It can be disheartening for people to be stumble across 80,000 hours content and be inspired but then be left a bit disappointed by the practical options available to them.
To me this is the key point in your post: if you try to bring people into a movement, saying âX is the thing that most needs doingâ and then when people decide âok, Iâll go work on Xâ you say âactually we have a lot of people already, probably go do something elseâ they will understandably be disappointed!
But Iâm also a little confused by your calculations. You say:
If we assume fifty percent of the attendees are interested in EA roles (100) then there is roughly 10x as many people interested in EA roles as there are available domestically.
The 10 roles available in Australia sounds like itâs coming from adding up the number of Australians working in EA community building in Australia, is that right? If the number of people in EA community building were on the same scale as the number of people attending EA conferences, that would actually be very worryingâif people count impact by getting others into the movement, but then the only impact those others have is getting still more people to join the movement youâre not actually doing anything to make the world better.
When I look over the 80,000 Hours list of pressing problems I see lots of things that it should be possible to work on from many places, including Australia?
(Aside: I saw you used both âgive to earnâ and âearn to giveâ. Iâm used to seeing the latterâwas this a typo or is there a distinction youâre trying to draw between the two?)
To me this is the key point in your post: if you try to bring people into a movement, saying âX is the thing that most needs doingâ and then when people decide âok, Iâll go work on Xâ you say âactually we have a lot of people already, probably go do something elseâ they will understandably be disappointed!
But Iâm also a little confused by your calculations. You say:
The 10 roles available in Australia sounds like itâs coming from adding up the number of Australians working in EA community building in Australia, is that right? If the number of people in EA community building were on the same scale as the number of people attending EA conferences, that would actually be very worryingâif people count impact by getting others into the movement, but then the only impact those others have is getting still more people to join the movement youâre not actually doing anything to make the world better.
When I look over the 80,000 Hours list of pressing problems I see lots of things that it should be possible to work on from many places, including Australia?
(Aside: I saw you used both âgive to earnâ and âearn to giveâ. Iâm used to seeing the latterâwas this a typo or is there a distinction youâre trying to draw between the two?)