Thereās a related question thatās pretty decision-relevant question for me, which is that I probably should have some principled take on what fraction of my āmeta work-timeā ought to be allocated to āadvising/āgiving mentorship to othersā vs āseeking mentorship and other ways to self-improve on research.ā
Yeah, I agree that this is an important concrete question, and unfortunately I donāt have much in the way of useful general-purpose thoughts on it, except:
Mentorship/āmanagement is a really important bottleneck in EA research at the moment and seems likely to remain so, so testing or improving fit for that may be more important than one would think by default
But presumably sometimes one would sometimes improve as a mentor/āmanager more by just getting better at their own object-level work rather than trying to work on mentorship/āmanagement specifically?
I donāt know how often thatās the case, but people should consider that hypothesis.
People should obviously consider the specifics of their situation, indications of what theyāre a good fit for, etc.
(It seems possible to work out more specific and detailed advice than that. Iād be keen for someone to do that, or to find and share whatās already been worked out. I just havenāt done it myself.)
Yeah, I agree that this is an important concrete question, and unfortunately I donāt have much in the way of useful general-purpose thoughts on it, except:
Mentorship/āmanagement is a really important bottleneck in EA research at the moment and seems likely to remain so, so testing or improving fit for that may be more important than one would think by default
But presumably sometimes one would sometimes improve as a mentor/āmanager more by just getting better at their own object-level work rather than trying to work on mentorship/āmanagement specifically?
I donāt know how often thatās the case, but people should consider that hypothesis.
People should obviously consider the specifics of their situation, indications of what theyāre a good fit for, etc.
(It seems possible to work out more specific and detailed advice than that. Iād be keen for someone to do that, or to find and share whatās already been worked out. I just havenāt done it myself.)