In her early 20s, Kelsey was taking leave from college for mental health reasons and babysitting her friends’ kid for room and board. If either of us had been in the student group, we would have been the least promising of the lot
IIRC, Kelsey was in fact the president of the Stanford EA student group, and I do not think she would’ve been voted “least likely to succeed” by the other members.
Quite. I was in that Stanford EA group, I thought Kelsey was obviously very promising and I think the rest of us did too, including when she was taking a leave of absence.
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.
Other people around the group (e.g. many of the non-Stanford people who sometimes came by & worked at tech companies) are better examples. Several weren’t obviously promising at the time, but are doing good work now.
Not opinionating on the general point, but:
IIRC, Kelsey was in fact the president of the Stanford EA student group, and I do not think she would’ve been voted “least likely to succeed” by the other members.
Quite. I was in that Stanford EA group, I thought Kelsey was obviously very promising and I think the rest of us did too, including when she was taking a leave of absence.
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.
Agree that was a weird example.
Other people around the group (e.g. many of the non-Stanford people who sometimes came by & worked at tech companies) are better examples. Several weren’t obviously promising at the time, but are doing good work now.