FWIW, I think something akin to a mysterious old wizard was relevant in my EA-aligned career journey.
The way I’ve been phrasing it is that, once I got clear indications that I was likely to be offered a research role at an EA org (Convergence Analysis), I felt like I’d gotten a “stamp of approval” saying it now made sense for me to make independent posts to the Forum and LessWrong as well. I still felt uncertain about whether I’d have anything to say that was worth reading and wasn’t just reinventing the wheel, whether I’d say it well, whether people would care, etc., but I felt much less uncertain than I had just before that point.[1]
So maybe regular, formal job/project application processes already do a lot of the work we’d otherwise want mysterious old wizards to do?
But I still think there’s room for mysterious old wizards, as you suggest. I’ve tried to fill a mild (i.e., caveated) version of this role for a couple people myself.
[1] My data point is a bit murkier than I made it sound above, for reasons such as the following:
I had already started drafting a post that was related to the first post I ended up actually posting
Though I still think the indications of a likely job offer probably brought forward the date I started posted, and increased how many posts I ended up writing around then (shooting for a sequence right away, rather than just one exploratory post)
I had also been offered an operations role at a high-status EA org at the same time, which also provided some degree of “stamp of approval”
I also had various other “stamp of approval”-ish things around the same time, e.g. from conversations at an EAG and an EAGx
I’d set the goal to “get up to speed” to a certain extent, and then started posting things, and if I recall correctly I’d felt that the first part should last me most of 2019 and I indeed felt I’d basically completed that part by the end of 2019. So that probably also caused me to switch into a mode of “alright, let’s actually start posting now”.
This seems like a useful concept to have.
FWIW, I think something akin to a mysterious old wizard was relevant in my EA-aligned career journey.
The way I’ve been phrasing it is that, once I got clear indications that I was likely to be offered a research role at an EA org (Convergence Analysis), I felt like I’d gotten a “stamp of approval” saying it now made sense for me to make independent posts to the Forum and LessWrong as well. I still felt uncertain about whether I’d have anything to say that was worth reading and wasn’t just reinventing the wheel, whether I’d say it well, whether people would care, etc., but I felt much less uncertain than I had just before that point.[1]
So maybe regular, formal job/project application processes already do a lot of the work we’d otherwise want mysterious old wizards to do?
But I still think there’s room for mysterious old wizards, as you suggest. I’ve tried to fill a mild (i.e., caveated) version of this role for a couple people myself.
[1] My data point is a bit murkier than I made it sound above, for reasons such as the following:
I had already started drafting a post that was related to the first post I ended up actually posting
Though I still think the indications of a likely job offer probably brought forward the date I started posted, and increased how many posts I ended up writing around then (shooting for a sequence right away, rather than just one exploratory post)
I had also been offered an operations role at a high-status EA org at the same time, which also provided some degree of “stamp of approval”
I also had various other “stamp of approval”-ish things around the same time, e.g. from conversations at an EAG and an EAGx
I’d set the goal to “get up to speed” to a certain extent, and then started posting things, and if I recall correctly I’d felt that the first part should last me most of 2019 and I indeed felt I’d basically completed that part by the end of 2019. So that probably also caused me to switch into a mode of “alright, let’s actually start posting now”.