Yeah it’s very small, especially for people working professionally in subfields.
Also early Stanford EA had a very good hit rate, like I think there were <10 regular members, and that group included Claire, Kelsey, Caroline and Michael.
And Buck Shlegeris and Nate Thomas and Eitan Fischer and Adam Scherlis (though Buck didn’t attend Stanford and just hung out with us because he liked us). I wish I knew how to replicate whatever we were smoking back then. I’ve tried a couple times but it’s a hard act to follow.
Fwiw, I gave Scott permission to mention the above; I think by some metrics of promisingness as an EA I was obviously a promising EA even when I was also failing out of college, and in particular my skillset is public communications which means people could directly evaluate my EAmpromisingness via my blog posts even when by legible societal metrics of success I was a bit of a mess.
A bit of a tangent though these comments strike me as indicative that EA is a very small community in many ways.
Yeah it’s very small, especially for people working professionally in subfields.
Also early Stanford EA had a very good hit rate, like I think there were <10 regular members, and that group included Claire, Kelsey, Caroline and Michael.
And Buck Shlegeris and Nate Thomas and Eitan Fischer and Adam Scherlis (though Buck didn’t attend Stanford and just hung out with us because he liked us). I wish I knew how to replicate whatever we were smoking back then. I’ve tried a couple times but it’s a hard act to follow.
Fwiw, I gave Scott permission to mention the above; I think by some metrics of promisingness as an EA I was obviously a promising EA even when I was also failing out of college, and in particular my skillset is public communications which means people could directly evaluate my EAmpromisingness via my blog posts even when by legible societal metrics of success I was a bit of a mess.
This comment did not age well.