I am not sure whether my error was how much I was deferring in itself. But the decision to defer or not should be made on well defined questions and clearly defined ‘experts’ you might be deferring to. This is not what I was doing. I was deferring on a nebulous question (‘what should I be doing?‘) to an even more nebulous expert audience (a vague sense of what ‘the community’ wanted).
What I should have been doing instead first is to define the question better: Which roles should I be pursuing right now?
This can then be broken down further into subquestions on cause prioritisation, which roles are promising avenues within causes I might be interested in, which roles I might be well suited for, etc, whose information I need to aggregate in a sensible fashion to answer the question which roles I should be pursuing right now.
For each of these subquestions I need to make a separate judgement. For some it makes more sense to defer, for others, less so. Disappointingly, there is no independent expert panel investigating what kind of jobs I might excel at.
But then who to defer to, if I think this is a sensible choice for a particular subquestion, also needs to be clearly defined: for example, I might decide that it makes sense to take 80k at their word about which roles in a particular cause area are particularly promising right now, after reading what they actually say on their website on the subject, perhaps double-checking by asking them via email and polling another couple of people in the field.
‘The community’ is not a well defined expert panel, while the careful aggregation of individual opinions can be, who again, need to be asked well defined questions. Note that this can true even if I gave equal weight to every EA’s opinion: sometimes it can seem like ‘the community’ has an opinion that only few individual EAs hold if actually asked, if any. This is especially true if messaging is distorted and I am not actually asking a well defined question.
Something I want to add here:
I am not sure whether my error was how much I was deferring in itself. But the decision to defer or not should be made on well defined questions and clearly defined ‘experts’ you might be deferring to. This is not what I was doing. I was deferring on a nebulous question (‘what should I be doing?‘) to an even more nebulous expert audience (a vague sense of what ‘the community’ wanted).
What I should have been doing instead first is to define the question better: Which roles should I be pursuing right now?
This can then be broken down further into subquestions on cause prioritisation, which roles are promising avenues within causes I might be interested in, which roles I might be well suited for, etc, whose information I need to aggregate in a sensible fashion to answer the question which roles I should be pursuing right now.
For each of these subquestions I need to make a separate judgement. For some it makes more sense to defer, for others, less so. Disappointingly, there is no independent expert panel investigating what kind of jobs I might excel at.
But then who to defer to, if I think this is a sensible choice for a particular subquestion, also needs to be clearly defined: for example, I might decide that it makes sense to take 80k at their word about which roles in a particular cause area are particularly promising right now, after reading what they actually say on their website on the subject, perhaps double-checking by asking them via email and polling another couple of people in the field.
‘The community’ is not a well defined expert panel, while the careful aggregation of individual opinions can be, who again, need to be asked well defined questions. Note that this can true even if I gave equal weight to every EA’s opinion: sometimes it can seem like ‘the community’ has an opinion that only few individual EAs hold if actually asked, if any. This is especially true if messaging is distorted and I am not actually asking a well defined question.