I find searching for in-depth content on the EA Forum vastly better than Reddit. This isn't just relating to EA topics. There are a few academic-ish subreddits that I like and will search when I'm interested in what the amateur experts think on a given topic. Finding relevant posts is about the same on Reddit but finding in-depth comments + related posts is very hard. I usually have to do some Google magic to make that happen.

Also on rare occasion, I end up liking a person's writing style or thinking methods and want to deep dive into what else they've written about. On the EA Forum, about 100% of what I find will be tangential to things I care about. On Reddit, it's more likely I'll have to sift through lots of hobbyist content like about sports since it's more of a "bring your whole self" platform.

I'm loving this series so far. I got two questions if you've got some time to answer them.

What categories do you use for time-tracking? I find research tasks unusually hard to categorize.

Do you find that earlier stages in the Ideation -> Exploration -> Understanding -> Distillation pipeline take more time to get good at? My experience is that I improve at later stages far earlier and far faster than earlier stages (passable at Distillation before Understanding, passable at Understanding before Exploration, passable at Exploration before Ideation). And anecdotally, I heard people can take a very long time to come up with a good research idea.

I found it very valuable but (barring any major changes like there being 5 new organizations of similar impact) I wouldn’t find an expanded or updated version that useful.

Hoping to post some shallow takes on global health and development this year!

This is incredible. I skimmed all the sections and I'm impressed with the quality, scope, concreteness, and kindness throughout. 

This is an area where Probably Good blows the 80,000 Hours version out of the water. I'll be pointing people here for a one-stop shop for all their job searching needs and almost certainly coming back to this in the future.

Quick anecdote: I found this dynamic surprising in all the paths you mentioned: academia, research, EA research, and non-profit work. But I realized it very quickly for academia (one month) and painfully slowly for non-profits (several years).

In academia, the markers of success are transparent, the divide between "good" and "bad" jobs is sharp, and even very successful professors complain about the system.

On the other extreme, the non-profit sector is much fuzzier about credentials and career progression. So I might see an employee who graduated from a school like mine and think I could be that person, but not realize that they took on increasing amounts of responsibilities over various low-paid volunteer roles or not realize how much insider information they absorbed from their parents.

This caused me to underestimate how many skills I needed to build. Then I underestimated how long it would take to "make it", which meant setting goals too high for myself and almost giving up too early.

Hey Ozzie, a few quick notes on why I react but try not to comment on community based stuff these days:

• I try to limit how many meta-level comments I make. In general I’d like to see more object-level discussion of things and so I’m trying (to mixed success) to comment mostly about cause areas directly.
• Partly it’s a vote for the person I’d like to be. If I talk about community stuff, part of my headspace will be thinking about it for the next few days. (I fully realize the irony of making this comment.)
• It’s emotionally tricky since I feel responsibility for how others react. I know how loaded this topic was for a younger me, and I feel an obligation to make younger me feel welcome

• These conversations often feel aspirational and repetitive. Like “there should be more X” is too simple. Whereas something like “there should be more X. Y org should be responsible for it. Tradeoffs may be Z. Failure modes are A, B, and C.” is concrete enough to get somewhere.