kuhanj
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Posts 18
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I think donations in the next 2-3 days would be very useful (probably even more useful than door-knocking and phone-banking if one had to pick) for TV ads, but after that the benefits diminish somewhat steeply over the remaining days.
Amazing, thank you Everett! I'd love to hang out together. :)
Thank you for all your encouragement over the past few years for students and newer community members to post on the forum, and for actually making it easier and less scary to do so. I definitely would not have felt anywhere near as comfortable getting started without your encouragement and post editing offers. I've replaced Facebook binging with EA Forum binging since I both enjoyed it so much and found it really valuable for my learning. You will be missed, and incredibly hard to replace. Thank you for all your hard work!
Hi Michael, thanks for writing this up! These are important topics, and I'd love to see more discussion of them. Just want to clarify two potential misconceptions: I don’t think it’s no longer hard to get a direct work job, although I do feel reasonably confident that it isn’t as hard to get funding to do direct work as it was a few years ago (either through employment or grants, though I would probably still stand by this statement if we were only considering employment). Secondly, on this part:
Kuhan mentioned that to it's not easy to get an EA job if you're not willing to work that hard, both working hard during the job and preparing to get the job.
Is it the case that if you're hard-working and motivated and aligned with the values of the organizations you're applying for, then it's not that hard to get a job that works on a top cause?
There may have been some miscommunication in our conversation - I didn’t mean to imply that just being willing to work hard is enough to get a direct work job, or that people who aren’t able to get direct work positions aren’t able to due to their work ethic. What I meant to communicate is that I’ve found individuals who have a strong understanding of EA ideas, take actions (especially career planning) based on these ideas, and have a strong work ethic have had a lot of success finding direct work opportunities (through applying to jobs at EA orgs, applying for grants to run projects/do research/etc, and starting new organizations).
Edited for clarity - it might be a US thing, but I'd encourage others to try it out and see how it goes unless there are strong reasons not to.
80,000 Hours as a (very thorough) resource for individuals trying to do good/maximize their impact with their careers feels like a big accomplishment. I found EA when I googled "Highest impact careers/how to have the biggest impact with your career", and didn't find anything anywhere near as compelling as 80,000 Hours. I think their counterfactual impact is probably quite massive given how insufficient impact-oriented career advice is outside of 80K (and the broader communities/research/thinking/work that have led to 80K being what it is).
Most of the impact is indirect so I'm not sure how much this answers the original question. But 80K's impact from community building (e.g. being the most common entry point into EA nowadays, the podcast, etc.), career plan changes, and maybe most importantly, being the best resource for impact-prioritizing people looking for career advice (and especially students), feel very noteworthy.
Thanks Jake! Stanford EA and I would definitely not be where we are now without your initial mentorship/ motivation, and ongoing guidance and support! I can't thank you enough. :)
Great points, thanks for commenting Ben! Responding to each of the points:
In my experience, running local group events was like an o-ring process. If you're running a talk, you need to get the marketing right, the operations right, and the follow up right. If you miss any of these, you lose most of the value. This means that having an organiser who is really careful about each stage can dramatically increase the impact of the group. So, I'd highlight 'really caring' as one of the key traits to have.
I think I mostly agree with this (and strongly agree that 'really caring' is a key trait to have - I imagine that comes across in the post but perhaps stating it more clearly would be beneficial). I'm not sure we'd disagree on this, but I do think aggressive 80/20ing often makes sense, rather than being a perfectionist (e.g. it's probably fine not to do follow up with everyone who participates in your fellowship/comes to your intro talk, but you need to do good follow up with the few people who seem most likely to get get highly involved/be very impactful). Maybe that's what you meant by doing things "right" in the first place though, in which case there's no disagreement.
I think one-off talks can be powerful, but they have to be combined with one-on-one follow up, or otherwise funnelling people into a fellowship etc. We did a lot of this in the early days and found a lot of great people like this. One-off talks should be optimised for marketing & reach, to find people for the more in-depth programmes.
I agree. One thing I forgot to mention in the post that I'll add in after this comment (although it is already a novel rip :P) is that Mauricio and I spent a bunch of time trying to make our Intro to EA presentation as good as possible (script and slides here - the slides could definitely look much better), and I give it each quarter to get people to sign up for our fellowship and offer 1:1s with anyone at the event who's interested. I think making a good intro to EA presentation is one of the highest value things I've done in the last year. Thanks for bringing this up!
I feel a bit uneasy about encouraging people to live together. It sometimes works well (& I've done it), but it can also lead to drama (e.g. romantic entanglements), a loss of work-life balance / ability to separate your doing good life from your personal life, and for people to lose their friends outside of EA, and I have think having a social network outside of EA is really valuable. One option is just to do it for 1-2yr as a way of making deeper friendships.
Interesting, I guess in the context of student life living with friends is quite normal, and my guess is the upsides (largely becoming better friends, learning a lot about EA, seeing how dedicated EAs lead their daily lives) tend to outweigh the downsides, but of course this depends a lot on the specifics of the person, who they're living with, for how long, etc.
I agree a career focused pitch seems most attractive - that was part of why we set up 80k in the first place :) I hope we can create some better resources for the local groups to use, like the next version of key ideas (turned into a series of articles more like the old career guide), and eventually a better career-focused book.
These all sound amazing - I can't wait, and would love to help out where I can. Thanks for all your work starting and running 80K, it's how I first found EA (when I googled something like "Highest Impact Careers"), and I've been hooked ever since. Keep up the incredible work, the value you're providing to students (and others/the world) is tremendous! :)
:P