I think this is your strongest point, but the question remains whether you can specialize in situational awareness and adding complex value. Personally, I think you need to have a main hustle to really apply these abilities.
A few thoughts on this since I’m used as an example:
1. Very much agree with Holly (strong upvote) that having a main gig is critical (essential?) for situational awareness. In my case, having run Giving Games over the years it’d be really weird for me not to have picked up some situational awareness along the way. I’ve had countless conversations with different EAs (there are hundreds of contacts in the GG CRM which isn’t close to comprehensive), so I’ve met a lot of people and gotten a sense how they think. I also get a sense of how they perform on the narrow task of planning and executing a GG, in an absolute sense and relative to other people/groups. My mental model would look enormously different if I didn’t have all this context.
2. Related to 1, I think it’s been valuable that my role naturally provided vetting opportunities that help me weight information (especially if I see a pattern of behavior). This suggests that if EA is vetting constrained, it’ll be less situationally aware. And for the EA community to become situationally aware, that vetting needs to be public. My personal vetting anecdata doesn’t help other people improve their mental models, GiveWell’s research does.
3. To the extent I’m good at situational awareness, a lot of it has to do with learned skills. “Keep your world-model up to date with both social reality & objective, physical reality” was a huge part of the work I used to do in finance. I spent years doing that specific kind of work, got trained by smart people, and trained other people (which helps you learn something deeper).
4. Milan, I think you’re probably reading too much into the situational awareness/strategic advisor relationship, as strategic advisor can cover a lot of different ground.
Re: (1), agree that doing object-level things is important for being able to add complex value. (Both because it builds up one’s track record & because a lot of “adding complex value” cashes out into object-level projects.)
Totally agree re: (3).
You’re probably right re: (4), I’ll think about this more.
I think this is your strongest point, but the question remains whether you can specialize in situational awareness and adding complex value. Personally, I think you need to have a main hustle to really apply these abilities.
Any “strategic advisor” role is essentially specializing in this.
e.g. Jon Behar at The Life You Can Save; e.g. Howie Lempel at 80,000 Hours.
Also anyone doing “special projects” is essentially this.
But they have project projects as well as what you’re describing.
A few thoughts on this since I’m used as an example:
1. Very much agree with Holly (strong upvote) that having a main gig is critical (essential?) for situational awareness. In my case, having run Giving Games over the years it’d be really weird for me not to have picked up some situational awareness along the way. I’ve had countless conversations with different EAs (there are hundreds of contacts in the GG CRM which isn’t close to comprehensive), so I’ve met a lot of people and gotten a sense how they think. I also get a sense of how they perform on the narrow task of planning and executing a GG, in an absolute sense and relative to other people/groups. My mental model would look enormously different if I didn’t have all this context.
2. Related to 1, I think it’s been valuable that my role naturally provided vetting opportunities that help me weight information (especially if I see a pattern of behavior). This suggests that if EA is vetting constrained, it’ll be less situationally aware. And for the EA community to become situationally aware, that vetting needs to be public. My personal vetting anecdata doesn’t help other people improve their mental models, GiveWell’s research does.
3. To the extent I’m good at situational awareness, a lot of it has to do with learned skills. “Keep your world-model up to date with both social reality & objective, physical reality” was a huge part of the work I used to do in finance. I spent years doing that specific kind of work, got trained by smart people, and trained other people (which helps you learn something deeper).
4. Milan, I think you’re probably reading too much into the situational awareness/strategic advisor relationship, as strategic advisor can cover a lot of different ground.
Re: (1), agree that doing object-level things is important for being able to add complex value. (Both because it builds up one’s track record & because a lot of “adding complex value” cashes out into object-level projects.)
Totally agree re: (3).
You’re probably right re: (4), I’ll think about this more.