The soundness of this advice depends a bit on what career path you want to pursue, though. If you want to do some lobbying or policy advocacy, it’s pretty difficult to “just get to work” if you don’t have the right network, skill set, and credentials. And working in that area without knowing what you’re doing can also be quite harmful.
I understand where you’re coming from, and agree that you should be very mindful of how your ignorance might create blind spots in your EV calculations, but really the kind of “work” that I’m referring to could also be extremely low-cost and low-risk. Example: You might spot mistakes or opportunities for improvement on a website of an org that is doing important work, and offer to help fix those.
Yeah but that doesn’t really change the general argument made by sanyer here. I do have some networks, trivial skills and credentials, but I could also be an incompetent noob who’s like a chimp with a hammer thinking they’re fixing things.
I guess the crucial difference here is that I do my best to a) learn from other people, b) go for short feedback loops rather than shooting off my own high-cost, high-risk tangents, and c) elicit, actually listen to, and carefully assess feedback from various directions. All this while examining in detail the underlying assumptions behind people’s reasoning which have nothing to do with experiences/credentials.
Identifying as an impostor has really been beneficial here I guess. I’d rather be safe than sorry, and assume I don’t know the stuff others do, until I have good reason to believe they’re just as confused as I am.
I’m also counting on people with reasonable world models to tell me if they think I’m doing something net negative, but until they do, I’ll assume I can just do things.
I think this is true in most fields, and even in technical fields where you can learn a lot from reading papers, you learn a lot of very different (and more practical) skills by working with experienced people before you strike out on your own.
The soundness of this advice depends a bit on what career path you want to pursue, though. If you want to do some lobbying or policy advocacy, it’s pretty difficult to “just get to work” if you don’t have the right network, skill set, and credentials. And working in that area without knowing what you’re doing can also be quite harmful.
I understand where you’re coming from, and agree that you should be very mindful of how your ignorance might create blind spots in your EV calculations, but really the kind of “work” that I’m referring to could also be extremely low-cost and low-risk. Example: You might spot mistakes or opportunities for improvement on a website of an org that is doing important work, and offer to help fix those.
(also you did literally go into a form of policy advocacy via the route in this post)
Yeah but that doesn’t really change the general argument made by sanyer here. I do have some networks, trivial skills and credentials, but I could also be an incompetent noob who’s like a chimp with a hammer thinking they’re fixing things.
I guess the crucial difference here is that I do my best to a) learn from other people, b) go for short feedback loops rather than shooting off my own high-cost, high-risk tangents, and c) elicit, actually listen to, and carefully assess feedback from various directions. All this while examining in detail the underlying assumptions behind people’s reasoning which have nothing to do with experiences/credentials.
Identifying as an impostor has really been beneficial here I guess. I’d rather be safe than sorry, and assume I don’t know the stuff others do, until I have good reason to believe they’re just as confused as I am.
I’m also counting on people with reasonable world models to tell me if they think I’m doing something net negative, but until they do, I’ll assume I can just do things.
I think this is true in most fields, and even in technical fields where you can learn a lot from reading papers, you learn a lot of very different (and more practical) skills by working with experienced people before you strike out on your own.