Thanks for sharing more details on your perspective.
For context, I’ve been following GiveWell since 2012 and took the Giving What We Can pledge + started Yale’s EA group in 2014. But I wasn’t often in touch with people who worked at EA orgs until 2017.
My job puts me in touch with a lot of new people (e.g. first-time Forum posters, people looking to get into EA work), and I find them to be roughly as enthusiastic as the student group members I’ve worked with. But that’s often tempered by a kind of conservatism that seems to come from EA messaging—they’re more concerned about portraying ideas poorly, accidentally causing harm through their work, etc.
This may apply less to more experienced people, though I wonder how much of the feeling of “insufficiency” is closer to a feeling of deeper uncertainty about whether the person in question is focusing on the right things, given the number of new causes and ways of thinking about EV that have become popular since the early years.
Overall, I think you’re better-positioned to make this evaluation than I am, and I’m really glad that this post was written.
Thanks for sharing more details on your perspective.
For context, I’ve been following GiveWell since 2012 and took the Giving What We Can pledge + started Yale’s EA group in 2014. But I wasn’t often in touch with people who worked at EA orgs until 2017.
My job puts me in touch with a lot of new people (e.g. first-time Forum posters, people looking to get into EA work), and I find them to be roughly as enthusiastic as the student group members I’ve worked with. But that’s often tempered by a kind of conservatism that seems to come from EA messaging—they’re more concerned about portraying ideas poorly, accidentally causing harm through their work, etc.
This may apply less to more experienced people, though I wonder how much of the feeling of “insufficiency” is closer to a feeling of deeper uncertainty about whether the person in question is focusing on the right things, given the number of new causes and ways of thinking about EV that have become popular since the early years.
Overall, I think you’re better-positioned to make this evaluation than I am, and I’m really glad that this post was written.