TL;DR People pursuing impact generally do cool-sounding stuff. They should make said stuff easily discoverable on social media so others can find, admire, and get inspired to do similar work.
I’ve noticed a strange trend whilst browsing LinkedIn: the profiles of those pursuing effective careers are, on average, less verbose and more understated than those of similar status in adjacent (and generally less impactful) industries. I think there’s two reasons at play…
If you’re chasing impact, you’re probably very selective with where you spend your time and money in a work context. The world has a million problems to solve and even making a dent takes years of focused effort and devotion. You’re likely to be cognizant of the utils your frivolously-spent dollars could save if instead sent to the Shrimp Welfare Project. You’re likely to feel like you have to continuously optimize where your focus goes. Given that, how could you justify wasting your precious work time on something so seemingly self-aggrandizing? It feels selfish. You’re ok with others learning about your work through word of mouth. That’ll be enough.
Cynical corpospeak is LinkedIn’s lingua franca. It’s already grating if you’re in a position where you have to capitulate and post slop or lose potential exposure and career capital. It’s downright repelling to people that derive a strong sense of meaning from their work. People chasing impact are more inclined to view LinkedIn as a place where others disingenuously parade meaningless milestones around to further their impactless careers. They also rarely have to engage in such behavior to land impactful work; EA-adjacent hiring managers select more for virtuous character traits instead than a specific host of ATS keywords. If you’ve escaped such a dystopian rat race, why would you go back and redirect people from the starting line? You’re better than them, after all.
This sentiment, though hyperbolic, underscores what I believe to be a reactionary feeling diffused across the EA community. It’s refusing to engage with a useful system because it’s aesthetically unappealing or superficially similar to something you resent. The reflex to distance yourself from LinkedIn’s cringe culture by abstaining is worth examining. In fact, I think it’s potentially quite costly.
An understated digital presence on LinkedIn, Substack, and Twitter keeps your work invisible to people outside your circles. The people who most need to see that pandemic prevention is something urgent and tractable aren’t at EAGs or learning about your work through anecdotes at a Rationalist Bay Area party. They’re on LinkedIn, watching a Cluely ad, slowly internalizing that pumping out AI slop with a startup wrapper is the only way they’ll overcome Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. We can show them otherwise. We can show them their technical abilities and naive ambition can actualize truly heroic aims. I’m profoundly lucky that happened to me, with no thanks to those who preserved their contrarian minimalism over online legibility.
Personal visibility isn’t vanity, it’s a vehicle for diffusing important ideas! EAs forget that an exceptionally impactful career is incredibly untraditional and worthy of renown in the mainstream circles. When it’s clear that your work betters the lives of thousands, you become a memorable case study someone could latch onto when scrolling LinkedIn. Your profile could be the start of their rabbit hole into discourse around important problems, what people are doing about them, and how they can help!
So, update your LinkedIn! Write a verbose summary of what you’re interested in and how it connects to important problems. Write about how your career transition 10x’d your personal fulfillment. Talk about how you work with incredibly interesting concepts, technologies, and people while profoundly improving lives! Impactful careers are amazing but so hard to find, let’s fix that!
Thanks for this thoughtful piece.
One thing that I worry about when communicating on LinkedIn about EA affiliations is do-gooder derogation. Currently I am in a position where I don't have to worry about that as much, but I can easily imagine that employers might feel they can make a lowball offer to someone who is "just going to give it to charity anyway" (versus spend it on private school or whatever). For this reason I set my EA group affiliations on LinkedIn to private.