Reasons for and against posting on the EA Forum
I think many people should be writing for or posting on the EA Forum more! And when giving career advice or talking to people with interesting ideas, one of the most common things I say is “Maybe you should start posting?”
But of course, not everyone should be posting to the Forum, and not all the time.[1] So how can people decide?
This post discusses reasons for and against writing for / posting on the Forum, which readers can consider in light of their specific situation in order to make decisions that are right for them.
Feel free to skim or jump around this post; each section should make sense by itself.
This post doesn’t necessarily represent the views of my employers.
Summary
Reasons that sometimes push in favour of writing for or posting on the Forum include that doing so could help a person:
Reasons that sometimes push against writing for or posting on the Forum include the possibilities that doing so could:[2]
Have substantial opportunity cost (i.e., take up time and energy the writer could otherwise spend on other things) (more)
Not really improve—or actually worsen—other people’s knowledge, “models”, skills, and priorities (more)
Create information hazards (more)
Harm the writer’s reputation, make it harder to build a network, or similar (more)
Lead to unpleasant experiences after posting (more)
Be something about which the writer feels fear, anxiety, or aversion (more)
I’ve put those reasons in roughly descending order by how much I think they should influence people’s decisions, in a typical case. But:
I think that, in practice, people are often influenced more than they should be by some of these reasons—perhaps particularly some of the reasons against posting.
Whether a given reason should influence someone’s decision will vary substantially between different people and situations.
I encourage you to consider whether you specifically are predisposed to focus overly strongly on some of those reasons, and to consider talking this over with someone who doesn’t live in your brain.
See also Impostor syndrome
The scope of this post
I have in mind decisions about both:
Whether to write something specifically for the Forum
Whether to adapt/cross-post for the Forum something that one has already written or will write anyway (e.g., a thesis, a paper, a post for your personal blog)[3]
In either case, the posts could take the form of regular posts, question posts, or shortform posts
Somewhat similar points would also apply to decisions about whether to comment on the Forum
This post isn’t focused on venues publication venues other than the EA Forum
E.g., academic journals, arxiv, news media, LessWrong, blog hosts like Medium
But of course, many people should be writing for those venues instead or as well!
I’ve chosen to focus on the Forum here simply because I think some people should focus on the Forum sometimes, and I happen to know more about the Forum than about other publication venues
That said, I do think modified versions of many of these points would apply to decisions about writing for (or sharing writings on) those other venues as well
This post doesn’t explicitly compare the value of posting on the Forum to the value of other specific actions
But I hope what I write here will help you do that yourself
This post isn’t focused on things like how to write for the Forum, pick topics to write about, get feedback, etc.
1. Reasons that sometimes push in favour of posting
I’ll use italics for statements that are more like guesswork or based on my own experiences.
(Many of these reasons relate to EA’s ability to scalably use labour, including our ability to improve the EA-aligned research pipeline and deal with vetting constraints and organisation capacity bottlenecks.)
1.1 Test your fit for various things
The things you’re testing your fit for could include:
Writing or research in general
Writing or research of an “EA style” or for EA audiences
Writing or research on specific topics
You could learn more about your fit for these things via:
The process of writing the posts or of adapting other writings for the EA Forum
Comments you receive on drafts
E.g., if you send a draft to specific people for review
Comments you receive on the writings once posted
People giving you feedback in other ways
E.g., if you include a link for anonymous feedback
E.g., if you run a survey about the quality and impact of your writings
1.2 Improve your knowledge, models, and skills
This includes knowledge and models relevant to the domains you’re writing about
By “improving your models”, I mean something like “building reasonable inside-view models, even if it’s still very unclear how accurate they are”, or “more fully thinking through and crystallising your beliefs about something that seems decision-relevant, but on which there’s still a lot of room for reasonable disagreement”
One could also call this “improving your opinions”
E.g., I think no one can currently know with high confidence the answer to various crucial questions about optimal timing of work and donations, but writing that linked post allowed me to come to my own tentative opinions, which has informed some donation and career decisions in a way that seems more likely to have been for the better than for the worse.
This also includes reasoning skills, research skills, and writing and communication skills
These could be generic or specific to the topics you wrote about or to writing/research that’s “EA style” or “for an EA audience”[4]
You could improve your knowledge, models, and skills via:
The process of writing the posts or of adapting other writings for the EA Forum
Comments you receive on drafts
E.g., if you send it to specific people for review
Comments you receive on the writings once posted
People giving you feedback in other ways
E.g., if you include a link for anonymous feedback
E.g., if you run a survey about the quality and impact of your writings
I learned less from comments on published posts than I might’ve guessed.
But I learned a lot during the process of writing posts and from a survey I ran on my writings.
And in retrospect, early on, I probably should’ve more often asked people who knew more about topics I’d written drafts about to review those drafts; I imagine that would’ve helped me learn a lot.
1.3 Help other people improve the world (via your posts themselves)
Your posts could improve other people’s knowledge, models, skills, and priorities
This could of course be broken down into various ways in which your posts could improve people’s knowledge, models, skills, and priorities, and various ways in which that could translate into impact (e.g., improving decisions about research, careers, funding, or policies)
And then one could also consider how much of each of those benefits one could expect depending on various features of a post (e.g., its topic, the time invested to write it, the writing style, the author’s relevant prior knowledge, etc.)
But I won’t do that here.
For related things, see Why you (yes, you) should post on the EA Forum, Readings and notes on how to do high-impact research, and/or Impact assessment.
I think some people overestimate the difficulty of having a nontrivial amount of impact via Forum poss
The EA community is relatively small, it’s relatively new, and its members are on average relatively young. I think that, partly because of this, there are still so many:
Bodies of knowledge that very few EAs know about, and that no one has summarised and drawn implications from for an EA audience
Bodies of knowledge generated by professional EA researchers which haven’t been summarised for a broader audience
Collections or databases that “obviously” should be made but haven’t yet
“Obvious” and important considerations or project ideas that have yet to be highlighted
Etc.
See also Suggestion: EAs should post more summaries and collections
So I think there’s a good chance that you are already well-placed to write something that would be useful to many EAs
*This is of course especially likely if you have an area of deep expertise that’s relatively rare in the EA community *
Here are a couple examples of things I’ve made/written that really anyone could’ve done but no one had, and that I think have been pretty useful:
(I also think that many of my “research insights” have been relatively obvious, and that in some cases other people had already thought similar things, but they just hadn’t been written up clearly yet)
Regarding the impact of my own work as of approximately August 2020, I have some data and reflections here and some further thoughts here
(I called this section “Help other people improve the world (via your posts themselves)” because posting could also make you more able to in other ways help other people improve the world, e.g. by helping you test your fit for things.)
1.4 Credibly signal good things about you
See also EA hiring, EA is vetting-constrained, and this comment by Rob Wiblin.
The things posting could help you signal include specific areas of knowledge, skills, and interest
This could help with things like:
Getting a role at an EA organisation
Getting funding for a project
Getting collaborators for a project you want to work on
Being reached out to to collaborate with or give input to other people
E.g., I’m often reached out to for career advice, input on draft posts/reports, input on project plans, etc., partly because I’ve written posts about relevant topics and thereby demonstrated relevant knowledge, skills, and interest
I tend to enjoy giving this input, and I think doing so is often (but not always) more impactful than what I’d accomplish with the same time otherwise
Reducing the costs of vetting
E.g., allowing you to share a post you’ve written instead of doing a work test, saving you time and saving the organisation you’re applying to money (if they’d have compensated you for your time spent on the work test)
But I think this has only happened for me once, and I’ve applied for ~20 roles at EA orgs. (I’ve often provided Forum posts as writing samples, but only once instead of a work test.)
E.g., making it easier for hirers to find good candidates without doing an open hiring round, thereby saving time for both the hirers and the people who would ultimately be rejected in an open hiring round
My tentative independent impression is that it’s plausible that it’s usually or always best to do an open hiring round anyway. But I could definitely be wrong.
Posting on the EA Forum would presumably mostly help with credibly signalling to—or aiding in vetting by—people/organisations closely associated with the EA community, rather than other people.
This is because:
The hirer, funder, etc. is far more likely to have read your Forum post if they’re closely associated with the EA community
You’re more likely to share a Forum post to hirers, funders, etc. if they’re closely associated with the EA community
A key reason Forum posts might be useful as credible signals is that Forum posts may demonstrate knowledge, skills, reasoning styles, and communication styles that are particularly relevant to EA topics or particularly valued in EA
(If not for that fact, it would often be about as good or better to share some other writing sample, such as a university assignment.)
But, of course, probably everyone should apply for at least some roles, funding, etc. from people/orgs who aren’t closely associated with the EA community, and many people should primarily focus on roles, funding, etc. from such orgs.
This reduces, but does not eliminate, this particularly benefit of posting on the Forum.
See also working at EA vs non-EA orgs
Posting on the EA Forum would presumably mostly help with credibly signalling fit for—or aiding in vetting for—research-related roles or funding.
I think posting to the Forum might have improved/accelerated my own career trajectory.
In particular, there are multiple times when people who had read one or more of my Forum posts were involved in selection processes where (a) I was asked to apply (including to non-public hiring rounds), (b) I got fairly close to receiving an offer, or (c) I received an offer.
But it’s hard to know what the counterfactual was. E.g.:
Perhaps those people would’ve learned about my previous work even if I hadn’t posted it on the Forum
I would have applied to the public hiring rounds even if I wasn’t reached out to
I think the hirers’ decisions were based on work tests more than on Forum posts
1.5 Build your network
There are multiple ways in which the process of posting could help you build your network:
Sending a draft to a relevant person for review, or sharing it in a more open space like the Effective Altruism Editing and Review, could:
make people aware of you and your knowledge, skills, and interests
establish initial contact between you and them
give you more of a sense of how useful or enjoyable further interactions with them might be
Posting on the Forum will make more people aware of you and of your knowledge, skills, and interests
This could lead to them reaching out to you then or later (e.g., at a conference)
People commenting on your posts could:
establish initial contact between you and them (at least if you reply)
give you more of a sense of how useful or enjoyable further interactions with them might be
As with credibly signalling good things about yourself / aiding with vetting (see the previous section):
Building your network could help with things like:
Getting a role at an EA organisation
Getting funding for a project
Getting collaborators for a project you want to work on
Being reached out to to collaborate with or give input to other people
Reducing the costs of vetting
Posting on the EA Forum would presumably mostly help with credibly signalling to, or aiding in vetting by, people/organisations closely associated with the EA community, rather than other people
Posting on the EA Forum would presumably mostly help with credibly signalling fit for, or aiding in vetting for, research-related roles or funding
Posting on the Forum definitely helped me build my network, which in turn definitely led to me being reached out to to collaborate with or give input to other people, and may have accelerated or improved my career trajectory.
See the previous section for discussion of these points.
1.6 Enjoyment, satisfaction, etc.
AKA acquire additional utils
For example, you could get enjoyment or satisfaction from the writing process, upvotes and positive/interesting comments on your posts, and good interactions that come from building your network (see the previous section).
2. Reasons that sometimes push against posting
As above, I’ll use italics for statements that are more like guesswork or based on my own experiences.
2.1 Opportunity cost (i.e., you’d have to spend time and energy that you could otherwise spend on other things)
I think this is the most common reason for it being a good idea to not write a post for, or share writings to, the Forum
But it is often possible to write / share a post relatively quickly
This goes especially for sharing things one already has written anyway or already would write anyway
E.g., I think many people in the EA community have written or will in any case write potentially EA-relevant things, for example for university assignments or their personal blogs. I think that more of these things should be posted to the Forum.[5]
That said, there’s of course usually a tradeoff between achieving more of the benefits of posting and reducing the time and energy cost
For specific tips on relatively low-cost ways to make useful posts, see Notes on EA-related research, writing, testing fit, learning, and the Forum
2.2 Posting might not really improve—or might actually worsen—other people’s knowledge, models, skills, and priorities
This is the flipside of “Help other people improve the world (via your posts themselves)”; see that section for some relevant thoughts
This problem could occur if your post:
says things most readers would already have thought of
says things that aren’t really relevant to any important decisions
is unclear
says things that are false or misleading
distracts people from—or makes it harder to find—more useful or important things
(This is not necessarily an exhaustive list)
These things of course can happen
I also think some people are probably insufficiently concerned about these things
But I think it’s more common to be overly concerned about these things
And I think the fact you’re reading this sentence is some evidence that you’re the kind of person who’d tend to worry too much rather than too little
One of the main reasons I say this is because I think there are various mechanisms that mean there may be very little harm even if you do say things that are (relatively) obvious, unimportant, unclear, incorrect, etc.
Mechanisms you can use include:
providing an epistemic status
providing a clear summary
trying to maintain reasoning transparency
getting feedback before posting (see here for tips on getting feedback)
Meanwhile, mechanisms that don’t rely on you using them include:
The karma system (on average, the less useful the post, the fewer upvotes it’ll get, and so the faster it’ll slip off the front page)
Comments (people can highlight reasons why the post is flawed or may not be very useful)
Tags (tags on your post can help people decide whether it’s relevant to them, and the fact people can use tags to find other posts means it’s less bad to “clutter up the front page”)
The search bar (which again reduces how much bad “cluttering up the front page” is)
2.3 Information hazards
An information hazard is a “risk that arises from the dissemination or the potential dissemination of (true) information that may cause harm or enable some agent to cause harm” (Bostrom, 2011).
One common—but commonly overlooked—type of information hazard is an attention hazard. This refers to cases where the “mere drawing of attention to some particularly potent or relevant ideas or data increases risk, even when these ideas or data are already ‘known’” (Bostrom, 2011).
I think that information hazards are often a good reason to post on the Forum
And there are several things I’ve written but not posted for that reason
And there are a few cases where I’ve felt that something that was posted perhaps shouldn’t have been posted, for information hazard reasons
That said, I also think some people are more worried about information hazards in a given specific instance than they really should be
This is a complicated topic, and I won’t provide specific guidance here. If someone thinks something they want to post might pose information hazards, I recommend that they read some writings on information hazards and the unilateralist’s curse and what to do about those things.
2.4 Posting might harm your reputation, make it harder to build a network, or similar
This is the flipside of “Credibly signal good things about you” and “Build your network”; see those sections for some relevant thoughts
It’s worth quickly noting that, in some cases, a harm to an aspect of your reputation—or it being harder for you to build a network in some area—might be good for the world and perhaps even for you
This is if the harm and difficulty just appropriately reflects you indeed not being a good fit for something
But there could of course be other cases where the harm and difficulty are not appropriately calibrated, and where they’re bad for you and for the world
I think that this risk is worth at least a little bit of consideration, at least for people who (a) might want to get jobs at explicitly EA organisations and (b) might by default fire off many quickly written posts
E.g., people very much like me
I also have some indications that this downside has occurred to a small extent for me
However, I think that, overall, posting the way I have is more likely to have benefitted than harmed my career
And I’m a relatively extreme case (e.g., I think I might’ve made the most non-link-post Forum posts of anyone last year)
2.5 Posting might lead to unpleasant experiences
This is the flipside of “Enjoyment, satisfaction, etc.”
These negative experience could also perhaps reduce your engagement with and retention in EA, and increase your value drift
2.6 Fear, anxiety, or aversion about posting
I think that this is an entirely understandable reason for people to not write / share posts on the Forum
*And it seems to unfortunately be one of the most common and strongest reasons influencing people *
And I sympathise with people who feel this way
But I think this fear, anxiety, or aversion is unnecessarily holding people back, and that it would be good to—at a community or individual level—try to find ways to mitigate or push through it
I’m hoping that this post, my other post Notes on EA-related research, writing, testing fit, learning, and the Forum, and some of the links in that post can help
E.g., maybe the options listed in that post for getting feedback on drafts could help people get “over the hurdle” for their first few posts
See also
Aaron Gertler: Why you (yes, you) should post on the EA Forum
Notes on EA-related research, writing, testing fit, learning, and the Forum
Goals we might have when taking actions to improve the EA-aligned research pipeline
Potential benefits and downsides of making and/or sharing a research agenda [I’ll be posting this soon]
Acknowledgements
I’m grateful to Neil Dullaghan, Aaron Gertler, Peter Hurford, David Moss, and Saulius Šimčikas for comments on an earlier draft of this post. This does not imply that these people endorse all aspects of this post.
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I said that “not everyone should be posting to the Forum”. I think this is obviously true for the total world population, but only probably true for the EA community. It seems plausible to me that it would be both net positive and worth the opportunity cost for everyone in the EA community to at some point write one shortform post, share an adapted version of one essay they wrote for university, or similar. (Note that the Forum team could make some changes to the site, its features, its moderation, etc. if this started happening.)
- ↩︎
Here’s an alternative way of categorising the reasons against writing posts for / sharing posts on the EA Forum:
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Opportunity cost
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Reasons why writing posts for / sharing posts on the EA Forum may have little value
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Reasons why it may have negative value
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Reasons that are more like personal preferences or unwarranted (yet understandable) worries
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- ↩︎
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A possible example is getting better at reasoning transparency.
- ↩︎
- Notes on EA-related research, writing, testing fit, learning, and the Forum by (27 Mar 2021 9:52 UTC; 98 points)
- You should write on the EA Forum by (29 Apr 2022 14:55 UTC; 73 points)
- Intervention options for improving the EA-aligned research pipeline by (28 May 2021 14:26 UTC; 49 points)
- 's comment on Intervention options for improving the EA-aligned research pipeline by (28 May 2021 14:34 UTC; 14 points)
- 's comment on An animated introduction to longtermism (feat. Robert Miles) by (23 Jun 2021 6:57 UTC; 3 points)
- 's comment on Buck’s Quick takes by (11 Jun 2021 10:02 UTC; 2 points)
Yeah, I’m indeed thinking about what’s good in a moral sense / for the world / “from the point of view of the universe” / from my perspective, not what’s good from another person’s perspective. But it can also obviously be the case that from Person B’s current perspective, their values drifting would be bad. And we could also think about what people want in the moment vs what they want when looking back / reflecting vs what a somewhat “idealised” version of their values would want, or whatever.
In any case, this sort of thing is discussed much further in posts tagged value drift, so you might find those posts interesting. (I won’t discuss it in detail here since it’s a bit of a tangent + due to busyness.)
Do you mean “It isn’t clear to me why reducing value drift—either in favour or against some EA ideas—is a good thing universally”?
Usually—and in my comment above—the term value drift is used to refer to something more like drifting away from EA values as a whole, rather than shifting one’s focus between different EA values/ideas/causes, which I think is obviously often good and probably more often good than bad (i.e., people probably update in good directions at least somewhat more often than in bad directions).
I think value drift away from EA values as a whole is usually bad, but even that’s obviously not always bad (at least when you consider cases where a person was very focused on EA explicitly and then they move towards pursuing similar goals but with less focus on EA specifically). And indeed, I note above that “increas[ing] your engagement with & retention in EA, & mitigat[ing] value drift “would often be a good thing, though it’s unclear how often, and it may also often be a bad thing”.
This maybe could be assimilated under “opportunity cost”, but I think a major potential downside is skewed incentives. To avoid that drawback you’d either have to believe that posters mostly aren’t influenced by the mechanics of the Forum or that the mechanics of the Forum are closely aligned with the good.
To clarify, what sort of skewed incentives do you have in mind, or incentives for what? Like spending too much time writing more posts? Or like shifting your beliefs and arguments in worse ways to match the incentives on the Forum?
FWIW, I currently see the former as a bigger deal than the latter, though still not a huge deal. I mentioned it in this comment.
Also, I think there’s a third way that this drawback might not apply: The incentives associated with posting on the Forum could simply be better aligned with the good than the incentives that the person would be influenced by otherwise, even if not especially closely aligned with that in an absolute sense. We’re already influenced by some incentives.
Yeah, I thought about that and meant it to be included (somewhat sloppily) in the “closely aligned” proviso.
Or shifting your attention.
I think things like upvotes and comments here provide multiple incentive gradients which seem possibly harmful. For example, I think based on a vague gestalt impression that the Forum tends to:
Encourage confidence and simplicity over nuance at some margin less than the IMO optimal
Disproportionately reward critiques and “drama” of a certain sort
Discourage highly technical content
Encourage familiar content and content areas
Many of these claimed problems are very understandable and seem hard to avoid in this kind of setting. People like things they’re familiar with (looseley: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mere-exposure_effect); understanding and evaluating highly technical content either demands more time from readers or outright limits the audience size; if you don’t have the expertise to evaluate and contextualize claims, confident claims seems more informative than cautious ones; etc.
Obviously, my claims here are pretty subjective and fuzzy and others could disagree.
I’ll use this thread as a sort of “appendix”, listing some additional possible reasons for/against which I think are less genuinely important and/or less often a factor in people’s actual decisions. (So no obligation to read this!)
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Here’s one thing that could perhaps sometimes push in favour of writing posts for / sharing post on the Forum:
Posting might increase your engagement with & retention in EA, & mitigate value drift
There are multiple ways in which posting to the Forum could do this, some of which are related to the points covered in Section 1. These ways include:
Building a habit of engaging with EA
Making EA more a part of your identity
Helping you find an EA-relevant role, funding for EA-relevant projects, etc.
Helping you build your network of EA-adjacent people
Causing positive associations between engaging in EA and gaining enjoyment, satisfaction, attention, etc.
It seems safe to say that this result would often be a good thing, though it’s unclear how often, and it may also often be a bad thing
Personally, I think that mitigating value drift away from EA as a whole—and increasing retention in EA—is probably usually a good thing.
I also think increased engagement with EA among people who are lightly involved in EA and would become more engaged via posting would probably usually be a good thing.
I don’t know how often increased engagement with EA among people who are already pretty engaged with EA is a good thing; it’s probably also sometimes/often a bad thing, primarily due to opportunity costs (e.g., maybe they should spend more time engaging with other bodies of knowledge or other communities)
Here’s another possible—but probably less common or less clearly bad—reason against writing posts for / sharing posts on the Forum:
It could lead to something analogous to a social media “addiction”.
E.g., feeling continually drawn to post or comment, solely in order to get more upvotes, replies, attention etc.
This would basically be bad inasmuch as it might lead to the “reasons against” mentioned in my main post
E.g., it could lead to people writing for the Forum even when it’s not worth the opportunity cost for them, or even when if they often have an overall negative experience when doing so
But I think a mild version of something like this could be not actually bad, or possibly even good, inasmuch as it lead to the “reasons for” mentioned in my main post
E.g., it could help motivate people to capture those benefits
(This can be good inasmuch as someone might’ve otherwise been not very motivated about anything or motivated about less valuable things. It could be bad inasmuch as they’d have otherwise been motivated to do things that make more sense in their situation—e.g., spending more time on a PhD, if that’s what they should be doing.)
In my personal case:
I think I have sometimes been moderately addicted to the Forum, and other times mildly addicted.
I think this was sometimes somewhat bad for me, but mostly about neutral or slightly good
And it’s been more consistently neutral or good since mid last year, since I’ve been more conscious about “managing” the level and results of this “addiction” since then
It’s worth noting that, for me, this is basically replacing a mild “addiction” to things like playing video games, doing stand-up comedy, or becoming a better high school teacher, or a general listlessness
Here’s another possible—but less important and common—reason against writing posts for / sharing posts on the Forum:
It could mislead you about your fit for various things, and worsen your knowledge, models, or skills
This is the flipside of the benefits discussed in Sections 1.1 and 1.2; see those sections for some relevant thoughts
But I think it would probably be silly to worry about this, and I’m not actually aware of anyone worrying about it
It seems very unlikely to me that writing posts for, and sharing writings on, the EA Forum would predictably have a net negative effect on any given person’s self-knowledge, knowledge, models, or skills
[That’s why I ended up cutting this from the post itself]
It might happen to freakishly have a net negative effect for some people, but I think the effect would be positive in expectation for any given person
I do think writing / sharing posts on the Forum could in many cases have less of a positive effect on those variables than an alternative activity would
But that’s just a worry about opportunity cost, which I already mentioned separately
The only reason I mention this anyway just for comprehensiveness
Further, less important thoughts on “1.6 Enjoyment, satisfaction, etc.”:
Various parts of the posting process could lead to various different benefits of this type. For example:
The writing process could be intellectually stimulating, involve doing interesting research, cause a sense of satisfaction or pride about the finished product, and scratch an itch for creative expression.
Your post might get upvotes, attention, or positive or interesting comments. Or people might indicate in other ways—e.g., in a private message, a newsletter, or at a conference—that they appreciated your post. Or you might see more direct indications of impact from the work. This could be enjoyable, boost your self-esteem, feel fulfilling, etc.
Building your network (see the previous section) could lead to enjoyable interactions, more social support, etc.
Personally, my experience of writing for and posting on the Forum has indeed brought me more enjoyment and satisfaction than unpleasant feelings or dissatisfaction, even setting aside benefits to my knowledge, career, network, etc.
The same is also true for my experience of writing for and posting on LessWrong, though less so
Here’s a less important point that was originally part of the section “Credibly signal good things about you”:
This could perhaps help reduce the likelihood that you get hired or funded for something you actually shouldn’t have been hired or funded for
It seems like in theory this could happen, if your posts provide evidence that you’re not a good fit for something
That might be good for you, for the hirer/funder, and for the world
E.g., being accepted to and starting a job you’re actually not a good fit for could be a painful experience and could slow your career progression down compared to where you’d be if you’d used the time some other way
But I’d guess that someone’s posts would rarely be a decisive factor in a negative decision about whether to hire them, fund them, etc.
And I’d guess that, when it is, that would often or usually be a mistake by the decision-maker
E.g., it might be the decision-maker interpreting a quick throwing-an-idea-out-there post from a year ago as strong evidence of what the person is now capable of when really trying