I think there’s a disadvantage in giving advice to people that are in an exploration-exploitation problem and telling them “explore more”:
Very early stage professionals who are considering how to join an unknown field (such as software development, or global catastrophic risk) are not even sure how much exploration to do, how to do it, what benefit an extra hour of exploration is expected to have, how big the exploration space is, and so on. You have an advantage over them in all those areas.
Also, I think it’s more efficient if one person does this research and then tells everyone, compared to having every person do this research themselves.
What do you think?
I acknowledge there’s a failure mode on the other side too: If your advice isn’t good but nobody notices it because everyone only talks to you. I wonder if this is what you’re trying to avoid (?) I have ideas on how to counter it
Or perhaps it’s hard to structure concrete advice in this area?
I’d consider approaching it by optimizing for (1) getting a first job, and (2) personal fit. [I don’t know the space at all, so no idea if this model makes sense, consider it just a first draft]
I’m implicitly assuming things like “the growth rate during an actual job is going to be really high compared to whatever came beforehand” and “working on something that fits me well means I’ll improve quickly and that will determine a lot of the ‘variance’ in how useful I’ll be years ahead”
I think there’s a disadvantage in giving advice to people that are in an exploration-exploitation problem and telling them “explore more”:
Very early stage professionals who are considering how to join an unknown field (such as software development, or global catastrophic risk) are not even sure how much exploration to do, how to do it, what benefit an extra hour of exploration is expected to have, how big the exploration space is, and so on. You have an advantage over them in all those areas.
Also, I think it’s more efficient if one person does this research and then tells everyone, compared to having every person do this research themselves.
What do you think?
I acknowledge there’s a failure mode on the other side too: If your advice isn’t good but nobody notices it because everyone only talks to you. I wonder if this is what you’re trying to avoid (?) I have ideas on how to counter it
Or perhaps it’s hard to structure concrete advice in this area?
I’d consider approaching it by optimizing for (1) getting a first job, and (2) personal fit. [I don’t know the space at all, so no idea if this model makes sense, consider it just a first draft]
I’m implicitly assuming things like “the growth rate during an actual job is going to be really high compared to whatever came beforehand” and “working on something that fits me well means I’ll improve quickly and that will determine a lot of the ‘variance’ in how useful I’ll be years ahead”