To answer my own question, I suspect a lot of this comes from EA still being young and relatively pre-paradigmatic. A lot of valuable careers and projects seem to be in the timescale of not decades but rather years or even months, so keeping very up-to-date with what the hivemind is thinking, plus interfacing with your existing plans/career capital/network, allows you to spot new opportunities for valuable projects to do that you otherwise may not have even considered.
I suspect that as EA matures and formalizes, the value of following current EA thinking becomes less and less fruitful for the typical EA, and engagement (after some possibly significant initial investment) will look more like “read a newsletter once in a while”, and “have a few deep conversations a year”, even for very serious and dedicated EAs with some free time.
To answer my own question, I suspect a lot of this comes from EA still being young and relatively pre-paradigmatic. A lot of valuable careers and projects seem to be in the timescale of not decades but rather years or even months, so keeping very up-to-date with what the hivemind is thinking, plus interfacing with your existing plans/career capital/network, allows you to spot new opportunities for valuable projects to do that you otherwise may not have even considered.
I suspect that as EA matures and formalizes, the value of following current EA thinking becomes less and less fruitful for the typical EA, and engagement (after some possibly significant initial investment) will look more like “read a newsletter once in a while”, and “have a few deep conversations a year”, even for very serious and dedicated EAs with some free time.