While it’s hard to disagree that people should be familiar with the basics of economics, statistics, &c. I am not excited by the spirit of the question and the references to 101 materials.
First, I expect research scholars (and forum readers) to have quite a bit of shared knowledge about topics useful for EA. But more importantly, such advice doesn’t make use of distributed coordination [1] and doesn’t expand our aggregated knowledge. So I would be much more excited for general recommendations with “randomness,” which decorrelated the individual decisions.
For example: read a bunch about a few historical periods of your interest. No hurry with that; maybe, don’t solely read about the West; maybe, read something by anthropologists or econ historians. Doing so will expand the group’s intuitions about social movement, technological development, causes of war/conflict, power &c.
[1] A similar problem arises with a naive interpretation of 80K career advice (before stronger emphasis on personal fit): people would concentrate on the explicitly outlined paths without accounting for others doing the same.
I mostly agree with this, but fwiw to me this all seems consistent with what I said about “how to orient” toward the question & answers as well as with the content of many of my answers. Curious if you have a different impression?
Yes, I think that the wording of the forum questions is reasonable. The problem is that I expect that your nuance will get lost in the two layers of communication: commenters recommending intros into X or even specific books; readers adding titles to their Goodreads.
I think this is kinda fine for wellbeing/adulting bits of your advice, which I liked.
(I think “nuance will get lost in communication” is a very reasonable concern, and one I plausibly didn’t pay enough attention to before posting this question. I liked your original comment as well as this clarification, and don’t know why someone apparently downvoted them. I would be sad if I got fewer comments like this.)
While it’s hard to disagree that people should be familiar with the basics of economics, statistics, &c. I am not excited by the spirit of the question and the references to 101 materials.
First, I expect research scholars (and forum readers) to have quite a bit of shared knowledge about topics useful for EA. But more importantly, such advice doesn’t make use of distributed coordination [1] and doesn’t expand our aggregated knowledge. So I would be much more excited for general recommendations with “randomness,” which decorrelated the individual decisions.
For example: read a bunch about a few historical periods of your interest. No hurry with that; maybe, don’t solely read about the West; maybe, read something by anthropologists or econ historians. Doing so will expand the group’s intuitions about social movement, technological development, causes of war/conflict, power &c.
[1] A similar problem arises with a naive interpretation of 80K career advice (before stronger emphasis on personal fit): people would concentrate on the explicitly outlined paths without accounting for others doing the same.
I mostly agree with this, but fwiw to me this all seems consistent with what I said about “how to orient” toward the question & answers as well as with the content of many of my answers. Curious if you have a different impression?
Yes, I think that the wording of the forum questions is reasonable. The problem is that I expect that your nuance will get lost in the two layers of communication: commenters recommending intros into X or even specific books; readers adding titles to their Goodreads.
I think this is kinda fine for wellbeing/adulting bits of your advice, which I liked.
(I think “nuance will get lost in communication” is a very reasonable concern, and one I plausibly didn’t pay enough attention to before posting this question. I liked your original comment as well as this clarification, and don’t know why someone apparently downvoted them. I would be sad if I got fewer comments like this.)