If we keep focusing on students we won’t be able to fix the mentorship gap. At the moment we have lots of people looking for guidance and very few people able to provide the right level of support.
I’d love to get more thoughts on this. In my model, a lot of things for which there is a mentorship gap, the lack is of mentors with very relevant-to-EA kinds of experience—how to successfully run an EA-aligned organisation, knowledge of AI alignment, research taste working on EA projects, and that it is not significantly more difficult for a smart young person to skill up in these things than an older professional. The flexibility that students have in changing their focus comes in really handy here.
There are other things like how to get certain types of policy careers or climb some non-EA ladders in general that don’t fit the above. And outreach to people with that knowledge and experience seems valuable.
I’d love to get more thoughts on this. In my model, a lot of things for which there is a mentorship gap, the lack is of mentors with very relevant-to-EA kinds of experience—how to successfully run an EA-aligned organisation, knowledge of AI alignment, research taste working on EA projects, and that it is not significantly more difficult for a smart young person to skill up in these things than an older professional. The flexibility that students have in changing their focus comes in really handy here.
There are other things like how to get certain types of policy careers or climb some non-EA ladders in general that don’t fit the above. And outreach to people with that knowledge and experience seems valuable.