I put too much weight on what other people thought I should be doing, and wish I had developed stronger internal beliefs. Because I wanted to cooperate, I considered a nebulous concept of ‘the EA community’ the relevant authority for decision-making. Around 2015-2019 I felt like the main message I got from the EA community was that my judgement was not to be trusted and I should defer, but without explicit instructions how and who to defer to. I did plenty of things just because they were ‘EA’ without actually evaluating how much impact I would be having or how much I would learn.
- No location available
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- [note::I worry that a lot of people who introduced to EA make this same mistake, myself included.]

My understanding of what potential employers would judge is whether I was a generally smart and capable person. This was wrong, a better focus would have been whether I can help them solve their very specific problems. I probably would have approached some interactions with potential employers differently if I had internalized this earlier. I failed to model other people’s preferences in these interactions as separate from my own and did not try hard enough to understand what they are.
- No location available
- problem solving, interviewing,

I also get a lot of this vibe from (parts of) the EA community, and it drives me a little nuts. Examples:Moral uncertainty, giving other moral systems weight "because other smart people believe them" rather than because they seem object-level reasonableLots of emphasis on avoiding accidentally doing harm by being uninformedPeople bring up "intelligent people disagree with this" as a reason against something rather than going through the object-level argumentsBeing epistemically modest by, say, replacing your own opinions with the average opinion of everyone around you, might improve the epistemics of the majority of people (in fact it almost must by definition), but it is a terrible idea on a group level: it's a recipe for information cascades, groupthink and herding.
- No location available
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I put too much weight on what other people thought I should be doing, and wish I had developed stronger internal beliefs. Because I wanted to cooperate, I considered a nebulous concept of ‘the EA community’ the relevant authority for decision-making. Around 2015-2019 I felt like the main message I got from the EA community was that my judgement was not to be trusted and I should defer, but without explicit instructions how and who to defer to. I did plenty of things just because they were ‘EA’ without actually evaluating how much impact I would be having or how much I would learn.
- No location available
-
- [note::I worry that a lot of people who introduced to EA make this same mistake, myself included.]

My understanding of what potential employers would judge is whether I was a generally smart and capable person. This was wrong, a better focus would have been whether I can help them solve their very specific problems. I probably would have approached some interactions with potential employers differently if I had internalized this earlier. I failed to model other people’s preferences in these interactions as separate from my own and did not try hard enough to understand what they are.
- No location available
- problem solving, interviewing,

I also get a lot of this vibe from (parts of) the EA community, and it drives me a little nuts. Examples:Moral uncertainty, giving other moral systems weight "because other smart people believe them" rather than because they seem object-level reasonableLots of emphasis on avoiding accidentally doing harm by being uninformedPeople bring up "intelligent people disagree with this" as a reason against something rather than going through the object-level argumentsBeing epistemically modest by, say, replacing your own opinions with the average opinion of everyone around you, might improve the epistemics of the majority of people (in fact it almost must by definition), but it is a terrible idea on a group level: it's a recipe for information cascades, groupthink and herding.
- No location available
-