I was surprised to see that the word “class” appears nowhere in this post.
Once you’ve paid your tuition, college classes are free. And they teach a lot of useful skills if you pick the right ones. It’s great to read articles and work on small projects and find other extracurricular ways to skill up. But I’d hope that anyone organizing an EA group is also choosing good classes to take.
Examples of classes I took in college that felt like “skilling up” (which, collectively, took much more time than founding Yale EA, even on a per-semester basis):
Several writing classes
A negotiation class (funnily enough, Ari Kagan was one of my classmates)
An entrepreneurship class focused on building and scoping a specific business idea
A class where I learned the R programming language
A class on marketing via behavioral economics
I also did a ton of extracurricular campus journalism, which has been exceedingly useful in my career despite being quite disconnected from EA-focused upskilling.
None of this was as time-efficient as targeted reading on EA topics would have been. But targeted reading doesn’t come with certain benefits that classes offer (external project deadlines, free project review from experts, office hours with said experts). And because you have to take classes at college anyway, getting at least some value from them is a huge counterfactual win.
*****
It actually seems okay to me if most of organizers’ “EA time” is spent on marketing-like activities, as long as they are learning and practicing useful skills in their classes and non-EA activities (and as long as group members can tell that their organizers have cool stuff going on outside of EA marketing).
This is similar to something I’ve thought about recently, which is that one option for a highly impactful person looks basically like having their head down and studying for many years, getting into a conventional position, and using the skills they’ve acquired and the leverage in that position for good. I think this is underemphasized and I wonder if that is just because it seems less exciting and different.
Anecdotally I’ve observed some people taking long leaves from college/talking about dropping out (edit: I took a leave from college and it was very beneficial for me! And dropping out might make sense for some people.). There is sometimes a mood of “classes don’t matter.” But I think they often do.
I also think optimizing too much too early can be bad. Some of my most useful classes weren’t what I would have expected them to be before I took them.
I was surprised to see that the word “class” appears nowhere in this post.
Once you’ve paid your tuition, college classes are free. And they teach a lot of useful skills if you pick the right ones. It’s great to read articles and work on small projects and find other extracurricular ways to skill up. But I’d hope that anyone organizing an EA group is also choosing good classes to take.
Examples of classes I took in college that felt like “skilling up” (which, collectively, took much more time than founding Yale EA, even on a per-semester basis):
Several writing classes
A negotiation class (funnily enough, Ari Kagan was one of my classmates)
An entrepreneurship class focused on building and scoping a specific business idea
A class where I learned the R programming language
A class on marketing via behavioral economics
I also did a ton of extracurricular campus journalism, which has been exceedingly useful in my career despite being quite disconnected from EA-focused upskilling.
None of this was as time-efficient as targeted reading on EA topics would have been. But targeted reading doesn’t come with certain benefits that classes offer (external project deadlines, free project review from experts, office hours with said experts). And because you have to take classes at college anyway, getting at least some value from them is a huge counterfactual win.
*****
It actually seems okay to me if most of organizers’ “EA time” is spent on marketing-like activities, as long as they are learning and practicing useful skills in their classes and non-EA activities (and as long as group members can tell that their organizers have cool stuff going on outside of EA marketing).
This is similar to something I’ve thought about recently, which is that one option for a highly impactful person looks basically like having their head down and studying for many years, getting into a conventional position, and using the skills they’ve acquired and the leverage in that position for good. I think this is underemphasized and I wonder if that is just because it seems less exciting and different.
Anecdotally I’ve observed some people taking long leaves from college/talking about dropping out (edit: I took a leave from college and it was very beneficial for me! And dropping out might make sense for some people.). There is sometimes a mood of “classes don’t matter.” But I think they often do.
I also think optimizing too much too early can be bad. Some of my most useful classes weren’t what I would have expected them to be before I took them.