This might be just restrating what you wrote, but regarding learning unusual and valuabe skills outside of standard EA career paths:
I believe there is a large difference in the context of learning a skill. Two 90th-percentile quality historians with the same training would come away with very different usefulness for EA topics if one learned the skills keeping EA topics in mind, while the other only started thinking about EA topics after their training. There is something about immediately relating and applying skills and knowledge to real topics that creates more tailored skills and produces useful insights during the whole process, which cannot be recreated by combining EA ideas with the content knowledge/skills at the end of the learning process. I think this relates to something Owen Cotton-Barratt said somewhere, but I can’t find where. As far as I recall, his point was that ‘doing work that actually makes an impact’ is a skill that needs to be trained, and you can’t just first get general skills and then decide to make an impact.
Personally, even though I did a master’s degree in Strategic Innovation Management with longtermism ideas in mind, I didn’t have enough context and engagement with ideas on emerging technology to apply the things I learned to EA topics. In addition, I didn’t have the freedom to apply the skills. Besides the thesis, all grades were based on either group assignments or exams. So some degree of freedom is also an important aspect to look for in non-standard careers.
This might be just restrating what you wrote, but regarding learning unusual and valuabe skills outside of standard EA career paths:
I believe there is a large difference in the context of learning a skill. Two 90th-percentile quality historians with the same training would come away with very different usefulness for EA topics if one learned the skills keeping EA topics in mind, while the other only started thinking about EA topics after their training. There is something about immediately relating and applying skills and knowledge to real topics that creates more tailored skills and produces useful insights during the whole process, which cannot be recreated by combining EA ideas with the content knowledge/skills at the end of the learning process. I think this relates to something Owen Cotton-Barratt said somewhere, but I can’t find where. As far as I recall, his point was that ‘doing work that actually makes an impact’ is a skill that needs to be trained, and you can’t just first get general skills and then decide to make an impact.
Personally, even though I did a master’s degree in Strategic Innovation Management with longtermism ideas in mind, I didn’t have enough context and engagement with ideas on emerging technology to apply the things I learned to EA topics. In addition, I didn’t have the freedom to apply the skills. Besides the thesis, all grades were based on either group assignments or exams. So some degree of freedom is also an important aspect to look for in non-standard careers.
Owen speaks about that in his 80k interview.