Firstly, I’m sorry that you feel inadequate compared to people on the EA Forum or at EAGs. I think EA is a pretty weird community and it’s totally reasonable for people to not feel like it’s for them and instead try and do an ambitious amount of good outside the community.
I think this is somewhat orthogonal to feelings of rejection or the broader point that you are making about the higher impact potential of larger communities but I’ve personally felt that whilst EA seems to “care more” about people who are particularly smart, hardworking, and altruistic, it does a good job of giving people from various backgrounds an opportunity to participate—even if it’s differentially easier if you went to a top university.
For example, I think if someone with little or no reputation were to post a few top 10% of rethink priorities quality articles on important topics in fish welfare on the EA Forum they’d gain a lot of career capital and would almost overnight be on various organisation’s radars as someone to consider hiring (or at least be competitive in various application processes). I think that story is probably more true for AI safety. Contrast this with hiring for various hedge funds and consultancies which can be really hard to break into if you didn’t go to a small set of universities.
Firstly, I’m sorry that you feel inadequate compared to people on the EA Forum or at EAGs. I think EA is a pretty weird community and it’s totally reasonable for people to not feel like it’s for them and instead try and do an ambitious amount of good outside the community.
I think this is somewhat orthogonal to feelings of rejection or the broader point that you are making about the higher impact potential of larger communities but I’ve personally felt that whilst EA seems to “care more” about people who are particularly smart, hardworking, and altruistic, it does a good job of giving people from various backgrounds an opportunity to participate—even if it’s differentially easier if you went to a top university.
For example, I think if someone with little or no reputation were to post a few top 10% of rethink priorities quality articles on important topics in fish welfare on the EA Forum they’d gain a lot of career capital and would almost overnight be on various organisation’s radars as someone to consider hiring (or at least be competitive in various application processes). I think that story is probably more true for AI safety. Contrast this with hiring for various hedge funds and consultancies which can be really hard to break into if you didn’t go to a small set of universities.