The fundamental thing happening here is that the opportunity cost of an exceptionally talented person taking advice aimed at the average person is vastly higher than the inverse, so people give advice that ensures the exceptionally talented lean into ambition and build these fields, even if many non-exceptional people will try and fail.
People are not good at self-assessment in both directions and the more you caveat and qualify your advice, the less it gets through, so this is the bet to make.
I disagree voted, but I am not disagreeing about this happening—I am disagreeing about it being a good idea.
People who are exceptionally talented should be exceptionally capable of ignoring all the other bad advice they get, and the presence of more advice that is bad for them shouldn’t hurt them. Also they should be capable of understanding EA as a project about “the most good you can do” and be on board with solid, actionable advice for the average person being easily accessible around the place.
One of EA’s biggest failings is its community structures actively causing harm to people interested in EA, and more grounded advice would go a long way towards addressing that.
Exceptionally capable people are not usually so capable simultaneously in all dimensions.
The distribution for any specific individual is typically very lumpy (as everyone that I’ve heard of who goes to Lighthaven says), so a perfect or near-perfect “bad advice” filter simply doesnt exist for most.
I think my point is that there’s *already* a lot of bad advice out there. The difference between n and n+1 pieces of advice that’s bad for you being present around you shouldn’t be the thing that everything hinges on. If it is, something’s seriously off with your ability to filter and prioritise.
Take the High-Impact Professionals Playbook, for example (one might call this an “official EA advice source for exceptionally talented people”). It’s got sections on
Career
Donations
Workplace initiatives
Trusteeship
Mentoring and Advisory
Network and Influence
Probably, any given person will fit in on one or maybe two of these, and so all the other bits are “bad advice”. However EA assumes you’re competent at basic seeking methodology because how else would you have got interested in EA—or alternatively, tries to teach you basic seeking methodology as a core part of you becoming an EA—so by the time you’ve ended up buying the book, you probably should be capable of dipping in and out of the relevant bits of a book.
If someone is exceptionally talented in capacity, but their seeking methodology is so poor they’d be swayed by whatever advice happens to be immediately around them at any given time, EA probably *doesn’t* want them doing a bunch of the “highest-impact” stuff (particularly in AI) because they’ve got a very substantial possibility of making things worse.
I think your suggestion about talented people’s ability to triage advice is at least partially true. A problem with it is that a smart response to bad or inapplicable advice is to stop listening to the advice-giver entirely. So you only get a few chances to make contact and you shouldn’t spend them on the lower-value content.
The fundamental thing happening here is that the opportunity cost of an exceptionally talented person taking advice aimed at the average person is vastly higher than the inverse, so people give advice that ensures the exceptionally talented lean into ambition and build these fields, even if many non-exceptional people will try and fail.
People are not good at self-assessment in both directions and the more you caveat and qualify your advice, the less it gets through, so this is the bet to make.
I disagree voted, but I am not disagreeing about this happening—I am disagreeing about it being a good idea.
People who are exceptionally talented should be exceptionally capable of ignoring all the other bad advice they get, and the presence of more advice that is bad for them shouldn’t hurt them. Also they should be capable of understanding EA as a project about “the most good you can do” and be on board with solid, actionable advice for the average person being easily accessible around the place.
One of EA’s biggest failings is its community structures actively causing harm to people interested in EA, and more grounded advice would go a long way towards addressing that.
This doesn’t seem realistic.
Exceptionally capable people are not usually so capable simultaneously in all dimensions.
The distribution for any specific individual is typically very lumpy (as everyone that I’ve heard of who goes to Lighthaven says), so a perfect or near-perfect “bad advice” filter simply doesnt exist for most.
I think my point is that there’s *already* a lot of bad advice out there. The difference between n and n+1 pieces of advice that’s bad for you being present around you shouldn’t be the thing that everything hinges on. If it is, something’s seriously off with your ability to filter and prioritise.
Take the High-Impact Professionals Playbook, for example (one might call this an “official EA advice source for exceptionally talented people”). It’s got sections on
Career
Donations
Workplace initiatives
Trusteeship
Mentoring and Advisory
Network and Influence
Probably, any given person will fit in on one or maybe two of these, and so all the other bits are “bad advice”. However EA assumes you’re competent at basic seeking methodology because how else would you have got interested in EA—or alternatively, tries to teach you basic seeking methodology as a core part of you becoming an EA—so by the time you’ve ended up buying the book, you probably should be capable of dipping in and out of the relevant bits of a book.
If someone is exceptionally talented in capacity, but their seeking methodology is so poor they’d be swayed by whatever advice happens to be immediately around them at any given time, EA probably *doesn’t* want them doing a bunch of the “highest-impact” stuff (particularly in AI) because they’ve got a very substantial possibility of making things worse.
I think your suggestion about talented people’s ability to triage advice is at least partially true. A problem with it is that a smart response to bad or inapplicable advice is to stop listening to the advice-giver entirely. So you only get a few chances to make contact and you shouldn’t spend them on the lower-value content.