A lack of initiative seems to be what makes a lot of people more mediocre than they otherwise would be? When you have a sense of agency, you start or join early projects, make small (or large) contributions to other people’s work, etc., and either you grow less mediocre from the experience, or you’re at least a mediocre EA making sure to try all the promising things to maximise their impact!
(but then again, maybe I’m only saying that because it’s the area where I most feel my own limitations)
And here’s one more “thank you so much for writing this!!” comment.
I’m very underconfident, with a mental health that works fine until it doesn’t, and it’s also impacted what I got from the college I attended, from my choice of major (“no way I can actually do [other thing that seem more to my liking], so….”) to my extracurriculars and side projects—or lack thereof. So, I was really feeling the “there’s literally nothing I can bring to anyone, anyway”. Thankfully—for me!— it’s been getting a lot better recently, but… being agenty is still, like, super difficult, or is that just me? I’m at the stage where I can sort of say “maybe I can actually bring something to that space” but then it takes no end of poking and prodding from other people to get me to actually have a serious look at that idea, because that still seems huge and daunting—and maybe because of good ol’ executive dysfunction, too. But this post brought my underconfidence down a notch, and that seems to bring the agenty-ness also up a tiny notch. Thanks for that!
In addition to wreaking havoc with USAID, the rule of law, whatever little had been started in Washington about AI safety, etc., the US government has, as you all know, decided to go after trans people. I’m neither trans nor an American, but I think it’s really not nice of them to do that, and I’d like to do something about it, if I can.
To some extent, of course, it’s the inner deontologist within me speaking here: trans people are relatively few, arguably in less immediate danger than African children dying of AIDS, and the main reason why I feel an urge to do something is because explicitly wanting a certain group to be removed from society feels morally worse than letting them die just because you don’t want to spend money on them.
But still: anyone has a good guess at what would be the most effective way for me to allocate a little bit of my time and money to this problem?