I spent a long time spinning my wheels calculating the “scenarios i’d most like to mitigate” and the “1-3 potentially most effective interventions” before noticing that not specializing was slowly killing me. Agree that this is the hard part, but a current guess of mine is that at least some people should do the 80⁄20 by identifying a top 5 then throwing dice.
I have to make a post about specialization, the value it adds to your life independent of the choice of what to specialize in, etc.
Looking forward to reading this in the future! I’d like to add though that some people really enjoy being generalists, wearers of many hats, and Jacks of all trades, ready to switch tasks/projects/cause areas if priorities seem to change.
For sure, it’s hard, and also perhaps the most crucial part if you wanna feel like you’re doing the most effective thing you could be doing.
When I started this process after graduating ~9 months ago, I spent the first ~2 months mainly reading, trying to get a broad general understanding of what’s going on and why. I had already established that I cared the most about preventing extinction scenarios.
It might help simplify to go the Ngo route of batching risks together and identifying the intervention that would mitigate the whole bunch at once.
Personally, it took me ~2 months to come to the conclusion that an international agreement/treaty on red lines might be the single most high EV, reasonable, no-brainer intervention out there. Have explored other options but always returned to this one. Would like to see folks shoot for the moon and honestly try to make something like this happen 2026-2027.
this is actually hard, and where I stumble. for me the whole thing seems too owerwhelming to have a perference.
do you have any specific examples? what are the scenario(s) that drive your efforts?
I spent a long time spinning my wheels calculating the “scenarios i’d most like to mitigate” and the “1-3 potentially most effective interventions” before noticing that not specializing was slowly killing me. Agree that this is the hard part, but a current guess of mine is that at least some people should do the 80⁄20 by identifying a top 5 then throwing dice.
I have to make a post about specialization, the value it adds to your life independent of the choice of what to specialize in, etc.
Looking forward to reading this in the future! I’d like to add though that some people really enjoy being generalists, wearers of many hats, and Jacks of all trades, ready to switch tasks/projects/cause areas if priorities seem to change.
For sure, it’s hard, and also perhaps the most crucial part if you wanna feel like you’re doing the most effective thing you could be doing.
When I started this process after graduating ~9 months ago, I spent the first ~2 months mainly reading, trying to get a broad general understanding of what’s going on and why. I had already established that I cared the most about preventing extinction scenarios.
It might help simplify to go the Ngo route of batching risks together and identifying the intervention that would mitigate the whole bunch at once.
Personally, it took me ~2 months to come to the conclusion that an international agreement/treaty on red lines might be the single most high EV, reasonable, no-brainer intervention out there. Have explored other options but always returned to this one. Would like to see folks shoot for the moon and honestly try to make something like this happen 2026-2027.