The Nonlinear Library EA - Mediocre EAs: career paths and how do they engage with EA? by mikbp
Apr 11, 2024
01:41
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Mediocre EAs: career paths and how do they engage with EA?, published by mikbp on April 11, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum.
[Let's speak in third person here. Nobody likes to be called mediocre and I'm asking for people's experiences so let's make it (a bit) easier to speak freely. If you give an answer, you can be explaining your situation or that of someone you know.]
We all know that EA organizations search for and are full of brilliant (and mostly young) people. But what do EAs that are not brilliant do? Even many brilliant EAs are not able to work in EA organizations (see this post for example), but their prospects to having high impact careers and truly contribute to EA are good. However, most people are mediocre, many are not even able to get 1-1 in 80.000h or other similar help. This is frustrating and may make it difficult to engage for longer with EA.
These people have their "normal" jobs, get older, start creating families, time is scarce... and the priority of EA in their life inevitably falls. Regularly meeting is probably far out of reach. Even writing occasional posts in the forum probably demands way too much time --more so knowing that not-super-well-researched-and-properly-written-posts-by-unknown-users usually get down-voted early on making them invisible and so, mostly useless to write.
So I'd like to know what is the relationship with "the community" of mediocre EAs, particularly of a bit older ones. How do they exercise their EA muscle?
It'd be also cool to have a very short description of their career paths as well.
Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org
[Let's speak in third person here. Nobody likes to be called mediocre and I'm asking for people's experiences so let's make it (a bit) easier to speak freely. If you give an answer, you can be explaining your situation or that of someone you know.]
We all know that EA organizations search for and are full of brilliant (and mostly young) people. But what do EAs that are not brilliant do? Even many brilliant EAs are not able to work in EA organizations (see this post for example), but their prospects to having high impact careers and truly contribute to EA are good. However, most people are mediocre, many are not even able to get 1-1 in 80.000h or other similar help. This is frustrating and may make it difficult to engage for longer with EA.
These people have their "normal" jobs, get older, start creating families, time is scarce... and the priority of EA in their life inevitably falls. Regularly meeting is probably far out of reach. Even writing occasional posts in the forum probably demands way too much time --more so knowing that not-super-well-researched-and-properly-written-posts-by-unknown-users usually get down-voted early on making them invisible and so, mostly useless to write.
So I'd like to know what is the relationship with "the community" of mediocre EAs, particularly of a bit older ones. How do they exercise their EA muscle?
It'd be also cool to have a very short description of their career paths as well.
Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org