I've been meaning to write about what it's like trying to figure out your career direction between 18 and 21 while being part of the EA community—a time that feels, at least for me, like the most uncertain and exploratory part of life. You're not just asking yourself what you want to do, but also grappling with questions about impact and doing the most good, which adds another hard layer to an already complex period. For anyone at university who's getting introduced to EA and feeling overwhelmed about career decisions, I feel like I want to share some thoughts. I've been there—feeling unsure about whether I was making the "right" choices or if I was doing enough to have impact. I've seen others around that age wrestle with the same questions. I still wrestle with my impact. You have my empathy. If that's where you are right now, maybe a few scattered pieces of advice from someone a little further down the road could help. I won't turn this into a long essay, but if any of this resonates—or if you want more specific guidance—I'd be happy to expand on these thoughts: 1. 80,000 Hours is not gospel: Of course, they don't claim to be gospel, and explicitly want you to explore different options in your career and provide tools for you to do the thinking. But it's very easy to just default to their listed career options and cause areas. 80,000 Hours won't help you make the right choices if you aren't willing to accept that it's just one piece of your career puzzle. Most people don't just end up working on what they want by default, unfortunately.  2. Think beyond conventional impact paths: On that note, if something doesn't fit neatly into how a typical EA career pans out, that might feel uncomfortable. But that's okay—outside this community, people do all sorts of things in the world. Going to university doesn't automatically prepare you for AI policy work or give you operations skills. You'll probably need to get experience in the outside world that isn't an EA care

I think more people should consider leaving more (endorsed) short, nice comments on the Forum + LW when they like a post, especially for newer authors or when someone is posting something “brave” / a bit risky. It’s just so cheap to build this habit and I continue to think that sincere gratitude is underrated in ~all online spaces. I like that @Ben_West🔸 does this frequently :)

Reminder that there is an EA Focusmate group, where you can do 50 minute coworking calls with other EAs. Also, if you're already in the group, please give any feedback on it here or via DM.

Just wanted to share that, in addition to EA Opportunities, the CEA Online Team has also taken on EA Virtual Programs (previously it was part of the CEA Groups Team). Currently this mostly just means that @Cian M has moved over to the Online Team, but we plan to invest more resources into it than before. Keep an eye on the Forum for future updates! :)

Bird flu is probably fine right now. Let's not cry wolf. I've been looking into  H5N1 bird flu and built this dashboard (https://birdflurisk.com) To me the indicators suggest it's likely gonna be fine. You can see the forecasts are pretty low and even if these resolve positive it probably won't be a big deal to humans (see note in a sec) I think it's worth becoming well calibrated on risk ie only crying wolf when there is a wolf and right now I see no wolf, so as a community we improve our calibration by saying "bird flu will almost certainly be fine" That said, it probably will involve farms full of chickens being tortured to death if they catch the disease. This is tragic. I suggest it requires a different comms strategy though.  Also there may be inflation with the political ramifications of that.  Let me know what would make the dashboard more useful to you.