It seems like many senior EAs know an advanced internal reasoning process (for example, how to estimate when earning to give is actually worth it)in their brain that I haven’t yet learned. This worries me, because without these tools my independent career reasoning may be systematically inaccurate, and I would need frequent corrections from more EA people. However, I currently don’t know many EAs, and the ones I do know are often very busy.
No, these problems are fundamentally unsolvable, and everybody is just as confused and as uncertain as you. There is simply no way to know or predict these kinds of things. All you can do is make your best guess.
Thanks for your replying a lot. I’m really grateful for this.
Yeah, I agree most senior EAs don’t have like a completely accurate math model to calculate how worth is earn to give. However, I believe they have a thinking framework which can have an approximate answer that’s way more accurate than my own thoughts. Which means, there should be a guessing framework(on value of earn to give, which is probably complicated)to make a best guess rather than random guessing.
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.
No, these problems are fundamentally unsolvable, and everybody is just as confused and as uncertain as you. There is simply no way to know or predict these kinds of things. All you can do is make your best guess.
Thanks for your replying a lot. I’m really grateful for this.
Yeah, I agree most senior EAs don’t have like a completely accurate math model to calculate how worth is earn to give. However, I believe they have a thinking framework which can have an approximate answer that’s way more accurate than my own thoughts. Which means, there should be a guessing framework(on value of earn to give, which is probably complicated)to make a best guess rather than random guessing.
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.