Thanks for the great source, Richard! I intentionally didn’t include a description of how to best go about contacting people, as this post was more or less directed at more established orgs that have direct access to recruiters. However, after posting this and receiving messages from interested individuals/smaller orgs, your contribution comes in really handy!
If anyone is interested in more detailed information about contacting and/or being connected, please reach out!
mlc
Karma: 316
Serene moment in midst of all the chaos. Thank you for sharing.
Hi there! Sorry for the late reply. I was also planning on joining tomorrow. Thank you and see you soon!
I’m helping with creating a central platform connecting funders, talent, ideas, and advisors. Let me know if you’d like to be involved or are interested in more infos on it!
But there doesn’t seem to be a useful slack-like thing for just “I’m going to be living in this place, who can I find housing with?”
Seems to me like EA Houses is doing that. What problem would the slack channel be solving that EAH isn’t?
Hi Akash, awesome that you’re doing this! 👏🏼 I’m working on putting together reading groups & curated lists [removed the link as it’s currently being edited]
Thanks for pointing that out!
Thanks, Pablo! I replied to Michael’s message underneath with some examples of how personal development could be structured.
empty tag: now I feel inclined to write a post on productivity :p
“Productivity” is indeed included in the description of the personal development tag. However, I do believe/agree that this is a really big and important category that could be broken down.
Spending a couple of seconds thinking about this, I’d come up with the following suggestions:
-productivity
-mental health
-physical health
-systems
-meditation
-learning
-self-help
-PD services
-PD experiments
-spirituality.
I think there’s an incredible opportunity right now for mid-career people to do really exciting, rewarding, and high-value work with incredible colleagues in a great working environment.
This doesn’t have to mean switching to full-time EA work straight away. Smaller experiments are possible, like learning about an area of interest, or doing consulting or part-time work.
If you’re a mid-career EA lurker, don’t wait for permission! Get in touch with 80,000 Hours for free career coaching, or with organisations / individuals you might want to work with. Start working on impactful and rewarding projects!
-Ben Snodin
Misconception: There’s tons of people working in all these important areas.
Reality: Once you start meeting people, you’ll realise that most areas have surprisingly few people giving a significant fraction of their time to them. And people are liable to spread themselves over multiple topics or switch to new things, so you can quickly become one of the “main people” in an area just by sticking around for a bit.
-Ben Snodin
“There is more scholarly work on the life habits of the dung fly than on existential risks.” Nick Bostrom
Looking at our unresolved long-lasting moral debates, it is quite alarming to imagine the potential need for value lock-in within the next decades.
We are all in the same boat. The bad news is, it’s sinking. The good news is that we still have a chance to gather all our human power to try and solve this problem before it’s too late.
One of the main reasons for people’s objection to working in this field is that it’s so speculative and unexplored. This is precisely why we need more exploration. Your contribution here could really make a difference.
The more severe and urgent the problem, the more resources we should be allocating to solving it. AI Safety is arguably one of the most imminent problems of our lifetime. It is also one of the most neglected areas, with about 150 full-time people currently working on it. We need you.
Productivity
Thanks for the explanation.
other thoughts: Abram’s decision theory and Vanessa’s infrabayes work might be good for distillation. Also, might be worth thinking about some type of collab with current distillers, such as Robert Miles or Mark Xu, and the site distill.pub?
I am referring to people that chose alternative career paths to AI, autodidacts and independent ML researchers for example.
Excellent overview
Including a “country” column might be valuable, especially for the national orgs (or including the location in [brackets] next to the name)
You might be able to embed a sheet view directly on the forum (maybe just a static csv file/table, dynamically showing updates on the original spreadsheet, or fully interactive)