By Julia Wise, Damon Sasi and Chana Messinger
There's a lot of younger people around EA right now. A call with one led to a writing up of some boring "you probably already know this but it's good to make it explicit" advice, which the others of us fleshed out and added to.
Full access is back.
I, Chana, am experimenting with making this a linkpost to a google doc with full comment access. Please feel free to add feedback / thoughts / disagreements, with good epistemic norms (ideally nonanonymous, and putting whether you have thoughts from personal experience as a young person in a community like this, or working with them or neither).
(Experiment meaning comment access might get taken away, or doc might get put on private to reflect on how the experiment is going)
Patrick Collison has a list of good advice for ambitious, talented people aged 10-20.
Was just about to post this
I also like Scott Adams's list of generic skills that "make you luckier" if you're good at most of them:
(though some—golf stands out—are kind of idiosyncratic)
Tyler Cowen's standard generic advice is "find excellent peers and mentors". I agree with that as one of the most valuable things to do, whether teenager or otherwise.
Where
To elaborate on the point that I think Arjun is making, the general tip seems self-evidently good. It's not very valuable to state it, relative to the value of precise tips on HOW to get a mentor or how good this is relative to other good things (to figure out how much it should be prioritised compared to something else).
At a previous job, HR would tell all the new hires to try to find a mentor. However, what they did not mention was that going up to a random senior person and saying 'hello would you be my mentor' was seen as cringe and annoying by many such people!
Useful context: I'm 19. I stopped reading after the "Use your brainspace wisely."
Overall impression: boring as stated :D
More specific feedback:
I hope this feedback is constructive enough to give practical ideas on how to improve this post. Please feel free to let me know if something seems unclear. I'll do my best to give a timely response :-)
Admittedly I’m not a teen but I don’t seem to be able to access the doc.
Yes, currently restricted, sorry.
Invitation-only link post is an interesting format.
A couple of things I can imagine being more likely to write if I'm permitted to do the same.
Suggestion: tell people what to say about themselves in the "Request access" box to help you decide whether to grant access.
It's open to everyone when open, I restricted it because some people wanted to take a closer look first, but thanks for flagging that "restricted" is unclear.
I think it's undesirable to force people to click to outside websites unnecessarily (adds inconvenience for users, makes searching harder, not great for RSS feeds, etc.), but doing so and then almost immediately bait-and-switching the document seems especially bad, as it wastes the time of anyone who clicks on the post.
Sorry about that! Having open comments is a new experiment, so getting some more eyes on it and hoping to open it back up soon. But yeah, maybe I should change the title in the meantime, or put it back in drafts.
But good idea for a future experiment!
It doesn't seem hard to allow this kind of feature to be natively supported by the forum, either by having wiki articles which aren't tags or by allowing a mode where anyone can edit a post.
More here: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/NxWssGagWoQWErRer/community-posts-the-forum-needs-a-way-to-work-in-public