I’ve become much more engaged in the last year. I think this was just a continuation of a fairly steady upward trend in my engagement since I learned about EA in late 2018. And I think this trend hasn’t been about increased inclination to engage (because I was already very sold on EA shortly after encountering it), but rather about increased ability to engage, resulting from me:
catching up on EA’s excellent back-catalogue of ideas
gradually having more success with job applications
Ways my engagement increased over the past ~12 months include that I:
Continued applying to a bunch of EA-aligned jobs, internships, etc.
Over 2019 as a whole, I applied to ~30 roles
Perhaps ~10 were with non-EA orgs
Attended my first EAGx (Australia) and EAG (London)
Made my first 10% donation
This was to the EA Long-Term Future Fund
This was also my first donation after I took the GWWC Pledge in early 2019
Started posting to the EA Forum, as well as commenting much more
Was offered two roles at EA orgs and accepted one
Stayed at the EA Hotel
Mostly moved from vegetarianism to veganism
This was influenced by my stay at the EA Hotel, as basically all the food there was vegan, and I realised I was pretty happy with it
Was later offered a fellowship at a different EA org and accepted it
Made a bunch of EA friends
Overall, I’ve really enjoyed this process, and I’m very glad I found EA.
I’ve found some EAs or EA-adjacent people rude or arrogant, especially on Facebook groups and LessWrong (both of which I value a lot overall!). But for some reason this hasn’t really left me with a bad taste in my mouth, or a reduced inclination to engage with EA as a whole. And I’ve much more often had positive experiences (including on Facebook groups and LessWrong).
I’ve also changed the style/pace of my engagement somewhat, in a way that feels a little hard to describe.
It’s sort-of like, when I first encountered EA, I was approaching it as a sprint: there were all these amazing things to learn, all these important career paths to pursue, and all these massive problems to solve, and I had to go fast. I actually found this exciting rather than stressful, but it meant I wasn’t spending enough time with my (non-EA) partner, was too constantly talking about EA things with her, etc. (I think this is more about my personality than about EA specifically, given that a similar thing occurred when I first started teaching in 2018.)
Whereas now it’s more like I’m approaching EA as a marathon. By that I mean I’m:
Spending a little less time on “work and/or EA stuff” and a little more time with my partner
My work is now itself EA stuff, so I actually increased my time spent on EA stuff compared to when I was a teacher. But I didn’t increase it as much as I would’ve if still in “sprint mode”.
Making an effort to more often talk about non-EA things with my partner
Reducing how much I “sweat the small stuff”; being more willing to make some frivolous expenditures (which are actually small compared to what I’m donating and will donate in future) for things like nice days out, and to not think carefully each time about whether to do that
I think the factors that led me to switch to marathon mode are roughly that:
It seemed best for my partner and my relationship
I’ve come to see my relationship itself in a more marathon-y and mature way (or something like that; it’s hard to describe), I think due to the fact that I got married this year
This seems to have made ideas about compromise and long time horizons more salient to me
(I mean this all in a good way, despite how “seeing my relationship as a marathon” might sound!)
My career transition worked! So now I feel a bit less like there’s a mad dash to get onto a high impact path, and a bit more like I just need to work well and sustainably
But this change was only moderate, for reasons including that I remain uncertain about which path I should really be on
Getting an EA research job means I can now scratch my itch for learning, discussing, and writing about interesting and important ideas during my work hours, and therefore don’t feel an unmet intellectual “need” if I spend my free hours on other things
In contrast, when I was a teacher, I mostly had to get my fill of interesting and important ideas outside of work time, biting into the time I spent with my partner
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 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
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:
reading good posts on the forum (which are now more numerous and much easier to find)
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.)
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 veryinteresting, 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.]
I’ve become much more engaged in the last year. I think this was just a continuation of a fairly steady upward trend in my engagement since I learned about EA in late 2018. And I think this trend hasn’t been about increased inclination to engage (because I was already very sold on EA shortly after encountering it), but rather about increased ability to engage, resulting from me:
catching up on EA’s excellent back-catalogue of ideas
gradually having more success with job applications
Ways my engagement increased over the past ~12 months include that I:
Continued applying to a bunch of EA-aligned jobs, internships, etc.
Over 2019 as a whole, I applied to ~30 roles
Perhaps ~10 were with non-EA orgs
Attended my first EAGx (Australia) and EAG (London)
Made my first 10% donation
This was to the EA Long-Term Future Fund
This was also my first donation after I took the GWWC Pledge in early 2019
Started posting to the EA Forum, as well as commenting much more
Was offered two roles at EA orgs and accepted one
Stayed at the EA Hotel
Mostly moved from vegetarianism to veganism
This was influenced by my stay at the EA Hotel, as basically all the food there was vegan, and I realised I was pretty happy with it
Was later offered a fellowship at a different EA org and accepted it
Made a bunch of EA friends
Overall, I’ve really enjoyed this process, and I’m very glad I found EA.
I’ve found some EAs or EA-adjacent people rude or arrogant, especially on Facebook groups and LessWrong (both of which I value a lot overall!). But for some reason this hasn’t really left me with a bad taste in my mouth, or a reduced inclination to engage with EA as a whole. And I’ve much more often had positive experiences (including on Facebook groups and LessWrong).
I’ve also changed the style/pace of my engagement somewhat, in a way that feels a little hard to describe.
It’s sort-of like, when I first encountered EA, I was approaching it as a sprint: there were all these amazing things to learn, all these important career paths to pursue, and all these massive problems to solve, and I had to go fast. I actually found this exciting rather than stressful, but it meant I wasn’t spending enough time with my (non-EA) partner, was too constantly talking about EA things with her, etc. (I think this is more about my personality than about EA specifically, given that a similar thing occurred when I first started teaching in 2018.)
Whereas now it’s more like I’m approaching EA as a marathon. By that I mean I’m:
Spending a little less time on “work and/or EA stuff” and a little more time with my partner
My work is now itself EA stuff, so I actually increased my time spent on EA stuff compared to when I was a teacher. But I didn’t increase it as much as I would’ve if still in “sprint mode”.
Making an effort to more often talk about non-EA things with my partner
Reducing how much I “sweat the small stuff”; being more willing to make some frivolous expenditures (which are actually small compared to what I’m donating and will donate in future) for things like nice days out, and to not think carefully each time about whether to do that
This post feels relevant here
I think the factors that led me to switch to marathon mode are roughly that:
It seemed best for my partner and my relationship
I’ve come to see my relationship itself in a more marathon-y and mature way (or something like that; it’s hard to describe), I think due to the fact that I got married this year
This seems to have made ideas about compromise and long time horizons more salient to me
(I mean this all in a good way, despite how “seeing my relationship as a marathon” might sound!)
My career transition worked! So now I feel a bit less like there’s a mad dash to get onto a high impact path, and a bit more like I just need to work well and sustainably
But this change was only moderate, for reasons including that I remain uncertain about which path I should really be on
Getting an EA research job means I can now scratch my itch for learning, discussing, and writing about interesting and important ideas during my work hours, and therefore don’t feel an unmet intellectual “need” if I spend my free hours on other things
In contrast, when I was a teacher, I mostly had to get my fill of interesting and important ideas outside of work time, biting into the time I spent with my partner
Did you this mostly through the EA Forum? Through books/articles scattered across a bunch of different websites?
Given your experience, if someone else were to want to catch up on this “back-catalogue” themselves, how would you recommend they do it?
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:
reading good posts on the forum (which are now more numerous and much easier to find)
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.)
Hey Michael, thanks for detailing this. Do you have a sense of how long this process took you approximately?
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.]
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.
(Btw, I’ve just updated my original answer, as it overlooked the time spent on audiobooks, podcasts, and video.)