyone on the EA forum has some reason to care about good writing, only some small subset of people on the EA forum  have some reason to care about genetic engineering detection.  

Very good to know! I've never heard of a US master's program being paid. 

I wonder if the interest in US-based PhDs has something to do with the larger US academic offerings--or maybe it's just that unusually energetic people are both more likely to have early research experience and more likely to go to the US.

It's actually quite remarkable--the way we teach writing to students is anti-useful.  You could possibly do a worse job than we're currently doing but I don't immediately see how. 

There's something of a pepperoni airplane effect here. Everyone wants to think they're Proust.  I analogize it to the Picasso thing--you need to "learn the rules" before you can usefully take the training wheels off and start "breaking" them. Scare quotes intentional. 

I disagree re: Murakami (haven't read the others). I find him to be communicating extremely clearly. The actual book is full of specific examples of things that we think of as artful and indirect but that are actually bending the full force of themselves  into conveying  a very bright and specific concept.

I worked with Cass on the project mentioned and moving the needle on PPE seems much harder than I initially thought. The demand/scale thing is a real killer. There might be some solution here but it seems really muddled to me and I don't think it's throwing scrappy young engineers at it. Though of course the funding situation is different now too.

Good post--not least because I think this gives me insight into what the skeptics of EA-in-politics are thinking. I have a few responses:

It seems to me that two things are being conflated here: EAs individually running for office, and EA as a movement exercising political power. The latter, I agree, sounds like a terrible idea, for all the reasons you point out. But most of the arguments you bring up don't apply to the former. My model of EA in electoral politics looks a lot more like individual EAs (who are themselves pre-selected for being unusually charismatic, well connected, or otherwise well-fit for politics) behaving as basically conventional politicians, being team players, but making EA issues their top priorities on the rare occasions when they come up. That's perfectly consistent with pulling the rope sideways. 

There's a lot of middle ground between making EA as a movement a faction of the Democratic party and limiting EA involvement in politics to lobbying (though I think we should of course also be doing lobbying.) 

As far as I know, advocates for EAs running for political office are much more excited for EAs to run as Republicans than as Democrats, for precisely the reasons you outline (and several others). 

Finally, I want to comment that things like the Flynn campaign were always longshots, and that's fine; this is a numbers game and is largely going to be paying off over decades, not years.

Completely agree, and I'll second the impression that EA marketers primarily activate and recruit other EA marketers. 

Another way to frame this dynamic - 

If someone is making the claim to you that these problems are the overwhelmingly most important things to do with your life, then why aren't they working on them? In a way it almost feels self-defeating. The people who best activated and motivated me to work directly on hard problems were people who themselves were working on them.

This is all anecdotal, of course, but I do think we need an epistemically healthier model of community building, for these and other reasons.

I think this is pretty much the case for many (especially non-STEM)  fields in the US, too--my sense is that it's a consequence of funding/competition. 

I totally agree that they're not useless--prestige/signalling in general is useful! And I think the median student is probably not going to be the kind of person who can fail out and still be wildly successful. 

But, I think they are way overvalued. If the choice is between getting straight A's and honor societies and awards, or getting B's and also  getting paid to do research,  I think too many people choose the former over the latter.

Thanks for this wonderful comment! Let me try and address your questions:

• I’m uncertain about the compensation/signaling/networking value for the research tech role. It's not clear why it offers more returns than available to a few years in industry, even as a non-prestigious, entry level graduate.

I think actually a few years in industry is almost certainly better, though I think there's a lot of overlap, and of course heavily depends on the field/industry. Major cruxes include I would say that if you have a substantial interest in later pursuing a PhD, that probably indicates being a research tech

The reason I recommend these roles is explicitly because they are easy to get. I remember how I felt nearing the end of my undergraduate physics degree. I had no idea how to even begin applying to industry jobs. It all seemed terribly scary and overwhelming; the returns on spending countless hours applying to jobs seemed low. If your counterfactual role to working as a research tech is going into industry, I would say you should probably go to industry.  

But if your counterfactual sort of feels like it's going to be just getting through classes, or going for unpaid internships, or sitting on the couch panicking about the future, then consider sending some emails to smart interesting people absolutely desperate for labor.  Particularly, if you are contacting people at the university you currently attend, it's pretty much part of the professor's job to train you,  even if they don't really need labor.

If you're still a student, an academic lab is also likely to be more flexible about letting you do interesting part time work. It's all about accessibility.

• In addition to the fact that many academic labs are exploitative (as the OP does touch on), I am concerned that even good and kind academic labs can give an off-color work experience/incentives/worldview, as I think they are not quite “real world environments”. I think a technician will get the worst of this while losing a lot of the positives?

"Technician" is sort of an imprecise title. I've designed and lead research projects as a "research assistant"/"research tech." I find this is heavily dependent on the lab, and something that you should absolutely try to feel out during the interview. I'll edit the post with some advice on this front. 

The nice thing about roles like these is that they are relatively informal so that if it sucks it will not be that hard to just leave. 

That said, while a lab is more like a "real world" environment than a class, this is a real weakness. Again, if you can easily get an industry job (or paid internship), that is probably  a better choice, unless you are explicitly trying to boostrap yourself into a PhD without running the application gauntlet. 

• I don’t have a strong model of how this approach can lead to research that many in the EA community think is most valuable—"lead researchers with field leading potential".

I'm not sure I entirely understand this point. Probably roles like this are not going to be in terribly directly impactful areas. I think the value of this approach is for bootstrapping yourself into an impactful role if you had a rough start--or more generally, doing better than just going to class and sitting around panicking about the future. I think this approach offers a good package deal for young EAs who don't feel very effective or impressive and have absolutely no idea what to do next, or how.