I’m also quite unsure about this, largely because there’s an enormous visibility bias; I can think of a few people within EA who did become world-class at something, but barely anyone who tried and failed. But this is something I hope to collect some anecdata on in the future (and through comments on the post).
One more important factor is the extent to which being a part of the EA community might help your chances of getting to a world-class level in something (through access to mentorship, access to lots of people who can help you stick to your goals and spread word about your work, etc.).
This may not be true often, if at all—hanging out with musicians seems like a much better idea than hanging out with EAs if your goal is to win fame as a musician—but I can see 80,000 Hours having some interesting general insights if they ever decided to research the general area of “becoming famous”. (This seems antithetical to most of their current thinking, and would probably not be a good use of their
JP,
I’m also quite unsure about this, largely because there’s an enormous visibility bias; I can think of a few people within EA who did become world-class at something, but barely anyone who tried and failed. But this is something I hope to collect some anecdata on in the future (and through comments on the post).
One more important factor is the extent to which being a part of the EA community might help your chances of getting to a world-class level in something (through access to mentorship, access to lots of people who can help you stick to your goals and spread word about your work, etc.).
This may not be true often, if at all—hanging out with musicians seems like a much better idea than hanging out with EAs if your goal is to win fame as a musician—but I can see 80,000 Hours having some interesting general insights if they ever decided to research the general area of “becoming famous”. (This seems antithetical to most of their current thinking, and would probably not be a good use of their