It’s really hard to tell if my writing has had any impact. I think it has, but it’s often in the form of vague influence that’s difficult to verify. And honestly, I haven’t tried very hard because I think it’s potentially harmful in the short run to index too heavily on any proxy metric. F.e.x. I don’t even track page views.
Though I have talked to some EA people who mostly told me to keep blogging, rather than pursuing any of the other common paths. Some people did recommend that I pursue the Future Perfect Fellowship, which I think is likely to be super high impact, but it just wasn’t a good fit for me.
I didn’t think a lot about it. It was basically “Scott Alexander has a good blog, some EA people have good blogs, this seems to be a worthwhile activity”.
One way to explain it is as self-mentorship. Todd’s latest report indicates that EA really is talent constrained, and specifically senior talent constrained. Unfortunately, the senior talent pipeline is not that healthy right now, largely because there is a lack of senior talent available to mentor junior talent in the first place. So blogging is one path to eventually becoming senior talent without taxing EA resources, and does effectively create new capacity out of nowhere.
On that path, some good next steps could be to:
Do more consulting for EA orgs
Directly work on a large research project, once this seems manageable
Eventually try to hire/mentor even more junior people
Thanks! I asked because I am currently going through 80k 8-week planning course and I get impression there is just large uncertainty around what could or could not be impactful.
It’s really hard to tell if my writing has had any impact. I think it has, but it’s often in the form of vague influence that’s difficult to verify. And honestly, I haven’t tried very hard because I think it’s potentially harmful in the short run to index too heavily on any proxy metric. F.e.x. I don’t even track page views.
Though I have talked to some EA people who mostly told me to keep blogging, rather than pursuing any of the other common paths. Some people did recommend that I pursue the Future Perfect Fellowship, which I think is likely to be super high impact, but it just wasn’t a good fit for me.
I didn’t think a lot about it. It was basically “Scott Alexander has a good blog, some EA people have good blogs, this seems to be a worthwhile activity”.
One way to explain it is as self-mentorship. Todd’s latest report indicates that EA really is talent constrained, and specifically senior talent constrained. Unfortunately, the senior talent pipeline is not that healthy right now, largely because there is a lack of senior talent available to mentor junior talent in the first place. So blogging is one path to eventually becoming senior talent without taxing EA resources, and does effectively create new capacity out of nowhere.
On that path, some good next steps could be to:
Do more consulting for EA orgs
Directly work on a large research project, once this seems manageable
Eventually try to hire/mentor even more junior people
Thanks! I asked because I am currently going through 80k 8-week planning course and I get impression there is just large uncertainty around what could or could not be impactful.