What things did you do to gain experience related to EA?

I wrote a post about this.

In brief, I:

• Did a lot of writing in and after college, and got good at producing fast, clean prose for a variety of audiences
• Organized some EA groups — poorly, but still gained experience
• Was connected with some people who wanted help donating money, which gave me some real-world experience in evaluating charities and (more importantly) understanding how charity communication works from both sides of the table
  • This wasn't something I sought out myself, but you may be able to figure out ways to offer your services for free if you live in a place with wealthy people who donate money. If the experience is what you care about, you don't necessarily need the donors you work with to be especially EA-minded.

Related questions here and here.

NB - None of the things below were done with the goal of building prestige/signalling. I did them because they were some combinaion of interesting, fun, and useful to the world. I doubt I'd have been able to stick with any if I'd viewed them as purely instrumental. I've listed them roughly in the order in which I think they were helpful in developing my understanding. The signalling value ordering is probably different (maybe even exactly reversed), but my experience of getting hired by an EA org is that you should prioritise developing skill/knowledge/understanding over signalling very heavily.

• As a teacher, I ran a high-school group talking about EA ideas, mostly focusing on the interesting maths. This involved a lot of thinking and reading on my part in order to make the sessions interesting.
• Over the course of a few years, I listened to almost every episode of the 80k podcast, some multiple times.
• I wrote about things I thought were important on the EA forum.
• I volunteered for SoGive as an analyst, and had a bunch of exciting calls with people like GiveWell and CATF as a result.
• I spent a bunch of time on Metaculus, including volunteering as a moderator and trying to write useful questions, though I ended up doing fairly well at forecasting by some metrics.

I pursued related research prior to learning about EA, attended EA Global a few times, joined a startup that is EA-aligned (the Human Diagnosis Project), conducted more research on the side, and provided both mentorship and collaboration for other researchers.

I started a newsletter that shares forecasting markets around UK policy questions. It's had a little takeup and I've had some people message me in relation to it.

(I think there is space for this newsletter but for other geographies ie US, EU, China, India etc)

 

I have been trying to become one of the top 50 forecasters on Metaculus on questions resolving in the last 3 months.

To do this, I've forecasted about 4 questions a week for perhaps the last 6 months.