Related: Julia Galef’s post about ‘Planners vs. Hayekians’. See in particular how she describes the Hayekians’ conclusion, which sounds similar to (though stronger than) your recommendation:
Therefore, the optimal approach to improving the world is for each of us to pursue projects we find interesting or exciting. In the process, we should keep an eye out for ways those projects might yield opportunities to produce a lot of social value — but we shouldn’t aim directly at value-creation.
My impression is that I’ve been disagreeing for a while with many EAs (my sample is skewed toward people working full-time at EA orgs in Oxford and especially Berlin) about how large the ‘Hayekian’ benefits from excellence in ‘conventional’ careers are. That is, how many unanticipated benefits will becoming successful in some field X have? I think I’ve consistently been more optimistic about this than most people I’ve talked to, which is one of several reasons for being less excited about ‘EA jobs’ relative to other options than I think many EAs. My reasoning here seems to broadly agree with yours, and I’m glad to see it spelled out that well.
(Apologies if you’ve linked to that in your post already, I didn’t thoroughly check all links.)
Related: Julia Galef’s post about ‘Planners vs. Hayekians’. See in particular how she describes the Hayekians’ conclusion, which sounds similar to (though stronger than) your recommendation:
My impression is that I’ve been disagreeing for a while with many EAs (my sample is skewed toward people working full-time at EA orgs in Oxford and especially Berlin) about how large the ‘Hayekian’ benefits from excellence in ‘conventional’ careers are. That is, how many unanticipated benefits will becoming successful in some field X have? I think I’ve consistently been more optimistic about this than most people I’ve talked to, which is one of several reasons for being less excited about ‘EA jobs’ relative to other options than I think many EAs. My reasoning here seems to broadly agree with yours, and I’m glad to see it spelled out that well.
(Apologies if you’ve linked to that in your post already, I didn’t thoroughly check all links.)