I’ve started feeling super guilty and sad about how much I, the EA community, have wasted on supporting my participation in various community building and research endeavors—I’m not really any more capable or competent at doing the things I’ve done than a local American graduate would have been.
I obviously know much less about you than you do. But speaking to my own experiences, the second part of this rings false:
I wouldn’t hire someone to do something for me unless I thought they were the best person who would accept an offer. This makes me think that the people who hired you thought you were more capable and competent than the other available people.
It’s easy to overestimate how many people are as capable and competent as you are — especially if you’ve spent most of your working life in a bubble where all the people around you were hired through an intense, selective process. I gave up on EA work for well over a year because I overestimated the world (or underestimated myself).
Someone getting hired from a very different background, such that they had to struggle more and overcome greater barriers just to be competitive, seems likely to end up being more capable/competent than their average peer in the long run, even if they were roughly equal at the time they were hired.
If one person starts a 1600m race 50 meters ahead of someone else, but they’re both tied as they finish their first lap around the track, the person who started from behind is probably going to win. In this metaphor, you’re the person who seemingly started behind (though I’m making an assumption from very little knowledge); if I were looking for talented people to bet on, you’d stand out on that account.
More broadly, I’d guess this is part of the reason that such a large fraction of successful U.S. startups have at least one immigrant founder; at whatever point these founders successfully entered the American business scene, they were presumably growing / developing a bit faster, on average, than their local rivals.
I think the community-level questions you raise are worthy of much more discussion, and there’s no way I can address them fairly in the scope of this comment — but apart from that, I do endorse raising your own self-estimation a bit.
Was going to make a very similar comment. Also, even if “someone else in Boston could have” done the things, their labor would have funged from something else; organizer time/talent is a scarce resource, and adding to that pool is really valuable.
I obviously know much less about you than you do. But speaking to my own experiences, the second part of this rings false:
I wouldn’t hire someone to do something for me unless I thought they were the best person who would accept an offer. This makes me think that the people who hired you thought you were more capable and competent than the other available people.
It’s easy to overestimate how many people are as capable and competent as you are — especially if you’ve spent most of your working life in a bubble where all the people around you were hired through an intense, selective process. I gave up on EA work for well over a year because I overestimated the world (or underestimated myself).
Someone getting hired from a very different background, such that they had to struggle more and overcome greater barriers just to be competitive, seems likely to end up being more capable/competent than their average peer in the long run, even if they were roughly equal at the time they were hired.
If one person starts a 1600m race 50 meters ahead of someone else, but they’re both tied as they finish their first lap around the track, the person who started from behind is probably going to win. In this metaphor, you’re the person who seemingly started behind (though I’m making an assumption from very little knowledge); if I were looking for talented people to bet on, you’d stand out on that account.
More broadly, I’d guess this is part of the reason that such a large fraction of successful U.S. startups have at least one immigrant founder; at whatever point these founders successfully entered the American business scene, they were presumably growing / developing a bit faster, on average, than their local rivals.
I think the community-level questions you raise are worthy of much more discussion, and there’s no way I can address them fairly in the scope of this comment — but apart from that, I do endorse raising your own self-estimation a bit.
Was going to make a very similar comment. Also, even if “someone else in Boston could have” done the things, their labor would have funged from something else; organizer time/talent is a scarce resource, and adding to that pool is really valuable.