Three bottlenecks that the EA community faces – easily mistaken for each other, but with important differences:
Mentorship – People who help you learn skills, design your career, and gain important context about the EA landscape that help you figure out how to apply those skills.
Management – Within a given org or existing hierarchy, someone who figures out what needs doing and who should do it. This can involve mentorship of employees who are either new, or need to train in new skills.
Finally, what I call Mysterious Old Wizards – Those who help awaken people's ambition and agency.
Mentorship and Management are (hopefully) well understood. Right now, my guess is that management is the biggest bottleneck (with mentorship a close second).
But I'm here to talk about Mysterious Old Wizards, and the activation of agency.
I mention all three concepts to avoid jargon confusion. Mysterious Old Wizards are slightly fungible with mentors and management, but they are not the same thing.
I'm looking for someone to share in an adventure
In The Hobbit, Bilbo Baggins wakes up one day to find Gandalf at his door, inviting him on a quest.
Gandalf does not teach Bilbo anything. He doesn't (much) lead the adventuring party, although he bales them out of trouble a few times. Instead his role in the story is to believe in Bilbo when nobody else does, not even himself. He gives Bilbo a bit of a prod, and then Bilbo realizes, mostly on his own, that he is capable of saving lives and outwitting dragons.
In canon Harry Potter, Dumbledore plays a somewhat similar role. In the first five books, Dumbledore doesn't teach Harry much – but a couple times a year, he pops in to remind Harry that he cares about Harry and thinks he has potential.
Slight push back here in that I've seen plenty of folks who make good mentors but who wouldn't be doing a lot of mentoring if not for systems in place to make that happen (because they stop doing it once they aren't within whatever system was supporting their mentoring), which makes me think there's a large supply of good mentors who just aren't connected in ways that help them match with people to mentor.
This suggests a lot of the difficulty with having enough mentorship is that the best mentors need to not only be good at mentoring but also be good at starting the mentorship relationship. Plenty of people, it seems though, can be good mentors if someone does the matching part for them and creates the context between them and the mentees.
That is helpful, thanks. I've been sitting on this post for years and published it yesterday while thinking generally about "okay, but what do we do about the mentorship bottleneck? how much free energy is there?", and "make sure that starting-mentorship is frictionless" seems like an obvious mechanism to improve things.
This seems like a useful concept to have.
FWIW, I think something akin to a mysterious old wizard was relevant in my EA-aligned career journey.
The way I've been phrasing it is that, once I got clear indications that I was likely to be offered a research role at an EA org (Convergence Analysis), I felt like I'd gotten a "stamp of approval" saying it now made sense for me to make independent posts to the Forum and LessWrong as well. I still felt uncertain about whether I'd have anything to say that was worth reading and wasn't just reinventing the wheel, whether I'd say it well, whether people would care, etc., but I felt much less uncertain than I had just before that point.[1]
So maybe regular, formal job/project application processes already do a lot of the work we'd otherwise want mysterious old wizards to do?
But I still think there's room for mysterious old wizards, as you suggest. I've tried to fill a mild (i.e., caveated) version of this role for a couple people myself.
[1] My data point is a bit murkier than I made it sound above, for reasons such as the following:
I realize this will sound crazy, but:
A good mentor will tell you smart things, you'll follow them, see good results and maybe think, "Wow! I'm so lucky to have a good mentor. I'll ask them about X, Y and Z." This reinforces the mentor-mentee dependency cycle
A bad mentor will tell you stupid things, you'll follow them, see terrible results and hopefully think, "Wow! That mentor was terrible. I'll ask someone else about X, Y and Z." This frees up the bad mentor to "help" others.
A bad mentor who believes in you, but provides terrible advice is perhaps a Mysterious Old Wizard. A more common situation is a loving, kind parent or wonderful friend who believes in you more than you believe in yourself!