In a nutshell, I’m worried that the people would not find the options you list exciting from their perspective, and instead would perceive not working in one of the 20 most competitive jobs at explicitly EA-motivated employers as some kind of personal shortcoming, hence the frustration.
I think the OP is evidence that his can happen e.g. because the author reports that
this is the message I felt I was getting from the EA community:
“Hey you! You know, all these ideas that you had about making the world a better place, like working for Doctors without Borders? They probably aren’t that great. The long-term future is what matters. And that is not funding constrained, so earning to give is kind of off the table as well. But the good news is, we really, really need people working on these things. We are so talent constraint… (20 applications later) … Yeah, when we said that we need people, we meant capable people. Not you. You suck.”
Note that I agree with you that in fact “[t]here are lots of exciting things for new EAs” including the options you’ve listed. However, even given this considered belief of mine, I think I was overly focussed on ‘EA jobs’ in a way that negatively affected my well-being.
Even when I consider that my guess is that I’m unusually susceptible to such psychological effects (though not extremely so, my crude guess would be ’80th to 99th percentile’), I’d expect some others to be similarly affected even if they agree—like I—about the impact of less competitive options.
Perhaps with “the kind of thing described in the original post” you meant specifically refer to the issue ‘people spend a lot of time applying for EA jobs’. Certainly a lot of the information in the OP and in one of my comments was about this. In that case I’d like to clarify that it’s not the time cost itself that’s the main cause of effects (i)-(iii) I described in the parent. In fact I somewhat regret to have contributed to the whole discussion perhaps being focused on time costs by providing more data exclusively about this. The core problem as I see it is how the OP, I, and I believe many others, think about and are psychologically affected by the current EA job market and the surrounding messaging. The objective market conditions (e.g. number of applicants for jobs) contribute to this, as do many aspects of messaging by EA orgs and EAs, as do things that have nothing to do with EA at all (e.g. people’s degree of neuroticism and other personality traits). I don’t have a strong view on which of these contributing factors is the best place to intervene.
In a nutshell, I’m worried that the people would not find the options you list exciting from their perspective, and instead would perceive not working in one of the 20 most competitive jobs at explicitly EA-motivated employers as some kind of personal shortcoming, hence the frustration.
I think the OP is evidence that his can happen e.g. because the author reports that
Note that I agree with you that in fact “[t]here are lots of exciting things for new EAs” including the options you’ve listed. However, even given this considered belief of mine, I think I was overly focussed on ‘EA jobs’ in a way that negatively affected my well-being.
Even when I consider that my guess is that I’m unusually susceptible to such psychological effects (though not extremely so, my crude guess would be ’80th to 99th percentile’), I’d expect some others to be similarly affected even if they agree—like I—about the impact of less competitive options.
Perhaps with “the kind of thing described in the original post” you meant specifically refer to the issue ‘people spend a lot of time applying for EA jobs’. Certainly a lot of the information in the OP and in one of my comments was about this. In that case I’d like to clarify that it’s not the time cost itself that’s the main cause of effects (i)-(iii) I described in the parent. In fact I somewhat regret to have contributed to the whole discussion perhaps being focused on time costs by providing more data exclusively about this. The core problem as I see it is how the OP, I, and I believe many others, think about and are psychologically affected by the current EA job market and the surrounding messaging. The objective market conditions (e.g. number of applicants for jobs) contribute to this, as do many aspects of messaging by EA orgs and EAs, as do things that have nothing to do with EA at all (e.g. people’s degree of neuroticism and other personality traits). I don’t have a strong view on which of these contributing factors is the best place to intervene.