I ran the Forum for three years. Iâm no longer an active moderator, but I still provide advice to the team in some cases.
Iâm a Communications Officer at Open Philanthropy. Before that, I worked at CEA, on the Forum and other projects. I also started Yaleâs student EA group, and I spend a few hours a month advising a small, un-Googleable private foundation that makes EA-adjacent donations.
Outside of EA, I play Magic: the Gathering on a semi-professional level and donate half my winnings (more than $50k in 2020) to charity.
Before my first job in EA, I was a tutor, a freelance writer, a tech support agent, and a music journalist. I blog, and keep a public list of my donations, at aarongertler.net.
Depends on the hobby and how good you are. Some things are relatively easy to monetize (you can teach lessons or do live performances), but even in those cases, youâll be competing with people who do your âhobbyâ as their job, and youâre probably better off doing more of whatever your job is (working extra hours, freelancing...).
The thing I do is play games in tournaments, which is less common that streaming/âgigging/âetc., so this analysis may be of limited value, but: Iâve made something like $75,000 playing Magic: the Gathering and Storybook Brawl over the last four years (donating ~80% of that), but it took thousands of hours to do so, and a few unlucky turns of a card could have cost me most of the money. And Iâm in the top 0.01% among people who try to play those games seriously in terms of success; many people roughly as good as me have put in more time to earn less.