I’ve been thinking about starting such an EA mental health podcast for a while now (each episode would feature a guest describing their history with EA and mental health struggles, similar to the 80k episode with Howie).
However, every EA whom I’ve asked to interview—only ~5 people so far, to be fair—was concerned that such an episode would be net negative for their career (by, e.g., becoming less attractive to future employers or collaborators). I think such concerns are not unreasonable though it seems easy to overestimate them.
Generally, there seems to be a tradeoff between how personal the episode is and how likely the episode is to backfire on the interviewee.
One could mitigate such concerns by making episodes anonymous (and perhaps anonymizing the voice as well). Unfortunately, my sense is that this would make such episodes considerably less valuable.
I’m not sure how to navigate this; perhaps there are solutions I don’t see. I also wonder how Howie feels about having done the 80k episode. My guess is that he’s happy that he did it; but if he regrets it that would make me even more hesitant to start such a podcast.
I thought about this a bunch before releasing the episode (including considering various levels of anonymity). Not sure that I have much to say that’s novel but I’d be happy to chat with you about it if it would help you decide whether to do this.[1]
The short answer is:
Overall, I’m very glad we released my episode. It ended up getting more positive feedback than I expected and my current guess is that in expectation it’ll be sufficiently beneficial to the careers of other people similar to me that any damage to my own career prospects will be clearly worth it.
It was obviously a bit stressful to put basically everything I’ve ever been ashamed of onto the internet :P, but overall releasing the episode has not been (to my knowledge) personally costly to me so far.
My guess is that the episode didn’t do much harm to my career prospects within EA orgs (though this is in part because a lot of the stuff I talked about in the episode was already semi-public knowledge w/in EA and any future EA employer would have learned about them before deciding to hire me anyway).
My guess is that if I want to work outside of EA in the future, the episode will probably make some paths less accessible. For example, I’m less sure the episode would have been a good idea if it was very important to me to keep U.S. public policy careers on the table.
[1] Email me if you want to make that happen since the Forum isn’t really integrated into my workflow.
I’ve been thinking about starting such an EA mental health podcast for a while now (each episode would feature a guest describing their history with EA and mental health struggles, similar to the 80k episode with Howie).
However, every EA whom I’ve asked to interview—only ~5 people so far, to be fair—was concerned that such an episode would be net negative for their career (by, e.g., becoming less attractive to future employers or collaborators). I think such concerns are not unreasonable though it seems easy to overestimate them.
Generally, there seems to be a tradeoff between how personal the episode is and how likely the episode is to backfire on the interviewee.
One could mitigate such concerns by making episodes anonymous (and perhaps anonymizing the voice as well). Unfortunately, my sense is that this would make such episodes considerably less valuable.
I’m not sure how to navigate this; perhaps there are solutions I don’t see. I also wonder how Howie feels about having done the 80k episode. My guess is that he’s happy that he did it; but if he regrets it that would make me even more hesitant to start such a podcast.
I thought about this a bunch before releasing the episode (including considering various levels of anonymity). Not sure that I have much to say that’s novel but I’d be happy to chat with you about it if it would help you decide whether to do this.[1]
The short answer is:
Overall, I’m very glad we released my episode. It ended up getting more positive feedback than I expected and my current guess is that in expectation it’ll be sufficiently beneficial to the careers of other people similar to me that any damage to my own career prospects will be clearly worth it.
It was obviously a bit stressful to put basically everything I’ve ever been ashamed of onto the internet :P, but overall releasing the episode has not been (to my knowledge) personally costly to me so far.
My guess is that the episode didn’t do much harm to my career prospects within EA orgs (though this is in part because a lot of the stuff I talked about in the episode was already semi-public knowledge w/in EA and any future EA employer would have learned about them before deciding to hire me anyway).
My guess is that if I want to work outside of EA in the future, the episode will probably make some paths less accessible. For example, I’m less sure the episode would have been a good idea if it was very important to me to keep U.S. public policy careers on the table.
[1] Email me if you want to make that happen since the Forum isn’t really integrated into my workflow.
Thanks, Howie! Sent you an email.