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Deliberate Grad School | Andrew Critch

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Among my friends interested in rationality, effective altruism, and existential risk reduction, I often hear: “If you want to have a real positive impact on the world, grad school is a waste of time. It’s better to use deliberate practice to learn whatever you need instead of working within the confines of an institution.” While I’d agree that grad school will not make you do good for the world, if you’re a self-driven person who can spend time in a PhD program deliberately acquiring skills and connections for making a positive difference, I think you can make grad school a highly productive path, perhaps more so than many alternatives. In this post, I want to share some advice that I’ve been repeating a lot lately for how to do this: That’s all I have for now. The main sentiment behind most of this, I think, is that you have to be deliberate to get the most out of a PhD program, rather than passively expecting it to make you into anything in particular. Grad school still isn’t for eve

Deliberate Grad School | Andrew Critch Andrew Critch PhD, UC Berkeley Skip to content Home Research Papers Software Selected talks Activities Blog Jekyll posts (2018-present) WordPress posts (2014-2018) Life AI Safety Effectiveness Altruism LessWrong posts (2010-2012) Videos Math Robust Rental Harmony PDTAI : Provability, Decision Theory and Artificial Intelligence SAGS at Berkeley: Student Algebraic Geometry Seminar MPHD at Berkeley: Math, Productivity, Happiness & Decision-making AIM 2011 Singular Learning Theory slides BASS: Berkeley Algebraic Statistics Seminar MathOverflow Random Mat

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