where I need experience to get opportunities, but need opportunities to gain experience

This is a very real issue, and it is a bit of a catch-22. The core of the advice is really to start with little steps.

You need to have experience with projects, employers, or volunteer opportunities. These needs to be good enough that you can describe them on a resume or in a cover letter and they sound decently impressive. They also need to give you stories that you can use to answer questions like "what is the most logistically complex event or project you've been involved in" and "a time when you had to solve a difficult problem." Ideally, these experiences will be at least somewhat relevant to the context/industry of the organization you are applying for, such as if you volunteered for a vegan advocacy organization and later you apply to the Good Food Institute.

Basically, you need to be able to (honestly) appear as an impressive candidate. The details of what 'impressive' means will vary in different contexts: an impressive candidate for event management for existential risk organizations will be different than an impressive candidate for a researcher role focused on animal welfare. But there are general commonalities (clear communication, time management, teamwork, etc.) that exist for almost all roles.

There are also some limited opportunities for building a network if you aren't located in New York, San Francisco, London, or some other city with a good EA network. CEA runs some online programs, I run a couple of book clubs, and many EAG and EAGx conferences offer heavy discounts for people who are students, unemployed, travelling, etc. I think that it isn't as good as living in an EA hub, but there are some options that help a bit. I also perceive a big location-focused bias.

There might also be other skills that could be helpful for professional growth:

• doing self-study through Coursera, EdX, and similar MOOC providers.
• Joining toastmasters
• Doing some sort of paid training course on professionally-relevant skills (such as as a coding bootcamp, a product manager training course, or even just a 'management for beginners' seminar). Many of these are available remotely, but most of them cost a lot of money.
• Reading books and listening to podcasts. I benefited a lot from listening to many, many podcasts from Manager Tools and Career Tools.

Finally, I want to argue that a large number of small steps are more realistic than a small number of big steps. Rather than getting some experience, then getting an impressive job, think of it like an incremental process in which you get a little experience, and then you get a low-quality job, and that job allows you to build your experience a little more, which allows you to get a slightly better job, etc. Here is my sloppy attempt at a visualization from MS Paint.

To a certain extent, I think that local/city groups might fit this description. The EA communities in NYC, DC, and Chicago each have their own Slack workspace, and they also do in-person events. For people not in big cities, EA Anywhere's Slack workspace offers a discussion space. None of those are perfect substitutes for the EA Forum, but my vague impression is that each of them is less AI-focused than the EA Forum. There is also an EA Discord, but I haven't interacted with that much so I can't speak to it's style or quality.

As far as events go, there is an online book club in the EA Anywhere's Slack workspace (full disclosure: I organize it, and I think it is great).

Depending on what you are looking for, there is also an Animal Advocacy Forum, although it is far less active than the EA Forum.

A bit of nice discussion/exploration about longtermism over on the AskPhilosophy subreddit. The short summary might be something like 'don't conflate longtermism with caring about future generations.' Since the EA forum seems to be mostly focused on things other than helping people understand philosophy, I thought it might be nice to share some stuff focused on that.

https://www.reddit.com/r/askphilosophy/comments/1ktiqm8/i_dont_get_the_controversy_with_longtermism 

Tentatively and naively, I think this is accurate.

I'm wondering if there would be any way to target/access this population? If this campaigns existed, what action would it take? Some groups of people are relatively easy to access/target due to physical location or habits (college-aged people often congregate at/around college, vegan people often frequent specific websites or stores, etc.).

I imagine that someone much more knowledgeable about advertising/marketing than I am would have better ideas. All I can come up with off the top of my head is targeted social media advertisements: people who work at one of these several companies and who have recently searched for one of these few terms, etc.

Not obvious at all, and useful/helpful to share and remind us all of. 🙂

In the spirit of encouraging skepticism and critical thinking, I want to encourage everyone to remember how easy it is to believe false/inaccurate or fraudulent research if you don't have contextual expertise. Even well-known and well-respected academics like Acemoglu can endorse things without fully digging into the details.

I almost feel obligated to link to the blog post Beware The Man Of One Study (a good reminder to wait for meta analyses and to only update in a "Bayesian" sense) and to the book Science Fictions (excellent for learning about falsehoods in the culture and method of science).

Some notes about the graphs:

• These are from a project I did several months ago using data from the Common Data Set, from College Scorecard, from their Form 990 tax filings, and some data from the college's websites.
• The selection of the non-Harvard schools is fairly arbitrary. For that particular project I just wanted to select a few different types of schools (small liberal arts, more technical focused, etc.) rather than comparing Harvard to other 'hyper elite' schools.
• I left the endowment graph non-logarithmic just to illustrate the ludicrous difference. Yes, I know it is bad design practice and that it obscures the numbers for the non-Harvard schools.

I know that folks in EA often favor donating to more effective things rather than less effective things. With that in mind, I have mixed feelings knowing that many Harvard faculty are donating 10%, and that they are donating to the best funded and most prestigious university in the world.

On the one hand, it is really nice to know that they are willing to put their money where their mouth is when their institution is under attack. I get some warm fuzzy feelings from the idea of defending an education institution against political attacks. On the other hand, Harvard University's endowment is already very large, and Harvard earns a lot of money each year. It is like a very tailored version of a giving pledge: giving to Harvard, giving for one year. Will such a relatively small amount given toward such a relatively large institution do much good? I do wonder what the impact would be if these fairly well-known and well-respected academics announced they were donating 10% to clean water, or to deworming, or to reducing animal suffering. I wonder how much their donations will do for Harvard. 

I'll include a few graphs to illustrate Harvard's financial strength.

(My comment is maybe quibbling a bit too much and being too nit-picky. In general I strongly agree that most people in most situations would benefit from spending less time staring at their phones.)

I think of this less as 'using smartphones causes worse life outcomes,' and more as 'mindlessly scrolling through TikTok, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Reddit^[1], and similar apps cause worse life outcomes.' I use my phone lots for years: flashcards on Anki to learn languages, listening to on Libby, or sometimes even reading books or articles. People can use their screens in wildly different ways. One hour of screen time is not the same as a different hour of screen time, anymore than TV is bad or books are good.^[2]

1. ^{^}

   Of course, users can curate these a lot. The default recommendations tend to be garbage, but if you selectively subscribe to (and block) some channels/users/feeds these can be incredibly useful. Many journalists and academics use Twitter as a primary way to learn about what is going on in their fields.

2. ^{^}

   Is one hour of a toddler watching Cocomelon the same as that toddler watching Bluey or Blue's Clues? Is one hour of reading War and Peace equivalent to one hour of reading Battlefield Earth? Of course not. The quality of what you consume (read, watch, listen to, etc.) matters immensely, and it can vary a lot within a single medium. Even on social media apps, an hour of scrolling through a r/personalfinance is very different than an hour of scrolling through a r/fightporn.

Can't people just buy VWCE/VWRP/IWDA?

Sometimes people can just buy those funds. I'm guessing that people in relatively wealthy/developed economies have the best options (and people living in their home country tend to have better options than people working internationally, since many finance/investment/banking things are restricted by citizenship). Most major European countries probably have services like Interactive Brokers or Vanguard or similar options (although I haven't looked into the details of it). And I assume that things generally are improving over time: things available now weren't available in 2015, and things which were available in 2015 weren't available in 2010. Commission-free trading is now very common among the large brokerage firms, which is a huge improvement for the individual investor.

Folks in Europe, UAE, and similarly wealthy/developed areas probably have the best options available to them. The investment options available to a Spaniard or a Emirati are probably better than those available to, say, a Peruvian or a Mozambican or a Vietnamese. A few years back a friend from [undisclosed non-OECD country] was looking to invest her savings, and the least bad option we could find was to pay extra fees to invest through a brokerage in her home country that allowed her to buy American index funds; the native/local funds just weren't very good. So she was able to invest, but it took extra steps and cost her more money to do so.

So I don't want to make it sound like nobody outside of the USA can invest. I just want to emphasize that it is harder for people who don't have the good fortune to be born in or to live in develop countries; they often don't have access (or have to pay more fees for access) to some of the following things, and it is a lot harder to build wealth if you don't have access to these things:

• low fee investment brokerages
• brokerages with commission free trades
• able to invest without risk of currency fluctuations
• index funds/mutual funds that track a good stock market
• being able to invest in global markets without paying extra fees
• tax sheltered/tax advantaged investments (Such at the IRA in the USA, a RRSP in Canada, or a Super in Australia)
• employer sponsored/supported investments/savings (a 401(k) match is fairly common among 'good'/elite/white-collar jobs in the USA)

If you will indulge me in some rambling, one thing that sticks in my memory is learning that a countries economy can grow a lot while it's stock market does quite badly. I wish I had the image to share, but remember an image from a finance class I took showing China's GDP growth over many years alongside it's stock market growth; if a Chinese person had invested a broad index of Chinese stocks, it would have had very modest growth. It disabused me of the notion that I should try to invest in a country if it's economy is growing. And of course, Chinese people have the added challenge that the currency can't be traded freely. And brokerages that technically have operations in China might not be open to retail investors; I recall seeing a few years back that Vanguard opened operations in Shanghai, but it was only private investment advice for high-net-worth individuals, and regular citizens couldn't open their own account. When I lived and worked in China as a foreigner with a visa, I wasn't allowed to invest because all the investment firms required investors to have a China National ID Number. (my apologies for focusing on China so much, it is the area I know best)