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 “X is the thing that most needs doing” and then when people decide “ok, I’ll go work on X” you say “actually we have a lot of people already, probably go do something else” they will understandably be disappointed!
But I’m 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 it’s 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 worrying—if 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 you’re 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 “give to earn” and “earn to give”. I’m used to seeing the latter—was this a typo or is there a distinction you’re 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 “X is the thing that most needs doing” and then when people decide “ok, I’ll go work on X” you say “actually we have a lot of people already, probably go do something else” they will understandably be disappointed!
But I’m also a little confused by your calculations. You say:
The 10 roles available in Australia sounds like it’s 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 worrying—if 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 you’re 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 “give to earn” and “earn to give”. I’m used to seeing the latter—was this a typo or is there a distinction you’re trying to draw between the two?)