Hmm, interesting. Is it really true that EAs are not exploring non-EA ideas sufficiently, and aren’t taking jobs outside of EA sufficiently?
I feel like the 80,000 Hours job board is stuffed with positions from non-EA orgs. And while me and a lot of my friends are highly-engaged EAs, I feel like we all fairly naturally explore(d) a bunch outside of EA. As you said, EA is not that big and there’s so much other useful and interesting stuff to interact with. People study random things, people read vast literatures that are not from EA, have friends and family and roommates that are not EA. A datapoint might be EA podcasts, that I feel are interviewing non-EAs in at least half of the episodes?
Your suggestions kind of feel like unnecessary exercises from the top-down, like “let’s make X higher status”, or “let’s nudge new people towards X or Y”. I feel like naturally people do what interests them, and that’s so far going well? But plausible that I’m off, for example because I have spend very little time in the central EA hubs.
Tbh, I’ve noticed the problem Owen mentions in many university group organisers. Many of them have EA as the main topic of conversation even when they are not working and don’t seem to have explored other intellectually interesting things as much as I think would have been ideal for their development. But maybe that’s too small of a group to focus on and there’s been pushback on this recently anyway.
Yeah maybe I should have been more explicit that I’m very keen on people who’ve never spent time in EA hubs going and doing that and getting deeply up to speed; I’m more worried about the apparent lack of people who’ve done that then going into explore mode while keeping high bandwidth with the core.
Hmm, interesting. Is it really true that EAs are not exploring non-EA ideas sufficiently, and aren’t taking jobs outside of EA sufficiently?
I feel like the 80,000 Hours job board is stuffed with positions from non-EA orgs. And while me and a lot of my friends are highly-engaged EAs, I feel like we all fairly naturally explore(d) a bunch outside of EA. As you said, EA is not that big and there’s so much other useful and interesting stuff to interact with. People study random things, people read vast literatures that are not from EA, have friends and family and roommates that are not EA. A datapoint might be EA podcasts, that I feel are interviewing non-EAs in at least half of the episodes?
Your suggestions kind of feel like unnecessary exercises from the top-down, like “let’s make X higher status”, or “let’s nudge new people towards X or Y”. I feel like naturally people do what interests them, and that’s so far going well? But plausible that I’m off, for example because I have spend very little time in the central EA hubs.
Tbh, I’ve noticed the problem Owen mentions in many university group organisers. Many of them have EA as the main topic of conversation even when they are not working and don’t seem to have explored other intellectually interesting things as much as I think would have been ideal for their development. But maybe that’s too small of a group to focus on and there’s been pushback on this recently anyway.
Yeah maybe I should have been more explicit that I’m very keen on people who’ve never spent time in EA hubs going and doing that and getting deeply up to speed; I’m more worried about the apparent lack of people who’ve done that then going into explore mode while keeping high bandwidth with the core.