I went to high school in the USA, in the 2000s, so it has been roughly twenty years. I attended a public highschool, that wasn't particularly well-funded nor impoverished. There were no ethics or philosophy courses offered. There was not education on moral philosophy, aside from that which is gained through literature in an English class (such as reading Lord of the Flies or Fahrenheit 451 or To Kill a Mockingbird).

There is a Facebook group for EA Education, but my impression is that it isn't very active.

My (uninformed, naïve) guess is that this isn't very tractable, because education tends to be controlled by the government and there are a lot of vested interests. The argument would basically be "why should we teach these kids about being a good person when we could instead use that time to teach them computer programming/math/engineering/language/civics?" It is a crowded space with a lot of competing interests already.

Some musings about experience and coaching. I saw another announcement relating to mentorship/coaching/career advising recently. It looked like the mentors/coaches/advisors were all relatively junior/young/inexperienced. This isn't the first time I've seen this. Most of this type of thing I've seen in and around EA involves the mentors/advisors/coaches being only a few years into their career. This isn't necessarily bad. A person can be very well-read without having gone to school, or can be very strong without going to a gym, or can speak excellent Japanese without having ever been to Japan. A person being two or three or four years into their career doesn't mean that it is impossible for them to have have good ideas and good advice.^[1] But it does seem a little... odd. The skepticism I feel is similar to having a physically frail person as a fitness trainer: I am assessing the individual on a proxy (fitness) rather than on the true criteria (ability to advise me regarding fitness). Maybe that thinking is a bit too sloppy on my part.

This doesn't mean that if you are 24 and you volunteer as a mentor that you should stop; you aren't doing anything wrong. And I wouldn't want some kind a silly and arbitrary rule, such as "only people age 40+ are allowed to be career coaches." And there are some people doing this kind of work that have a decade or more of professional experience; I don't want to make it sound like all of the people doing coaching and advising are fresh grads.

I wonder if there are any specific advantages or disadvantages to this 'junior skew.' Is there a meaningful correlation between length of career and ability to help other people with their careers? 

EA already skews somewhat young, but from the last EA community survey it looks like the average age was around 29. So I wonder why are the vast majority of people doing mentorship/coaching/career advising are younger than that? Maybe the older people involved in EA are disproportionality not employed for EA organizations and are thus less focused on funneling people into impactful careers? I do have the vague impression that many 35+ EAs lean more toward earn-to-give. Maybe older EAs tend to be a little more private and less focused on the EA community? Maybe older people simply are less interested, or don't view it as a priority? Maybe the organizations that employ/hire coaches all prefer young people? Maybe this is a false perception and I'm engaging in sloppy generalization from only a few anecdotes?

1. ^{^}

   And the other huge caveat is that you can't really know what a person's professional background is from a quick glance at their LinkedIn Profile and the blurb that they share on a website, any more than you can accurately guess age from a profile photo. People sometimes don't list everything. I can see that someone earned a bachelor's degree in 2019 or 2020 or 2021, but maybe they didn't follow a "standard" path: maybe they had a 10-year career prior to that, so guesses about being fairly young or junior are totally off. As always, drawing conclusions based on tiny snippets of information with minimal context is treacherous territory.

Thanks for writing this!

In a vaguely financial markets/efficient market hypothesis train of thought, if you can identify the 'undervalued' teams/organizations, there is (presumably?) some kind of benefit in that.

This may be ridiculously simplistic: I often think about how a person who invests $100 million and earns $1 million will be praised much more than a person who invests $100 and earned $20. In some contexts it matters "what are the absolute results" and in some contexts what really matters is "what were your results given what you had." Sure, I would rather have $1 million than $20, but I'd want to find the person that can get a 20% return and provide them with additional resources.

basic accounting ratios and financial analysis are quite helpful for getting a basic view on return on donations and high level valuations of charities.

Strongly agree. When I took a financial accounting course, learning about the ratios was the moment when my eyes really opened up and I saw how I could use these tools to make comparisons.

I think that this is very context specific, and will vary quite a bit. I think that it probably isn't worthwhile to spend 30-60 minutes defining "fringe" when talking about fringe ideas. But plenty of concepts have fuzzy or ambiguous meanings, and in those situations clarifying what we actually mean can be useful to make sure we are talking about the same thing (such as 'average income', or 'an EA organization,' or 'private information').

But broadly speaking, I could see your claim being true. Definitions are important, but maybe not quite as important as EA norms and culture implies them to be.

I'm coming back to this after more than a year because I recently read the book Wild Problems: A Guide to the Decisions That Define Us. I found it to be a better-than-average moral guide to good behavior. It leans toward virtue ethics rather than deontology or utilitarianism. I recommend it.

It felt very practical (in the sense of how to approach life). It isn't practical in teaching you a specific/isolated skill, but it is practical in that this nurtures a mindset, an approach, a perspective that will lead to better choices, better relationships, and a better life. To the extent that one's life is like a garden that needs nurturing and cultivation, I think that Wild Problems is a pretty good does of care/water/sunshine.

What are the norms on the EA Forum about ChatGPT-generated content?

If I see a forum post that looks like it was generated by a LLM generative AI tool, it is rude to write a comment asking "Was this post written by generative AI?" I'm not sure what the community's expectations are, and I want to be cognizant of not assuming my own norms/preferences are the appropriate ones.

Unfortunately, I don't know of any good methods for distinguishing other than simply explaining in writing that these are general ideas rather than exact quotes.

I think that this post is helpful, and has a lot of aspects with are ripe for discussion. I think that it might get more people to read it and to think about it if it were split into several smaller forum posts, with each subsection (such as EA devalues human life based on the arbitrary implications of capitalism and privilege) being it's own post. Each of these subsections is its own arguments, and each also has quite a bit of nuance.

If that feels like too much work, I'd be happy to help you copy-and-paste, format, and share this as a series of smaller posts.

Hi Victor. I have a clarification question. For the quotes in this post (such as "Don't do that even though you would love it, because you would have no impact."), are those exact quotes, or are those your own phrasing/description of the types of things that you see and hear?