MichaelA🔸 comments on How have you become more (or less) engaged with EA in the last year?

[MichaelA🔸]

Those are good questions. I can’t remember in great detail what I did (and especially the order and causal attributions). But here’s my rough guess as to what I did, which is probably similar to what I’d recommend to others who are willing/​keen to invest a bunch of time to “get up to speed” quite thoroughly:

• I started mainly with the 80k career guide (now the “old career guide”), problem profiles, career profiles, and other 80k articles I found via links (including their older blog posts)

  • I’d now recommend the Key Ideas article rather than the career guide

• I listened to every episode of the 80k podcast

• I started going through the sequences (Rationality: AI to Zombies) on LessWrong, mainly via the “unofficial” podcast version

  • But I only finished this around February this year, after getting a job at an EA research org, so the latter parts probably weren’t key to my journey

  • But I’d still definitely recommend reading at least a substantial chunk of the sequences

• I watched on YouTube basically all the EA Global talks since 2016, as well as a bunch of other EA-related videos (see here for where to find such videos)

• I started listening to some audiobooks recommended by Wiblin, Beckstead, and/​or Muehlhauser

  • I selected these based on how relevant they seemed to me, how highly the people recommended them, and how many of those 3 people recommended the same book

  • I’ve now listened to/​read 30-38 (depending on what you count) EA-relevant books since learning about EA, most of which were recommended by one of those people. I should probably share my list in a shortform comment soon.

    • ETA: I’ve now made that shortform comment and then adapted it to a top-level post, putting the books in roughly descending order of perceived/​remembered usefulness-to-me.

• I read a lot of EA Forum and LessWrong posts

  • I think I basically bookmarked or read anything that seemed relevant and that I was linked to from elsewhere or heard mentioned, and then gradually worked through those bookmarks and (separately) the list of most upvoted posts based on what seemed most relevant or interesting

• I looked at most major EA orgs’ sites and read at least some stuff there, I guess to “get a lay of the land”

  • E.g., FHI, Center on Long-Term Risk (named FRI at the time), GPI, Charity Entrepreneurship, Animal Charity Evaluators …

• I started listening to some other podcasts I’d heard recommended, such as Slate Star Codex, EconTalk, and Rationally Speaking

  • I found the first of those most useful, and Rationally Speaking not super useful/​interesting, personally

  • See also this list of podcasts

• I subscribed to the main EA Newsletter

  • I now also subscribe to the EA London newsletter, and find it useful

• I read everything on Conceptually

• I read some stuff on the EA Concepts site

• I applied for lots of jobs, and through the process learned more about what jobs are available and what they involve (e.g., by doing work tests)

• Probably other things I’m forgetting

I think this process would now be easier, for a few reasons. One that stands out is that the tagging system makes it easier to find posts relevant to a particular topic. Another is that a bunch of people have made more collections and summaries of various sorts than there previously were (indeed, I made an effort to contribute to that so that others could get up to speed more efficiently and effectively than I did; see also).

So I’d probably recommend people who want to replicate something like what I did use the EA Forum more centrally than I did, both by:

1. reading good posts on the forum (which are now more numerous and much easier to find)

2. finding on the forum curated lists of links to the large body of other sources that are scattered around elsewhere

(I expect more sequences on the EA Forum will also help with this.)

[Arden Koehler]

Hey Michael, thanks for detailing this. Do you have a sense of how long this process took you approximately?

[MichaelA🔸]

tl;dr: Duration: Maybe ~12 months. Hours of EA-related video per week during that time: Maybe 4? Hours of EA-related audiobooks and podcasts per week: Maybe 10-15. Hours of all other EA-related learning per week: Maybe ~5-15?

So maybe ~1400 hours total. (What!? That sounds like a lot!) Or 520 hours if we don’t count video and audio, since those didn’t actually take time out of my day (see below).

Duration

I learned about EA around September 2018, and started actively trying to “get up to speed” around October 2018. It’s less clear what “end points” to use—i.e., when was I now “up to speed”?

Two possible “end points” are when I wrote my first proper forum post and when I was offered an EA researcher job. Both of those things happened around the end of December 2019, suggesting this was a ~14 months process.

But maybe a better “end point” would be around August 2019. By around then, I was running an EA-based club at my school and organising and presenting at local EA events. And in September, I attended EAGxAustralia, and felt—to my surprise! - like I was unusually familiar with EA ideas, among the people there. So that suggests this was a ~10 month process.

Hours of video per week

I watched EAG, EAGx, and other EA-related videos only while on an exercise bike or while eating. So it didn’t really cut into my schedule, except in that it meant I wasn’t watching other things at that time (e.g., random history lectures, Netflix). I’d guess this amounted to roughly 4 hours per week.

Hours of audio per week

I listen to audiobook and podcasts while commuting, doing housework, donating plasma, or doing other tasks that don’t require much focus but also don’t allow me to be on my laptop. This seems to amount to roughly 1-2.5 hours per day. As with the video, this doesn’t really cut into my schedule except by displacing other audio things (and also by making me extra helpful with housework when I’ve got a really good book/​podcast!).

(I also listen at 1.5-2x speed, but skip back often, so the 1-2.5 clock hours are probably ~1.5-3.5 content hours.)

Hours per week ignoring video and audio

During these 10-14 months, I was also teaching at 0.8 FTE and doing a Masters of Teaching (but with a lower course-load than I expect most Masters have, as it was integrated with my actual teaching). This was part of the Teach For Australia program, which people tend to find very busy and intense by itself. So I crammed my “EA study” into weekends, after-work hours, and (teacher) holidays, alongside the (limited and pretty easy) Masters coursework.

So it wasn’t a huge number of hours per week, simply as I had few available. On the other hand, I think I’m happy with working—and tend to work—more hours than is average. And I also just found learning EA-relevant things very interesting, so that didn’t drain me at all—it was more like the carrot I dangled in front of myself to get myself to do my other, actual work more efficiently!

And the matter of hours per week is further complicated by the fact that (a) teachers get long holidays, but (b) I had a lot of Masters work and teacher prep work to do during holidays.

So I’d pretty unconfidently guess I spent 5-15 hours per week on this, averaging out across that whole period (including both the work weeks and holiday weeks).

[My original answer ignored the video and audio time, since I’d been trying to remember how much time I allocated to EA-related stuff, and the video and audio didn’t really require allocating special time so I overlooked it.]

[Arden Koehler]

Thanks this is super helpful—context is I wanted to get a rough sense of how doable this level of “getting up to speed” is for people.

[MichaelA🔸]

(Btw, I’ve just updated my original answer, as it overlooked the time spent on audiobooks, podcasts, and video.)