“and I was surprised to find I had ideas and perspectives that were unique/might not have surfaced in conversation had I not been there.”
I think this is one of the reasons EAG (or other ways of informally conversing with regular EAs on EA-related things) can be extremely valuable for people. It lets you get epistemic and emotional feedback on how capable you are compared to a random EAG-sampled slice of the community. People who might have been underconfident (like you) update towards thinking they might be usefwl. That said, I think you’re unusually capable, and that a lot of other people will update towards feeling like they’re too dumb for EA.
But the value of increased confidence in people like you seems higher value than the possible harm caused by people whose confidence drops. And there are reasons to expect online EA material to be a lot more intimidating due to being way more filtered for high-status (incl. smart), so exposure to low-filtered informal conversations in EAG probably causes higher confidence in people who haven’t had had a lot of low-filtered informal exposure yet (so if that describes you, reader, you should definitely considering going). Personally, I have a history of feeling like everything I discover and learn is just a form of “catching up” to what everyone else already knows, so talking to people about my ideas has increased my confidence a lot.
I think this is one of the reasons EAG (or other ways of informally conversing with regular EAs on EA-related things) can be extremely valuable for people. It lets you get epistemic and emotional feedback on how capable you are compared to a random EAG-sampled slice of the community. People who might have been underconfident (like you) update towards thinking they might be usefwl. That said, I think you’re unusually capable, and that a lot of other people will update towards feeling like they’re too dumb for EA.
But the value of increased confidence in people like you seems higher value than the possible harm caused by people whose confidence drops. And there are reasons to expect online EA material to be a lot more intimidating due to being way more filtered for high-status (incl. smart), so exposure to low-filtered informal conversations in EAG probably causes higher confidence in people who haven’t had had a lot of low-filtered informal exposure yet (so if that describes you, reader, you should definitely considering going). Personally, I have a history of feeling like everything I discover and learn is just a form of “catching up” to what everyone else already knows, so talking to people about my ideas has increased my confidence a lot.