Without the series of posts on the EA forum there is some base rate level of EAs who would found and join startups.
I think the people making the posts believe they usefully increase the number of EAs who join and found startups, by influencing people on the margin.
However, I believe currently startups are salient and attract people already who we expect are good at them. This means that the set of marginal people being optimally moved is smaller.
(To give an anecdote, a friend who struck me as risk averse and dreamed of a big tech job, got a near entry level job at Google for $300k. A few months in, she was already telling me how maintaining giant, sensitive production codebases was unsatisfying and had a plan to leave after a few years to build something of her own. This was surprising to me.)
In addition to the set people being optimally updated, I think there are people who may be better off not being influenced. If there is a set of people where this information might be of lower value or harmful (I don’t think it’s very harmful in any case), it’s reasonable to think that this set might tend to be more swayed through reading online opinions.
Without the series of posts on the EA forum there is some base rate level of EAs who would found and join startups.
I think the people making the posts believe they usefully increase the number of EAs who join and found startups, by influencing people on the margin.
However, I believe currently startups are salient and attract people already who we expect are good at them. This means that the set of marginal people being optimally moved is smaller.
(To give an anecdote, a friend who struck me as risk averse and dreamed of a big tech job, got a near entry level job at Google for $300k. A few months in, she was already telling me how maintaining giant, sensitive production codebases was unsatisfying and had a plan to leave after a few years to build something of her own. This was surprising to me.)
In addition to the set people being optimally updated, I think there are people who may be better off not being influenced. If there is a set of people where this information might be of lower value or harmful (I don’t think it’s very harmful in any case), it’s reasonable to think that this set might tend to be more swayed through reading online opinions.