I think there is enough difficulty in achieving specialization that you are better off ignoring coordination concerns here in favor of choosing based on personal inclination. It’s hard to put in all the time it takes to become an expert in something, it’s even harder when you don’t love that something for its own sake, and my own suspicion is that without that love you will never achieve to the highest level of expertise, so best to look for the confluence of what you most love and what is most useful than to worry about coordinating over usefulness. You and everyone else is not sufficiently interchangeable when it comes to developing sufficient specialization to be helpful to EA causes.
I’d agree with the idea people should take personal fit very seriously, with passion/motivation for a career path being a key part of that. And I’d agree with your rationale for that.
But I also think that many people could become really, genuinely fired up about a wider range of career paths than they might currently think (if they haven’t yet tried or thought about those career paths). And I also think that many people could be similarly good fits for, or similarly passionate about, multiple career paths. For these people, which career path will have the greatest need for more people like them in a few years can be very useful as a way of shortlisting the things to test one’s ability to become passionate about, and/or a “tie-breaker” between paths one has already shortlisted based on passions/motivations/fit.
For example, I’m currently quite passionate about research, but have reason to believe I could become quite passionate about operations-type roles, about roles at the intersection of those two paths (like research management), and maybe about other paths like communications or non-profit entrepreneurship. So which of those roles—rather than which roles in general—will be the most marginally useful in a few years time seems quite relevant for my career planning.
(I think this is probably more like a different emphasis to your comment, rather than a starkly conflicting view.)
I think there is enough difficulty in achieving specialization that you are better off ignoring coordination concerns here in favor of choosing based on personal inclination. It’s hard to put in all the time it takes to become an expert in something, it’s even harder when you don’t love that something for its own sake, and my own suspicion is that without that love you will never achieve to the highest level of expertise, so best to look for the confluence of what you most love and what is most useful than to worry about coordinating over usefulness. You and everyone else is not sufficiently interchangeable when it comes to developing sufficient specialization to be helpful to EA causes.
I’d agree with the idea people should take personal fit very seriously, with passion/motivation for a career path being a key part of that. And I’d agree with your rationale for that.
But I also think that many people could become really, genuinely fired up about a wider range of career paths than they might currently think (if they haven’t yet tried or thought about those career paths). And I also think that many people could be similarly good fits for, or similarly passionate about, multiple career paths. For these people, which career path will have the greatest need for more people like them in a few years can be very useful as a way of shortlisting the things to test one’s ability to become passionate about, and/or a “tie-breaker” between paths one has already shortlisted based on passions/motivations/fit.
For example, I’m currently quite passionate about research, but have reason to believe I could become quite passionate about operations-type roles, about roles at the intersection of those two paths (like research management), and maybe about other paths like communications or non-profit entrepreneurship. So which of those roles—rather than which roles in general—will be the most marginally useful in a few years time seems quite relevant for my career planning.
(I think this is probably more like a different emphasis to your comment, rather than a starkly conflicting view.)