My guess is that the median person who filled out the EA survey isn’t being consistent in this way. I expect that they could have a one-hour 1-1 with a top community-builder that makes them realize they could be doing something at least 10% better. This is a crux for me.
I agree with most of this. (I think that other people in EA usually think they’re doing roughly the best thing for their skills/beliefs, but I don’t think they’re usually correct.)
I don’t know about “top community builder”, unless we tautologically define that as “person who’s really good at giving career/trajectory advice”. I think you could be great at building or running a group and also bad at giving advice. (There are several ways to be bad at giving advice — you might be ignorant of good options, bad at surfacing key features of a person’s situation, bad at securing someone’s trust, etc.)
Separately, I do feel a bit weird about making every conversation into a career advice conversation, but often this seems like the highest impact thing.
I’m thinking about conversations in the vein of an EAG speed meeting, where you’re meeting a new person and learning about what they do for a few minutes. If someone comes to EAG and all their speed meetings turn into career advice with an overtone of “you’re probably doing something wrong”, that seems exhausting/dispiriting and unlikely to help (if they aren’t looking for help). I’ve heard from a lot of people who had this experience at an event, and it often made them less interested in further engagement.
If I were going to have an hour-long, in-depth conversation with someone about their work, even if they weren’t specifically asking for advice, I wouldn’t be surprised if we eventually got into probing questions about how they made their choices (and I hope they’d challenge me about my choices, too!). But I wouldn’t try to ask probing questions unprompted in a brief conversation unless someone said something that sounded very off-base to me.
I agree with most of this. (I think that other people in EA usually think they’re doing roughly the best thing for their skills/beliefs, but I don’t think they’re usually correct.)
I don’t know about “top community builder”, unless we tautologically define that as “person who’s really good at giving career/trajectory advice”. I think you could be great at building or running a group and also bad at giving advice. (There are several ways to be bad at giving advice — you might be ignorant of good options, bad at surfacing key features of a person’s situation, bad at securing someone’s trust, etc.)
I’m thinking about conversations in the vein of an EAG speed meeting, where you’re meeting a new person and learning about what they do for a few minutes. If someone comes to EAG and all their speed meetings turn into career advice with an overtone of “you’re probably doing something wrong”, that seems exhausting/dispiriting and unlikely to help (if they aren’t looking for help). I’ve heard from a lot of people who had this experience at an event, and it often made them less interested in further engagement.
If I were going to have an hour-long, in-depth conversation with someone about their work, even if they weren’t specifically asking for advice, I wouldn’t be surprised if we eventually got into probing questions about how they made their choices (and I hope they’d challenge me about my choices, too!). But I wouldn’t try to ask probing questions unprompted in a brief conversation unless someone said something that sounded very off-base to me.