Holden Karnofsky: preference

Transcript context

…Right. Now your written career advice emphasizes building aptitudes and specializing, but when I look at your career––, it's all over the place, right? We were just talking about it at the beginning of the interview. You started off in GiveWell, then you were working at Open Philanthropy and now you're forecasting AI. So how do you think about this kind of thing? Are you specializing? What's going on here? I don't know if I really forecast AI. I mostly distill and bring together analyses that others have done, and I manage people who work on that sort of thing. The career advice I often give is that it's really good to have something you're very focused on that you're specializing in, and that you're trying to be the best in the world at. The general theme of my career is just taking questions, especially questions about how to give effectively, where it's just like no one's really gotten started on this question. Even doing a pretty crappy analysis can be better than what already exists. So often what I have done in my career, what I consider myself to have kind of specialized in, in a sense, is I do the first cut crappy analysis of some question that has not been analyzed much and is very important. Then I build a team to do better analysis of that question. That's been my general pattern. I think that's the most generalizable skill I've had, but I have switched around because I do think that I've kind of at various points in my career just said, “Hey, here's something that's getting very little attention and it's very important, and it's worth the sacrifice of the specialized knowledge I built up in one area to switch into this other area that I think I ought to be working on. ” What does the logo on the Cold Takes blog mean?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.