In your list of new hard-to-fake signals of seriousness I like.
Doing high upside things even if there’s a good chance they might not work out and seem unconventional.
I think that this is underrated and as a community, we overemphasise actually achieving things in the real world meaning if you want to get ahead within EA it often pays to do the medium right but reasonable thing over the super high EV thing, as the weird super high EV thing probably won’t work.
I’m much more excited when I meet young people who keep trying a bunch of things that seem plausibly very high value and give them lots of information relative to people that did some ok-ish things that let them build a track record/status. Fwiw I think that some senior EAs do track these high EV high-risk things really well, but maybe the general perception of what people ought to do is too close to that of the non-EA world.
Part of me is a bit sad that community building is now a comfortable and status-y option. The previous generation of community builders had a really high proportion of people who cared deeply about these ideas, were willing to take weird ideas seriously and often take a substantial financial/career security hit.
I don’t think this applies to most of the current generation of community builders to the same degree and it just seems like much more of a mixed bag people wise. To be clear I still think this is good on the margin, I just trust the median new community builder a lot less (by default).