Hereās one other section that was in the doc. Iām guessing this section will be less useful to the average person than the other sections, so Iāve ādemotedā it to a comment.
Some quick thoughts regarding the value of posting on the Forum and/āor conducting independent research, in my experience
Note that:
This section is lightly edited from what I wrote ~August 2020; I didnāt bother fully updating it with newer evidence and thoughts
This may of course not generalise to other people.
Some of this work was independent, some was associated with Convergence Analysis (who I worked for), and some was in between
Doing this definitely improved my thinking, my network, and how well-known I am among EAs
Not sure how much the third thing actually matters
Doing this seems to have accelerated my career trajectory via the above and via providing evidence of my abilities
Often the citation seemed to suggest my work was a handy summary of an idea the person wanted to mention, rather than strongly suggesting that my posts advanced the personās own thinking in a key way
Hereās one other section that was in the doc. Iām guessing this section will be less useful to the average person than the other sections, so Iāve ādemotedā it to a comment.
Some quick thoughts regarding the value of posting on the Forum and/āor conducting independent research, in my experience
Note that:
This section is lightly edited from what I wrote ~August 2020; I didnāt bother fully updating it with newer evidence and thoughts
This may of course not generalise to other people.
Some of this work was independent, some was associated with Convergence Analysis (who I worked for), and some was in between
Doing this definitely improved my thinking, my network, and how well-known I am among EAs
Not sure how much the third thing actually matters
Doing this seems to have accelerated my career trajectory via the above and via providing evidence of my abilities
See also this comment
I have some evidence of impact from my work
See my data and reflections here
Various people have cited my posts
Perhaps most often my database of existential risk (or similar) estimates
Sometimes those people were prominent EA researchers I respect
Mostly this was in other Forum posts or comments
But also at least twice in potentially important non-Forum reports
E.g., a Founderās Pledge report
Often the citation seemed to suggest my work was a handy summary of an idea the person wanted to mention, rather than strongly suggesting that my posts advanced the personās own thinking in a key way
But sometimes it seemed more like the latter
E.g., I was told that Research questions that could have a big social impact, organised by discipline was kind-of based on or made much easier by my Central directory of open research questions
I was told that an organisation I respect had a discussion about what their theory of change was and should be, prompted by a related post of mine
The network-building/āsignalling from this may have also helped me have impact in other ways
E.g., I was contacted to review the above-mentioned Founders Pledge report, and was told my comments helped improve the report