I have been through the 80,000 career guide before. I want to be a for-profit startup founder in an area with a I can move over to CS and Math double major early and focus on ML and ML related research in undergrad. Since it is competitive, especially at top schools, knowing early is better than later. I mostly agree, but disagree a little bit with some of the career capital advice. I think they speak a little too broadly about transferable skills. I don’t think I should spend the first 5-10 years of my life tangently related to what I want to do to “build general skills” (unless it is very necessary for what I want to do).
One can build general skills and pursue their original goals at the same time. Startup founders can start pretty young (and there is no correlation between age and success, by the book Super Founders) and still be find in connections and fundraising. There is a risk of getting swept up in what others are doing and forgetting EA and just continue as a regular FAANG/consultant employee. I do plan to look at different potential problem causes during college and keep in mind that there is a risk of pigeonholing too much. But the advantage of pointing in the direction of what I want to do is better than pretending that I can’t do any exploring and go a “general college grad route”.
I’m now working on AI safety and I’ve been really happily surprised at the opportunities available to people trying to get into the field. There are courses (AGISF, ML Safety Scholars), internship / research opportunities, various competitions, and EAF + LW to showcase public writing. I basically worked on non-EA stuff for three years while reading about AI Safety for fun and ended up pretty well positioned to work on it.
I have been through the 80,000 career guide before. I want to be a for-profit startup founder in an area with a I can move over to CS and Math double major early and focus on ML and ML related research in undergrad. Since it is competitive, especially at top schools, knowing early is better than later. I mostly agree, but disagree a little bit with some of the career capital advice. I think they speak a little too broadly about transferable skills. I don’t think I should spend the first 5-10 years of my life tangently related to what I want to do to “build general skills” (unless it is very necessary for what I want to do).
One can build general skills and pursue their original goals at the same time. Startup founders can start pretty young (and there is no correlation between age and success, by the book Super Founders) and still be find in connections and fundraising. There is a risk of getting swept up in what others are doing and forgetting EA and just continue as a regular FAANG/consultant employee. I do plan to look at different potential problem causes during college and keep in mind that there is a risk of pigeonholing too much. But the advantage of pointing in the direction of what I want to do is better than pretending that I can’t do any exploring and go a “general college grad route”.
I like the idea of building skills early in your career. I would specifically highlight being opportunistic — individual people run into unusual opportunities to do difficult and valuable things, and especially early in your career it’s worth doing them. This is mostly based on my n=1 personal experience, I wrote a little more about it here: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/AKLMZzsTc2ghxohhq/how-and-when-should-we-incentivize-people-to-leave-ea?commentId=w6RJ7L6H4nrJhFyAM
I’m now working on AI safety and I’ve been really happily surprised at the opportunities available to people trying to get into the field. There are courses (AGISF, ML Safety Scholars), internship / research opportunities, various competitions, and EAF + LW to showcase public writing. I basically worked on non-EA stuff for three years while reading about AI Safety for fun and ended up pretty well positioned to work on it.
Agreed on your perspective on career capital