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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: Try working on something random with someone cool, published by eca on May 18, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. I occasionally get referred people. Those messages look something like this. "From: [Person I respect and trust] Hey, have you met [Someone]? linkedin.com/someone They're interested in [some biosecurity thing] and have [some relevant qualifications]. They seem really promising, and I thought they might be a good fit for [something I'm doing]. Should I intro you?" If I'm feeling particularly underwater and/or antisocial, I have a followup like this. "Wow cool background. Have you worked with [Someone] on anything? Or do you know anyone who has?" The answer is almost always no. And I think this is bad. Why? Matching people to high-impact work is really hard. Hiring by work trust network is the only cheat code I know. While working together on a very real project very extensively is most informative, working on a random thing is still probably informative. Working with people on some random thing is relatively easy. Time spent on the counterfactual-more casual introduction-y conversations- is comparatively less valuable. If you buy this, the prescription is simple. Find the coolest EAs you know, find some random thing to work on, and work on it together. Appendix 1. Community builders, consider spending more time working on projects with promising people. I imagine there are lots of good reasons I haven't thought about explaining the prioritization of volume v.s. depth in the community building funnel, and I don't know what I'm talking about in general. But in my individual experience, I'd trade at least 5 high-quality introductions like the one above for a single intro from the same distribution, but where the [Person I respect or trust] has direct work experience with whoever they are introing. Say, experience on a project of similar scope to a final project in an intro CS class at a good university. Appendix 2. Some quick justification, I guess Matching people to high-impact work is really hard. Something needs to explain 'talent bottleneck in EA orgs' but also 'loads of talented people seeking direct work'. Lots of posts relevant to this, e.g. here: This is typically called "vetting" from what I know. I think its more like matching, in the sense that vetting for one team and role should be very different from another. Hiring by work trust network is the only cheat code I know. Earlier this year I hired a lot of people in a period of several weeks. And I think they're pretty amazing folks. The only way this could work was by asking people I was working with, or had worked with in the past, to tell me who they had worked with who was a great fit for our needs. Thats what I've been calling work trust networks (almost certainly stolen from someone else, sorry)- a sequence of direct work experiences. This is a general competence filter. But more importantly, if you trust the person giving you their reference to be totally honest, it gives you an oracle to query about the future of a potential candidate at your company. Work experience doesn't just tell you "good/ not good", it tells you how someone likes using slack, whether they tend to procrastinate on longform writing tasks, and how patient they are with a disorganized onboarding process. This information can not only allow you to evaluate whether your team is a match, but also find match(es) between the person and your most pressing needs as an organization. Notably, when I've tried to hire through trust networks, e.g. allowing for connections by reputation or friendship instead of just work experience, it hasn't worked as well (purely anecdotal, but also makes sense from first principles IMO) While working together on a very real project very extensively is most informative, working on a random thing ...