Lecture
One of the most powerful ways to improve your career — community | The 80,000 Hours career guide
- Forming skilled teams and joining professional communities can generate economies of scale, reduce fixed costs like registration, and enable individuals to achieve more than three times the output of working alone without proportionally increasing fundraising difficulty.
- Engaging in communities centered on shared goals allows for mutual success without transactional expectations, whereas interactions with donors or those with differing aims can still yield significant benefits through introductions.
- Environmental influences within a group dictate norms, meaning proximity to generous individuals fosters generosity while association with dishonest people normalizes deceit.
- Diversifying participation across multiple communities is advised to prevent over-reliance on a single group, mitigate echo chamber effects, and ensure identity remains resilient.
- Recommended strategies for community selection include creating lists, attending various events, starting new groups like reading circles or Slack channels, and trial-and-error participation to identify the best fit.
- Individuals focused on specific global problems such as biosecurity, factory farming, or AI alignment should target dedicated communities, while those interested in specific career paths like research or journalism should seek related professional networks.
- Broad ideological and practical communities exist for social entrepreneurship, progress studies, animal welfare, socialism, libertarianism, social justice, and non-violent communication, with the effective altruism (EA) community founded in 2011 by the authors.
- The EA community is defined as a research field and practical network focused on identifying large-scale, neglected, and tractable problems, attracting individuals with similar values to maximize impact through specialized roles like "earn to give."
- Potential risks within the EA community include stress, feelings of totalization, tight-knit cultural dynamics, and recent controversies following the FTX collapse, though the community remains useful for finding neglected issues where conventional networks lack participants.
- Other specific communities recommended include the AI alignment community for existential risk, the animal welfare community for factory farming, the biosecurity community for bio-risk, the international development community for global health, and the international relations community for nuclear war or great power conflict.
- Academic fields offer associated communities and conferences where students and early-career professionals can seek guidance from professors, while the rationality community, accessible via the LessWrong hub, overlaps with EA for many practitioners.