NB—None of the things below were done with the goal of building prestige/signalling. I did them because they were some combinaion of interesting, fun, and useful to the world. I doubt I’d have been able to stick with any if I’d viewed them as purely instrumental. I’ve listed them roughly in the order in which I think they were helpful in developing my understanding. The signalling value ordering is probably different (maybe even exactly reversed), but my experience of getting hired by an EA org is that you should prioritise developing skill/knowledge/understanding over signalling very heavily.
As a teacher, I ran a high-school group talking about EA ideas, mostly focusing on the interesting maths. This involved a lot of thinking and reading on my part in order to make the sessions interesting.
Over the course of a few years, I listened to almost every episode of the 80k podcast, some multiple times.
I wrote about things I thought were important on the EA forum.
I volunteered for SoGive as an analyst, and had a bunch of exciting calls with people like GiveWell and CATF as a result.
I spent a bunch of time on Metaculus, including volunteering as a moderator and trying to write useful questions, though I ended up doing fairly well at forecasting by some metrics.
NB—None of the things below were done with the goal of building prestige/signalling. I did them because they were some combinaion of interesting, fun, and useful to the world. I doubt I’d have been able to stick with any if I’d viewed them as purely instrumental. I’ve listed them roughly in the order in which I think they were helpful in developing my understanding. The signalling value ordering is probably different (maybe even exactly reversed), but my experience of getting hired by an EA org is that you should prioritise developing skill/knowledge/understanding over signalling very heavily.
As a teacher, I ran a high-school group talking about EA ideas, mostly focusing on the interesting maths. This involved a lot of thinking and reading on my part in order to make the sessions interesting.
Over the course of a few years, I listened to almost every episode of the 80k podcast, some multiple times.
I wrote about things I thought were important on the EA forum.
I volunteered for SoGive as an analyst, and had a bunch of exciting calls with people like GiveWell and CATF as a result.
I spent a bunch of time on Metaculus, including volunteering as a moderator and trying to write useful questions, though I ended up doing fairly well at forecasting by some metrics.