A couple of thoughts, which may or may not be redundant with 80K/âother material youâve seen:
80,000 Hours has a very long wait list, but even if you never get coaching, itâs clear from this post that youâre thinking carefully about the future and have taken initiative to become more skilledâthose are both rare traits, and indicate a lot of promise for your future work!
Learning statistics/ââhow to read and evaluate papers that make quantitative claimsâ seems really valuable, much more so than learning facts about a particular subject area. This doesnât mean you shouldnât be researching actual subject areas, but the most important thing is getting good at the methodology of good thinking/âresearch. Open Phil has a lot of research areas and will probably add more in the future, and their current research staff often move between different topicsâmaking specific subject-level expertise seem less useful, comparatively.
That said, there are certainly subjects that will predictably be useful to Open Phil for a long time to come (see this post for a promising example). But those subjects may not fit neatly into a single academic discipline, so general âthinking skillsâ still seem more promising to focus on.
Spend time reading good research; reading through the most recent collection of GiveWell Top Charity writeups and Open Philâs cause overviews will help you get a sense for common patterns of thought/âanalysis. Past that, try to learn about particular work these organizations have found valuable/âreliable, and read that material too. Good research seems to involve a lot of small touches/âhabits that would be hard to communicate explicitly, but might be acquirable if you view enough examples.
If youâre interested in movement-building, check out this page from CEAâs groups team. Itâs hard to calculate the expected value of organization; itâs highly dependent on the nature of the people youâd be organizing (that is, the number of potentially EA-aligned people you can reach at your campus) and your own talent as an organizer. But the main purpose should be to get more people involved in work/âresearch; donations are valuable and important, but itâs hard to get students to set up donation habits that persist, and donations from students are likely to be quite small in the grand scheme of EA funding.
Given that youâre an older student and Amherst is a small campus, organizing seems like it might be tough to pull off. Itâs also possible that someone has tried to start an Amherst group before (if so, CEAâs groups team would probably know about itâconsider contacting them). It can also be really difficult to organize a group on your own. Given your apparent passion for research, Iâm tempted to recommend focusing on your own skill-building, but you should probably talk to someone from CEA to see what they think.
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I work for CEA (not on the Groups team), but these views are my own.
A couple of thoughts, which may or may not be redundant with 80K/âother material youâve seen:
80,000 Hours has a very long wait list, but even if you never get coaching, itâs clear from this post that youâre thinking carefully about the future and have taken initiative to become more skilledâthose are both rare traits, and indicate a lot of promise for your future work!
Learning statistics/ââhow to read and evaluate papers that make quantitative claimsâ seems really valuable, much more so than learning facts about a particular subject area. This doesnât mean you shouldnât be researching actual subject areas, but the most important thing is getting good at the methodology of good thinking/âresearch. Open Phil has a lot of research areas and will probably add more in the future, and their current research staff often move between different topicsâmaking specific subject-level expertise seem less useful, comparatively.
That said, there are certainly subjects that will predictably be useful to Open Phil for a long time to come (see this post for a promising example). But those subjects may not fit neatly into a single academic discipline, so general âthinking skillsâ still seem more promising to focus on.
Spend time reading good research; reading through the most recent collection of GiveWell Top Charity writeups and Open Philâs cause overviews will help you get a sense for common patterns of thought/âanalysis. Past that, try to learn about particular work these organizations have found valuable/âreliable, and read that material too. Good research seems to involve a lot of small touches/âhabits that would be hard to communicate explicitly, but might be acquirable if you view enough examples.
If youâre interested in movement-building, check out this page from CEAâs groups team. Itâs hard to calculate the expected value of organization; itâs highly dependent on the nature of the people youâd be organizing (that is, the number of potentially EA-aligned people you can reach at your campus) and your own talent as an organizer. But the main purpose should be to get more people involved in work/âresearch; donations are valuable and important, but itâs hard to get students to set up donation habits that persist, and donations from students are likely to be quite small in the grand scheme of EA funding.
Given that youâre an older student and Amherst is a small campus, organizing seems like it might be tough to pull off. Itâs also possible that someone has tried to start an Amherst group before (if so, CEAâs groups team would probably know about itâconsider contacting them). It can also be really difficult to organize a group on your own. Given your apparent passion for research, Iâm tempted to recommend focusing on your own skill-building, but you should probably talk to someone from CEA to see what they think.
----
I work for CEA (not on the Groups team), but these views are my own.