> I'm going to go out on a limb and say that political scientists that spend their entire working life studying political science and teaching students the most important questions in political science
Political scientists will know the most important questions in political science as judged by intellectual interest, but that's just not the question being asked here. They are asking which questions in political science will have the biggest impact on the world as judged by a utilitarian and long-termist framework, and I don't see why political scientists would have a confident answer to that.
Likewise, I am a physicist with expertise in what questions are of intellectual interest to physicists, but I don't think that I or my colleagues have good ready answers to which physics questions will have the biggest impact on the world.
> And this community overlap clearly has more of an impact on ...
But the community overlap wasn't a random event that is just now influencing this investigation. The members of the community were attracted to each other because they were convinced by certain abstract arguments. (LessWrong is concentrated in Berkeley while 80k Hours is UK based and the members mostly hail from there and Australia. They found each other through the internet and through the Oxford philosophy department.) You can certainly disagree with the arguments, but chalking this up to having overlap with some dorky community is a cheap ad hominem.
> They are asking which questions in political science will have the biggest impact on the world as judged by a utilitarian and long-termist framework, and I don't see why political scientists would have a confident answer to that.
> Likewise, I am a physicist with expertise in what questions are of intellectual interest to physicists, but I don't think that I or my colleagues have good ready answers to which physics questions will have the biggest impact on the world.
While answering the question involves predicting the future in ways no one should be overly confident in, it's worth noting that social impact questions of that type are, in fact, within the domain of political science in a way they are not within the domain of physics, so practitioners within the two fields aren't exactly similarly situated with regard to the question.
Sort of. Some political scientists are certainly more likely to estimate the impact of their policy suggestions than physicsts, mostly because physicists rarely make policy suggestions. But I don't think they try to survey all political science questions and systematically compare them along some measure of impact. I expect the hypothetically disagreement between Dafoe and a random political scientist is based on a disagreement outside the expertise (the importance and long-term impact of AI in general). Likewise, physicists wouldn't tell you much about the impact of their work because it hinges on things (e.g., econ) outside their expertise.
Political scientists will know the most important questions in political science as judged by intellectual interest, but that's just not the question being asked here. They are asking which questions in political science will have the biggest impact on the world as judged by a utilitarian and long-termist framework, and I don't see why political scientists would have a confident answer to that.
Likewise, I am a physicist with expertise in what questions are of intellectual interest to physicists, but I don't think that I or my colleagues have good ready answers to which physics questions will have the biggest impact on the world.
> And this community overlap clearly has more of an impact on ...
But the community overlap wasn't a random event that is just now influencing this investigation. The members of the community were attracted to each other because they were convinced by certain abstract arguments. (LessWrong is concentrated in Berkeley while 80k Hours is UK based and the members mostly hail from there and Australia. They found each other through the internet and through the Oxford philosophy department.) You can certainly disagree with the arguments, but chalking this up to having overlap with some dorky community is a cheap ad hominem.