The EA Forum Is the New LinkedIn: A Guide to Personal Branding

I'm humbled (and slightly Bayesianly uncertain) to announce that after years of carefully optimizing my personal brand on LinkedIn, I've decided to pivot to a higher-impact platform: the EA Forum. LinkedIn let me share updates about clients, networking events, and my "journey." The EA Forum offers something better: 3,000-word posts, detailed cost-effectiveness analyses, and occasional updates about my shifting credences on shrimp welfare.

(Quick tip: always add shrimp. They inflate every number.)

Why bother?

Let's be honest. We all know it's basically impossible to get a job through the 80,000 Hours job board.

Sure, they say they hire the most talented candidates. But you can go through a three-month hiring process, complete several work tests, write thoughtful answers, speak with half the organization, and they'll hire someone they already knew. While still saying they ran a careful, meritocratic process and did their due diligence.

So the real question: why not be that someone?

A visible presence on the EA Forum means that when an opportunity appears, you're not just another applicant. You're someone whose posts people have read. Maybe even upvoted.

Step 1: Announce your belief updates

On LinkedIn, people post about promotions. On the EA Forum, you post about credences.

"After extensive reflection, several conversations with thoughtful people, and at least one spreadsheet, I've updated from 60% to 68% confidence that invertebrate welfare deserves more attention."

This demonstrates intellectual seriousness and commitment to transparency.

Step 2: Replace opinions with frameworks

Posting opinions is good. Posting frameworks is better.

Instead of: "EA organizations could probably invest more in growth," try: "A four-part framework for thinking about growth investments in EA organizations."

The framework should include a diagram, several axes, and at least one matrix. Ideally a 2x2. Nobody has ever published a bad 2x2.

Step 3: Epistemic humility, deployed strategically

Sprinkle phrases like "I might be wrong about this," "my current best guess," and "very rough numbers" throughout your post. You can then say almost anything.

This isn't humility. It's cover fire.

Step 4: Length signals rigor

Under 1,500 words? Readers may worry the analysis was rushed. Over 3,000? They'll assume there's at least one important insight somewhere in there. Standard structure: historical context, conceptual clarifications, several caveats, a section titled "Limitations of this analysis."

Then you can say almost anything. See Step 3.

Step 5: Comment section etiquette

When someone disagrees with you: thank them for the thoughtful critique, acknowledge the strength of their argument, clarify your reasoning, then update — slightly.

"Thanks, this is really helpful. I think you're right that my model may have underestimated X. I'd probably move from 0.42 to 0.39 on this claim."

Somewhere there's a spreadsheet. A running total of every micro-concession, every carefully managed retreat.

Step 6: Distribution

Share your post in Slack groups and fellowship channels. Start conversations with "Have you seen this post yet?"

This process is sometimes called knowledge diffusion.

Step 7: Write meta-posts

The most successful YouTubers make YouTube about YouTube. The biggest LinkedIn influencers make LinkedIn about LinkedIn. The platform is the content. Write posts about the EA Forum itself — reflections on posting, how ideas spread, a guide to writing better posts. These always get engagement, because everyone on the EA Forum has opinions about the EA Forum — and absolutely no one finds this ironic.

The actual growth hack

Look, forget everything I said about epistemic humility and 2x2 matrices. To really succeed here, you need to think like a growth hacker. Study what performs. Reverse-engineer it. Don't moralize about it, just do it.

So I pulled the data. The most upvoted posts tend to fall into two categories: meta-posts about the EA Forum itself, and April Fools posts.

The optimal strategy is, naturally, to combine them.

By writing a meta April Fools post about personal branding on the EA Forum, you contribute to community reflection and maximize karma, while looking very serious about it.