10 things I would tell my younger EA self

10 things I would tell my younger EA self

1. Widen your confidence intervals. You are too confident that you know what is the highest impact.

2. Morally condemn people about 95% less than you would by default. The world is complicated, ethics is fundamentally unsolved, and you don’t have all the information. It is morally virtuous to cultivate a forgiving, understanding, and humble view of others.

3. Be friends with people you can productively disagree with. Almost all of your improvements in strategy will come from having long debates with friends who you, at first, deeply disagreed with.

4. Don’t let friends influence who you’re friends with. If they will dislike you or morally judge you for being with friends with people they disagree with, ignore them and do it anyways. Friendship that’s conditional on who you’re friends with or what you believe in will be the biggest limiting factor to your impact.

5. Don’t dismiss business books as “fluffy”. They 𝘢𝘳𝘦 fluffy, but they’re also filled with important skills and knowledge that are vital to actually getting stuff done in the world.

6. You can turn anything into audio and spend most of your spare time learning. It’s the best. It’s way more fun and leads to you improving way faster.

7. Don’t bite bullets. Ethics shouldn’t be “elegant” or “simple”. Ethics are a product of brains, which are messy and complicated. It’s unlikely there is some simple underlying ethical framework that will make sense of it all.

8. Write more. Publishing things on social media is really enjoyable and helps spread your ideas a lot better than just talking to people. Also having a public presence improves your ability to hire and fundraise.

9. Write for the EA Forum less, and replace it with posting more on all the different Facebook groups, Slacks, Discords, and sub-reddits. It’s more fun, better for your mental health, and gets you way more exposure for less effort.

10. ​Recognize that your mind is plastic, but not infinitely so. If you try to change how you feel about something for a long while and try a lot of different things and it doesn’t work, then just accept that as part of who you are.