Interesting. I’ll want to look back at this later; it seems like I partially missed the point of your original post, but also it seems like there are potentially productive fuzzy conversations to be had more broadly?
To one aspect, and sorry in advance if I get rambly since I don’t have much time to edit down:
I’m not quite sure what cycles you were referring to (do you have examples?),
In short: the location/finance/legibility spiral, the employment/employment/legibility spiral, and the enormous energy needed to get back up if you fall down a class-marker level in enough ways. I don’t think I can expand on that without getting into the personal-ish version, so I’ll just go ahead and let you adjust/weaken for perspective. There’s a lot of potential fog of “which bits of world are accessible” here (but then, that’s to some degree part of the phenomenon I’m gesturing at, too).
Preamble: if you care about being influential then your problems skew a lot more toward a social-reality orientation than if you primarily care about doing good work in a more purely abstract sense. I decided long ago for myself that not caring enough about being influential in a more direct sense was likely to create problems with misinterpretation and value skew where even if I did work that had a shot at making an impact on the target, the effective result of any popularization of it might not be something I could meaningfully steer. In particular, this means I don’t expect the “live cheaply somewhere remote and put out papers while doing almost all my collaboration electronically” approach to work, at least at this point in my career.
Caveat: currently, I think I’ve likely overshot in terms of mindset for medium-term benefit even in terms of social reality (mostly due to risk aversion of the kind you disapprove of and due to the way a bunch of signaling is anti-inductive). I am deeply conflicted as to how much to backtrack on or abandon.
First cycle: Several social and career needs might be better met by moving to a specific place. That place has a high cost of living due to big-city amplification effects, which is a big obstacle in itself—but it’s not just the cost, but things like default tenant-landlord relationships and the signaling involved in that. It’s having the pay stub so you can qualify to rent housing, and having that pay stub come from the right place, and so on. Ability to work around this is limited; alternative documentation usually requires an order of magnitude longer of demonstrated, documented stability, and gaining access via local networks of people has a bootstrapping problem.
Second cycle: I see a lot of talk around some labor markets (especially in software work, which seems very common in this social sphere) currently being heavily worker-tilted, but I’ve still not seen much way to get in on skills alone, especially because it’s not just technical skill, it’s the remaining 90% of the work that involves having practiced collaborating and taking roles in an organization in the ‘right’ way so they don’t have to completely train you up for that. There’s plenty of market for people with three years of legible, verifiable, full-time experience, and almost nothing otherwise. This is classic “you need a job to get a job”, and if your existing role is of the wrong kind, you’re on the treadmill of that alternate track and need a massive pile of slack to switch around.
The above two amplify each other a lot, because the former of them gives you a lot of random-chance opportunity to try to get past barriers to the latter and the latter gets you the socioeconomic legibility for the former. For some corroboration, Patrick McKenzie talks about hiring in the software industry: (1), (2), (3) with some tactics for how to work within this. He specifically notes in (3) that “plausible” is essentially binary and recommends something congruent with your “It’s probably easier for me to de-wheel at the current point, already having some signalling tools, then it is for the average person to de-wheel.” in terms of getting past a threshold first (which is similar to the type of advice you get upset at in the OP).
Now, if you’re talking from purely an alignment perspective, and most work in alignment is currently theoretical and doesn’t benefit much from the above, and organizations funding it and people doing it manage to avoid adhesion to similar phenomena in selection, then you have a much better case for not caring much.
I’m personally a STEM student at a fancy college with a fancy (non-alignment) internship lined up.
Being a student is notably a special case that gets you a lot of passes, because that’s the perceived place in life where you’re ‘supposed to’ not have everything yet. Once you’re past the student phase, you get very little slack. This is especially true in terms of lack of external-system slack in mentoring/integration capacity—the above induction into the ‘right kind’ of experience is slack that is explicitly given to interns, but then selecting for anyone else alongside that is expensive, so if they can fill all their intake needs from student bodies, and you don’t have the “I am a student” pass yourself, you lose by default.
A recent BBC Worklife article loosely corroborates my impression of job market conditions and early-career mentorship bottlenecks.
Although a war for talent is certainly raging, employers aren’t fighting the same battles across the board. Only some candidates have power in the job market – typically experienced, mid-career employees. It means entry-level workers can still face difficulties finding employment – and this is especially the situation in certain sectors.
In many cases, labour shortages mean companies are offering flexible working arrangements to secure talent. Grace Lordan, director of the Inclusion Initiative at the London School of Economics, says this practice can further restrict opportunities for inexperienced candidates.
“If hybrid working is implemented, it makes more sense to hire someone with experience: an employee you know can just get on with the job working from home,” adds Lordan. “Managers need more time to train entry-level workers and show what good performance looks like. With employees often time-poor at the biggest firms, it’s not surprising that we’re seeing some inexperienced workers struggle in the job market.”
Interesting. I’ll want to look back at this later; it seems like I partially missed the point of your original post, but also it seems like there are potentially productive fuzzy conversations to be had more broadly?
To one aspect, and sorry in advance if I get rambly since I don’t have much time to edit down:
In short: the location/finance/legibility spiral, the employment/employment/legibility spiral, and the enormous energy needed to get back up if you fall down a class-marker level in enough ways. I don’t think I can expand on that without getting into the personal-ish version, so I’ll just go ahead and let you adjust/weaken for perspective. There’s a lot of potential fog of “which bits of world are accessible” here (but then, that’s to some degree part of the phenomenon I’m gesturing at, too).
Preamble: if you care about being influential then your problems skew a lot more toward a social-reality orientation than if you primarily care about doing good work in a more purely abstract sense. I decided long ago for myself that not caring enough about being influential in a more direct sense was likely to create problems with misinterpretation and value skew where even if I did work that had a shot at making an impact on the target, the effective result of any popularization of it might not be something I could meaningfully steer. In particular, this means I don’t expect the “live cheaply somewhere remote and put out papers while doing almost all my collaboration electronically” approach to work, at least at this point in my career.
Caveat: currently, I think I’ve likely overshot in terms of mindset for medium-term benefit even in terms of social reality (mostly due to risk aversion of the kind you disapprove of and due to the way a bunch of signaling is anti-inductive). I am deeply conflicted as to how much to backtrack on or abandon.
First cycle: Several social and career needs might be better met by moving to a specific place. That place has a high cost of living due to big-city amplification effects, which is a big obstacle in itself—but it’s not just the cost, but things like default tenant-landlord relationships and the signaling involved in that. It’s having the pay stub so you can qualify to rent housing, and having that pay stub come from the right place, and so on. Ability to work around this is limited; alternative documentation usually requires an order of magnitude longer of demonstrated, documented stability, and gaining access via local networks of people has a bootstrapping problem.
Second cycle: I see a lot of talk around some labor markets (especially in software work, which seems very common in this social sphere) currently being heavily worker-tilted, but I’ve still not seen much way to get in on skills alone, especially because it’s not just technical skill, it’s the remaining 90% of the work that involves having practiced collaborating and taking roles in an organization in the ‘right’ way so they don’t have to completely train you up for that. There’s plenty of market for people with three years of legible, verifiable, full-time experience, and almost nothing otherwise. This is classic “you need a job to get a job”, and if your existing role is of the wrong kind, you’re on the treadmill of that alternate track and need a massive pile of slack to switch around.
The above two amplify each other a lot, because the former of them gives you a lot of random-chance opportunity to try to get past barriers to the latter and the latter gets you the socioeconomic legibility for the former. For some corroboration, Patrick McKenzie talks about hiring in the software industry: (1), (2), (3) with some tactics for how to work within this. He specifically notes in (3) that “plausible” is essentially binary and recommends something congruent with your “It’s probably easier for me to de-wheel at the current point, already having some signalling tools, then it is for the average person to de-wheel.” in terms of getting past a threshold first (which is similar to the type of advice you get upset at in the OP).
Now, if you’re talking from purely an alignment perspective, and most work in alignment is currently theoretical and doesn’t benefit much from the above, and organizations funding it and people doing it manage to avoid adhesion to similar phenomena in selection, then you have a much better case for not caring much.
Being a student is notably a special case that gets you a lot of passes, because that’s the perceived place in life where you’re ‘supposed to’ not have everything yet. Once you’re past the student phase, you get very little slack. This is especially true in terms of lack of external-system slack in mentoring/integration capacity—the above induction into the ‘right kind’ of experience is slack that is explicitly given to interns, but then selecting for anyone else alongside that is expensive, so if they can fill all their intake needs from student bodies, and you don’t have the “I am a student” pass yourself, you lose by default.
A recent BBC Worklife article loosely corroborates my impression of job market conditions and early-career mentorship bottlenecks.