To be clear, I think AI safety should be a priority, and people who are making progress here deserve resources to let them scale up their research. But it seems to sometimes be put on a pedestal I don't think it really belongs to. Biosecurity, cause prioritization, improving institutional decision making, etc all seem within an order of magnitude of AI at least -- and people's relative fit for the area can dwarf that.
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- [note::Strong agree. I think who haven't given adequate thought to where their skills could be applied default to AI safety because "it seems pretty impactful and if it turns out it isn't, I can just transition into a number of other AI-related fields that are prestigious/lucrative." Is there a way to test this theory?]

A worrying trend I've seen is that people who agree with the current in-vogue opinion and parrot the popular arguments often seem to be given more epistemic credit than they deserve. While those who try hard to form their own opinions, and sometimes make mistakes, are more likely to be viewed with skepticism. The tricky thing here is the "parrots" are right more often than the "independent thinkers" -- but the marginal contribution of the parrots contribution to the debate is approximately zero.
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- epistemics, social rewards,

But there's opportunities to apply this style of thinking and work at varying scales: setting up a new community event, helping an org you join run better, etc. These are often taken for granted, especially since once the idea has been executed, it may often seem trivial. But such "obvious" ideas frequently languish for many years as no one bothers to solve them.
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One thing that could help here is having a strong community outside of workplaces and narrow geographical hubs. And also evaluating people's career more by their long-term trajectory, and not just what they're working on right now, noting that direct impact outside EA orgs will often by necessity involve some work that by our lights would be of limited impact.
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- social dynamics, community, impact,

Having have come into contact with people doing direct work at EA conferences, I've come into contact with more and more people who are doing the kinds of work I read and listen to.
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My experience is that people in the community care about the external social rewards more than they feel comfortable acknowledging.  And while it is not inherently wrong to want these rewards, I think it is helpful for certain groups of the community to be made aware of the rewards and support (just like you did with your answer)  they can expect given the current trajectory of the community and for the community to question the ones it provides but especially question the ones it doesn't offer enough of.
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- community, effective altruism (ea),

(1) Value is subject to moral views and what a person prioritizes: e.g. is the (effective) work of a person working on global poverty much less valuable than a person working on AI Safety? (2) Value is subject to outer perceptions: I know a lot of EAs that CV-wise don't look like your "High-impact-superstars" but putting a lot of effort into achieving a lot of impact one day. I'd worry this turns into a self-fulfilling prophecy: Person is perceived as "low value" by the community -> Gets less rewards -> Person has less impact -> Person gets less reward... and so on(3) Value perception can shift (sometimes even very rapidly): Just look at how the community has shifted in terms of priority cause areas in the last years.
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This might totally be an incorrect impression, but my general sense is that the EA community had more of an intentional focus on being "welcoming" a few years ago compared to now. Maybe some of that has been the pandemic, maybe it's because the volume of interest has increased, maybe it's because more people are looking to EA as a direct source of income and career capital that was the case before. Regardless, if my hypothesis is correct, then one implication is that simple tenure is among the biggest status cleavages in the movement. The people who have been around for longer not only know more people, but they know more of the folks in the inner circle, and are more likely to have warm relationships with some of those people that in turn leads to various kinds of opportunities. And in turn, people coming into the movement now have a harder road to hoe.
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I think it might be useful to create public guides for people newer to the movement on how to navigate it well, with special attention to folks facing some of the constraints above.
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- [note::#idea]

Anonymous comment: "Intellectually stimulating ideas and those who work on them are rewarded significantly higher than less intellectually stimulating work on global poverty."
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