Ah, you won't get sustained working relationships from a bootcamp. The people who attend bootcamps are your competition, and the people who run bootcamps are teaching context rather than facilitating networking, and don't really have the brain space to form sustained relationships with cohort members.

Unfortunately, EA is full of a lot of people who are job hunting for the same jobs, which makes the community around this activity overly transient and, at times, divisive. I've written twice on this forum about the fact that we need to get better at lowering our infrastructure costs, and having less competitive application processes for infrastructure attendance focused around deeper networking and community capital development.

Finding the more stable, more unified parts of EA will help you build long-term relationships, but you'll probably be (directly or indirectly) expected to put in some money or volunteer time to do so.

If you find someone who gives a substantial amount of money to AI safety, they're probably the kind of person who would assist with your job hunting if you convinced them you're competent. But these kinds of people are found at effective giving focused events and spaces.

I'll continue to recommend a residential at the EA hotel in Blackpool UK. It operates as the shadowy centre of a surprising number of things in AI safety, its staff team are good at providing job hunting assistance, and its alumni network is vast and all over EA. The application process is relatively easy, because it selects for commitment by placing itself outside the Loxbridge bubble. And their £30 a night (food included) Patron rate basically removes the application process, they just check you understand what EA is and agree to follow their code of conduct.

https://aisafety.com/hackathon this is coming up and will likely have the "correct" people in attendance.

Posting reports on the EA forum about things you did, that others can usefully learn from, is another way of building the longer-term relationships. So it's good you found your way here!

Best of luck with the job hunt.

Oh, also - good job posting your first article on the EA Forum!

The fact that you have previously asked for spiritual direction means you're significantly closer than many other people on this Forum to "getting it", I reckon.

Things I'll recommend for keeping your fuel in a job rejection heavy life: 

Reading Effective Altruism in the Garden of Ends  https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/AjxqsDmhGiW9g8ju6/effective-altruism-in-the-garden-of-ends - in all of that, there's a quote about spiritual nourishment coming from a particular kind of quality of attention.

The Experiment with Light network: www.experiment-with-light.org.uk - the ExL is there as solo meditations, but they really are best done in groups. Done right it'll get you off "should" without getting you off committed motivation.

Looking up the PIN (position-interest-need) model for depolarisation, putting yourself on one P and someone you're trying to understand more on the other P, and going deeper until you find the shared N. Ideally this would be facilitated in a workshop the first few times you do it so you can be corrected on obvious mistakes. But I think you're probably pretty intelligent and would get stuff out of self-attempts.

Befriending someone local who's a singer and getting them to regularly sing you some of their favourite songs. If this sounds real scary, going to Sacred Harp meetups resulted in something similar.

Looking into the Active Hope framework (it's designed around climate doom, it works for EA doom with minimal alterations).

Once you've tried out some, you may gain understanding that interpersonal bonding over shared witnessing of the beautiful unites all these things, and (hopefully) also your spiritual direction, and indeed much of the best parts of EA. Once you've a) got the underlying concept and b) realised beauty is immaterial so it doesn't have to cost much money as long as you know your beauty sense well, you can probably work out how to fill your schedule with more of whatever best does it for you.

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Things I'll recommend for getting you a job:

Going for a residency at the EA Hotel in Blackpool, UK and using it to in-person network yourself into a job.

Volunteering at something you're good at already and visibly demonstrating altruism and competency in front to other EAs, and then asking them to help review your job applications. You probably do have an ingroup signalling problem rather than a competency problem, and the easiest fix is to demonstrate competency in front of EAs who are able and willing to fix the ingroup signals of competent people, because they understand that's a very high-impact action.

Dialing down the quantity of your job applications and upping the quality of each one. The mental cost (or gain) of job rejection should be taken into account in your calculus - it's fundamentally net negative applying for jobs where you'll be rejected and won't learn anything from the rejection.

I'd recommend the various AI safety bootcamps for gaining context, but honestly I think the EA Hotel would be faster and more convenient around any schedule you have.

One thing I really don't see much in community-first EA talk:

• Don't (just) pitch people with an interest in impact that building the EA community is the highest impact thing they could do
• Instead, pitch people with an interest in community building that building the EA community would be fun and do some good

Things like just asking a local scout leader to help run your retreat, or someone from your local church who helps run the youth camp, or someone from the Rotary club, or someone who coordinates volunteers at the community arts cafe. A lot of what EA needs is not "special" and the skills to create it can be found elsewhere in your local area.

I agree that an EA community needs high conduct standards for those present that go beyond "don't do bad" to reach "actively help out where this is possible at low cost to you".

I definitely think classic style should be taught more!

For EAs, there's a great argument about classic and postmodern writing styles on Less wrong - which is clearer for communication? https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/h8ZBxrBoSEtvpKc94/against-classic-style

I agree the comms is currently not as good as it could be.

I think the massive push to expand effective giving through a large variety of (non-CEA) methods might well take over EA external comms in the next few years. And I'm hoping the effects of that will eventually bounce back and fix CEA. There will just be a lot more comms-understanding EA-committed people in the EA hiring pool.

I'm also very hopeful about NEST, which seems to have understood that things like "hold a Nerdfighters or Kursgesagt meetup" is a thing a local EA group should be doing to attract the people who might become an EA, and is not cringe-bad-wrong-unprofessional.

Honestly you'd have a great time at EA in the Lakes and should come to the next one I run. More generally, you want to get yourself into an EA group space of people who make donations (of money and/or time) to EA infrastructure, rather than being in receipt of resources from EA infrastructure. The vibe is totally different: the questions are freer, and we help each other clarify the answers to being more truthful and more loving and more actionable because we all want our donations to be used well.

I think possibly the issue is that there's a lot of effort being put in to manage reputational risks, possibly without quite understanding exactly what the forward-looking reputational risks are (because you're reacting to bad things that have happened). That's got to be really tricky.

EA is deficient in character training. Now, teaching character is best done through interpersonal interactions, but here's a rough summary of some things for young EAs.

• Status is all fake. As a signal of usefulness, it's very patchy. It's likely that the most useful things or people simply won't be advertising in eye-catching ways, because they don't need to. So don't be too impressed by really flashy adverts.
• Similarly to the above: status games are overblown, and they can breed division hesitancy and lies in the social space of additional complexity required to upkeep them. If you can manage a serious and experientially lived commitment to genuine kindness and honesty in everything you do you do not need much else at all, which is good, because other things distract you from your goals.
• Criticise things. Criticise everything. Then get someone to evaluate your criticism: is it honest criticism? Is it kind criticism? Your aim is to train yourself to be the best possible critic you can be.
• Please, for the love of Christ, learn to cook healthy vegan food before going vegan. Get support from older vegans where necessary.
• Get good at befriending altruists (effective or not). If you want to make friends with someone quickly, figure out something nice they did that cost them something (time, money, effort, risk), and ask them why they did that - the answers are many and varied but all tend to lead to friendships forming. If it seems like a person has never done anything nice that cost them time, money effort, or risk, they're probably not worth befriending.

I am extremely glad EAGx is back in the UK! Well done for getting it off the ground, and I hope the event goes super well!