EA - An Earn to Learn Pledge by Ben West

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: An Earn to Learn Pledge, published by Ben West on June 2, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.tl;dr: create an equivalent of GWWC for building career capital. We've thought about this idea for ~15 minutes and are unlikely to do something ourselves, but wanted to share it because we think it might be good.Many people's greatest path to impact is through changing their careerBut for a lot of these people, particularly those earlier in their career, it doesn't make sense to immediately apply to impact-oriented jobs. Instead, it's better for them to build career capital at non-impact-oriented workplaces, i.e. "earning to learn"It would be nice if there was some equivalent of the Giving What We Can pledge for thisIt could involve something like pledging to:Spend at least one day per year updating your career plan with an eye towards impactApply to at least x impact-oriented jobs per year, even if you expect to get rejectedAnd some sort of dashboard checking people's adherence to this, and nudging them to adhere betterSome potential benefits:Many people who have vague plans of "earning to learn" just end up drifting away after entering the mainstream workforce; this can help them stay engagedIt might relieve some of the pressure around being rejected from "EA jobs" – making clear that Official Fancy EA People endorse career paths beyond "work at one of this small list of organizations" puts less pressure on people who aren't a good fit for one of those small list of organizationsRelatedly, it gives community builders a thing to suggest to a relatively broad set of community members which is robustly goodNext steps:I think the MVP here requires ~0 technology: come up with the pledge, get feedback on it, and if people are excited throw it into a Google formIt's probably worth reading criticisms of the GWWC pledge (e.g. this) to understand some of the failure modes here and be sure you avoid thoseIt also requires thinking through some of the risks, e.g. you might not want a fully public pledge since that could hurt people's job prospectsIf you are interested in taking on this project, please contact one of us and we can try to helpThanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org