I would love to see some ’40,000 hours’ materials for mid-career people pivoting into EA work.
Our skills, needs, constraints, and opportunities are quite different from 20-somethings. For example, if one has financial commitments (child support, mortgage, debts, alimony), it’s not realistic to go back to grad school or an unpaid internship to re-train. We also have geographical constraints—partners, kids in school, dependent parents, established friendships, community commitments. And in mid-life, our ‘crystallized intelligence’ (stock of knowledge) is much higher than a 20-something’s, but our ‘fluid intelligence’ (ability to solve abstract new problems quickly) is somewhat lower—so it’s easier to learn things that relate to our existing expertise, but harder to learn coding, data science, or finance from scratch.
On the upside, a ’40k project’ would allow EA to bring in a huge amount of talent—people with credentials, domain knowledge, social experience, leadership skills, professional networks, prestige, and name recognition. Plus, incomes that would allow substantially larger donations than 20-something can manage.
Hi Geoffrey, we agree this would be very valuable. Our materials are already heading in that direction, but I think it will be at least a year or two before we do a major research push to produce that guide due to other competing priorities.
I would love to see some ’40,000 hours’ materials for mid-career people pivoting into EA work.
Our skills, needs, constraints, and opportunities are quite different from 20-somethings. For example, if one has financial commitments (child support, mortgage, debts, alimony), it’s not realistic to go back to grad school or an unpaid internship to re-train. We also have geographical constraints—partners, kids in school, dependent parents, established friendships, community commitments. And in mid-life, our ‘crystallized intelligence’ (stock of knowledge) is much higher than a 20-something’s, but our ‘fluid intelligence’ (ability to solve abstract new problems quickly) is somewhat lower—so it’s easier to learn things that relate to our existing expertise, but harder to learn coding, data science, or finance from scratch.
On the upside, a ’40k project’ would allow EA to bring in a huge amount of talent—people with credentials, domain knowledge, social experience, leadership skills, professional networks, prestige, and name recognition. Plus, incomes that would allow substantially larger donations than 20-something can manage.
Hi Geoffrey, we agree this would be very valuable. Our materials are already heading in that direction, but I think it will be at least a year or two before we do a major research push to produce that guide due to other competing priorities.