I don’t know if I believe that. It seems like there’s a whole lot of random guessing going on among the most senior people in EA.
You might be better served to look into general psychology/​social science research and advice into how to make difficult personal decisions under conditions of high irreducible uncertainty. There are a few tricks I like. One is the regret minimization trick: which path would you regret least, even if it didn’t work out? Another trick is the coin flip or random number generator trick: randomly pick an option as if the coin flip (or other random event) is going to settle the decision for you. Notice whether you feel good or bad about that.
I think we all wish there was some kind of scientific formula we could use to make career decisions and so on. But I think there’s an inevitable mix of things like intuition, gut feeling, traditional wisdom, advice from people you know and trust, and so on.
I don’t know if I believe that. It seems like there’s a whole lot of random guessing going on among the most senior people in EA.
You might be better served to look into general psychology/​social science research and advice into how to make difficult personal decisions under conditions of high irreducible uncertainty. There are a few tricks I like. One is the regret minimization trick: which path would you regret least, even if it didn’t work out? Another trick is the coin flip or random number generator trick: randomly pick an option as if the coin flip (or other random event) is going to settle the decision for you. Notice whether you feel good or bad about that.
I think we all wish there was some kind of scientific formula we could use to make career decisions and so on. But I think there’s an inevitable mix of things like intuition, gut feeling, traditional wisdom, advice from people you know and trust, and so on.