My 2 cents is a shift in mindset. It’s related to 3.
In my experience, the elephant in the brain is that most of us, most of the time, are still optimizing for approval 90% and value 10%. If you manage to snap out of that, you’ll suddenly see that there is a lot of unacknowledged value out there.
Not because anyone’s intentionally ignoring things, but because the people and organisations that have the position to acknowledge value are busy, and imperfect. They haven’t thought of everything. They don’t have everything in control. They’re not your superiors. The only difference between them and you is that they realized that there’s no fire alarm for adulthood. You won’t wake up one day and realise that you are now wise and able to handle everything.
The terrifying truth is that there are not enough adults in the room. You are, in some broad sense, the most responsible individual here. No one can tell you what to do. So now you have to take ownership of these problems and personally see to it that they are solved. It’s terrifying, but it’s necessary.
In some sense, we’re not going to make it without your help.
It’s been said that EA is vetting constrained, but in some deep sense it’s more like that EA (and the world) is constrained on the amount of people that don’t need to be told what to do.
So build up that skill of making decisions that you would feel comfortable about even if a large amount of people scrutinized you for it. Then start acting as if a large amount of superintelligent and reasonable people are scrutinizing you with the expectation that you will personally take care of everything. If you can handle that pressure, it’s the best prompt I’ve found to get myself to start generating plenty of work to do. Much more than I can do on my own.
(lots of downvotes, so where are all the comments?)
I want to reward you for bringing up the topic of power dynamics in EA. Those exist, like in any community, but especially in EA there seems to be a strong current of denying the fact that EA’s are constrained by their selfish incentives like everyone else. It requires heroism to go against that current.
But by just insinuating and not delivering any concrete evidence or constructive suggestions for change, you haven’t really done your homework. I advise you to withdraw this post, cut out half the narrative crap, add some evidence and a model, make a recommendation, then repost it.