But almost all of the impactful positions in the world are at organisations which don’t identify as EA. So it’s important for us to find ways to make sure that wherever they work, people can still have a sense of being often around people with similar values and who help them figure out their path.
I share the view that this seems potentially really valuable. Anecdotally, I know an EA who seems like they could do well in roles at EA orgs, or could potentially rise to fairly high positions in government roles in a country that’s not a major EA hub. There are of course many consideration influencing their thinking about which path to pursue, but one notable one is that the latter just understandably sounds less fun, less satisfying over the long term, and more prone to value drift.
I think efforts to address this issue might ideally also try to address the issue that status, validation, etc. within the EA movement are easier to access by working at EA orgs than at other orgs, and probably especially hard to access by working at orgs outside the major EA hubs (e.g., a key department of a government agency in an Asia country rather than in the UK or US).
We tried to brainstorm some ideas for how EA in general could support people like this EA I know to happily pursue roles that where (by default) there’d be no EAs in their orgs and maybe only a few in their city/country as well. Some (not necessarily good) ideas, from memory:
Have more EA conferences in these not-currently-EA-hubs, so that the people living there can sometimes get “booster shots” of EA interactions
Provide funding for these people to occasionally travel to EA conferences / EA hubs
Make the EA movement more geographically distributed, e.g. by some EA orgs moving to places that aren’t currently hubs
Some (also not necessarily good) ideas that come to mind now:
Support more EA community building in these areas
Support the creation of organisations like HIPE in these areas
This could be seen as supporting community building that’s more targeted in terms of sector/career, yet not necessarily explicitly EA-branded. It could build a network of people with similar values and a desire to help each other, even if few/none explicitly identify as part of the EA movement.
(I don’t actually know much about HIPE)
Some sort of virtual community building stuff?
Things like the EA Anywhere group?
Things like online coworking spaces?
(There’s obviously a lot that could be done in this broad bucket)
Efforts to just make EAs less concerned about status, validation, etc. within the EA movement (or more concerned about those things from outside the EA movement)
(No big ideas for this immediately come to my mind)
Efforts to just make status, validation, etc. make those things easier to access for people who work at non-EA orgs and outside of EA hubs
This could include EAs sharing info about a broader range of organisations, geographical areas, career paths, etc., so that more EAs can easily see why a wider range of things are impactful
One idea that just came up to me was making it easier to reap status benefits from the GWWC giving pledge, e.g. I feel kind of proud of seeing my name on this huge numbered list and being among the first ten thousand people to sign. Relatedly, Subreddits and Wikipedia Projects seem to actively use badges of honor to acknowledge things like being a donor, having helped with some task etc. Maybe we could have „Pledge“ badges.
Another idea: getting access to people one holds in high regard could also be something to think about. One could promote speakers coming to local groups, or generally promote networking within the community more.
Another thought that came up: Not being chosen for 80,000Hours‘ career coaching felt like it was a symptom of my relatively low value for the community (not saying there is room for improvement how they communicated that, was years ago). I imagine it feels similar for some others. Maybe having motivated volunteers taking up the rejected applicants would be a cheap way to signal „there are people in the community that value you being here and trying to work out an EA career path“?
I feel kind of proud of seeing my name on this huge numbered list and being among the first ten thousand people to sign.
That resonates with me.
And the mention of Wikipedia is interesting. When I was a pretty active Wikipedia editor, I indeed felt proud of and motivated by badge-type things (mainly “barnstars”, if I recall correctly), as well as by random people thanking me for contributions (either by clicking a button or by posting on my talk page).
I’d guess a lot of EAs have similar mindsets, motivational patterns, etc. to a lot of Wikipedia editors, so it does seem like it could be interesting to try to learn from how Wikipedia “recruits”, motivates, and retains editors.
Could you expand on what you mean by “Maybe we could have „Pledge“ badges”? E.g., where are you envisioning those badges being displayed? Are you envisioning them just being for taking the pledge, or also for other actions (e.g., recording donations, hitting some milestone in donations, being in the first 10,000 members, a badge another pledger can give you to say you helped them decide where to give...)?
(Your other ideas also seem potentially interesting, but I don’t have anything in particular to say about them :) )
Could you expand on what you mean by “Maybe we could have „Pledge“ badges”? E.g., where are you envisioning those badges being displayed?
I thought about people’s forum accounts. There are also the EA hub accounts, but I basically never open it, not sure about others. I’d probably do it similar to Wikipedia (e.g. here), just having a small icon for the pledge and when you hover on it “GivingWhatWeCan member since April 2nd, 2020”. I didn’t think about other ideas, e.g. being helpful for a person deciding on a donation! I like the idea. One worry that comes up is that it could get a bit cluttered. Also, something in me feels a bit awkward when proudly displaying something, like I could become the target of the bullies of my highschool for feeling “too cool”. The GWWC pledge is already so socially accepted as something cool that I don’t feel this in that case.
Yeah, I think this idea—and other things in the same neighbourhood—is worth considering.
One thing worth mentioning is that GWWC already have badges you can display on websites, as well as Facebook photo frames. (This is where I found them.) So I think the intervention here wouldn’t be creating them, but rather:
getting the EA Forum—and maybe other sites—to have a clearly visible option for putting a badge there if one is a GWWC member
normalising using them
E.g., by directly talking to a few people about using them, and making a public statement to let people know about the idea
maybe creating variants
I think it could be worth talking to people like Luke Freeman (who’s head of GWWC) and/or Aaron Gertler (the lead Forum moderator) about this.
Benjamin Todd: And so now in this third stage [of the effective altruism movement], we’re a bit less constrained by kind of generally interested, talented people, and a bit more constrained by either people who have very particular skills that are needed, such as we used the AI technical safety example earlier, or grantmaker skill sets, the kinds of things we list on our priority problems. Or maybe we’re more constrained now by what you might want to call an organizational bottleneck, which is ability to figure out who’s interested. So there’s a kind of searching/vetting bottleneck, and figure out who would be able to contribute and then train them, manage them. And even just have things that lots of people could do.
[...]
Arden Koehler: So yeah, I guess maybe one complication here is that it feels most easy to imagine this organizational capacity bottleneck or something, in the case of like, “Well, organizations that have the effective altruism label, aren’t big enough and don’t have enough managers to basically be able to hire these people.” But then I guess since we think so many people can make such a big, positive difference working in areas besides effective altruism organizations, in government, in research, what’s the equivalent of this capacity bottleneck for those cases?
Benjamin Todd: Well, I was almost wondering if I should emphasize now that what I’ve been talking about is always just a matter of degree about which bottleneck seems like the very most pressing right now, but always additional organizational capacity, talented people, funding, they’re always useful and there’s always good things to do with those things. So I’m not saying that all those other things are just not useful at all. And you’re giving some really good examples of, “Well, if you are just a generally talented person, maybe it’s a bit harder to get some of these jobs, particularly at the nonprofits that are most central to the community right now than it was, say, in 2015.”
Benjamin Todd: But that doesn’t mean there’s nothing useful to do. You can go and train up in academia or start focusing on some kind of research there. There’s many, many hundreds or even thousands of people could go and work in government and policy positions. Yeah, you could go and work at some other nonprofits that are relevant to these issues, but not labeled as effective altruist organizations. And so yeah, having extra talented people is still really useful. It’s just, exactly what you might focus on, would be a bit different.
Arden Koehler: Yeah. I was thinking maybe one answer to the question of, what’s the analog of organizational capacity for those other areas, it might be guidance or something. Of course, this is something that 80,000 Hours is trying to provide, but figuring out what are the best roles in those other institutions and people having support or community when they’re in those other institutions so that they feel good about it and feel motivated for the long haul. Those could be sort of the equivalent. And if we got those, then it’d be easier for people to put their skills to work.
Benjamin Todd: Yes. And I think one thing that does make it hard to go and do those other things is it often requires more independence, because you might be going out alone or it might feel like that. And so yeah, in a sense that’s like another type of organizational bottleneck, is like, could someone form a really good community of people that are all trying to work in a certain area of policy together, and that would help them all do that more easily.
Arden Koehler: Yeah. I mean, I think working at an effective altruist organization, you and I are super lucky because we get to talk to people about the things that we care about all day, and talk to people who share our values. I think it’s really hard for people who are like, “I really care about these things, but I’m going to go out into the wild and work in a department of a government where nobody else will care about the same things I care about.” But I guess, if there was some way to make that less true and make those communities more supportive, then that would make it a bit more attractive and easier for people.
Benjamin Todd: Yes. And I mean, this is starting to change a bit. There are lots of other people interested in these ideas, doing those things, who will be up for chatting to you.
(I’d heard that episode back in November 2020, so it may have been one of many influences informing my comment.)
I also made a tag this morning for posts relevant to Working at EA vs Non-EA Orgs (and tagged this post), so readers interested in this topic may be interested in those posts as well.
I share the view that this seems potentially really valuable. Anecdotally, I know an EA who seems like they could do well in roles at EA orgs, or could potentially rise to fairly high positions in government roles in a country that’s not a major EA hub. There are of course many consideration influencing their thinking about which path to pursue, but one notable one is that the latter just understandably sounds less fun, less satisfying over the long term, and more prone to value drift.
I think efforts to address this issue might ideally also try to address the issue that status, validation, etc. within the EA movement are easier to access by working at EA orgs than at other orgs, and probably especially hard to access by working at orgs outside the major EA hubs (e.g., a key department of a government agency in an Asia country rather than in the UK or US).
We tried to brainstorm some ideas for how EA in general could support people like this EA I know to happily pursue roles that where (by default) there’d be no EAs in their orgs and maybe only a few in their city/country as well. Some (not necessarily good) ideas, from memory:
Have more EA conferences in these not-currently-EA-hubs, so that the people living there can sometimes get “booster shots” of EA interactions
Provide funding for these people to occasionally travel to EA conferences / EA hubs
Make the EA movement more geographically distributed, e.g. by some EA orgs moving to places that aren’t currently hubs
Some (also not necessarily good) ideas that come to mind now:
Support more EA community building in these areas
Support the creation of organisations like HIPE in these areas
This could be seen as supporting community building that’s more targeted in terms of sector/career, yet not necessarily explicitly EA-branded. It could build a network of people with similar values and a desire to help each other, even if few/none explicitly identify as part of the EA movement.
(I don’t actually know much about HIPE)
Some sort of virtual community building stuff?
Things like the EA Anywhere group?
Things like online coworking spaces?
(There’s obviously a lot that could be done in this broad bucket)
Efforts to just make EAs less concerned about status, validation, etc. within the EA movement (or more concerned about those things from outside the EA movement)
(No big ideas for this immediately come to my mind)
Efforts to just make status, validation, etc. make those things easier to access for people who work at non-EA orgs and outside of EA hubs
This could include EAs sharing info about a broader range of organisations, geographical areas, career paths, etc., so that more EAs can easily see why a wider range of things are impactful
Re: Make status easier accessible
One idea that just came up to me was making it easier to reap status benefits from the GWWC giving pledge, e.g. I feel kind of proud of seeing my name on this huge numbered list and being among the first ten thousand people to sign. Relatedly, Subreddits and Wikipedia Projects seem to actively use badges of honor to acknowledge things like being a donor, having helped with some task etc. Maybe we could have „Pledge“ badges.
Another idea: getting access to people one holds in high regard could also be something to think about. One could promote speakers coming to local groups, or generally promote networking within the community more.
Another thought that came up: Not being chosen for 80,000Hours‘ career coaching felt like it was a symptom of my relatively low value for the community (not saying there is room for improvement how they communicated that, was years ago). I imagine it feels similar for some others. Maybe having motivated volunteers taking up the rejected applicants would be a cheap way to signal „there are people in the community that value you being here and trying to work out an EA career path“?
That resonates with me.
And the mention of Wikipedia is interesting. When I was a pretty active Wikipedia editor, I indeed felt proud of and motivated by badge-type things (mainly “barnstars”, if I recall correctly), as well as by random people thanking me for contributions (either by clicking a button or by posting on my talk page).
I’d guess a lot of EAs have similar mindsets, motivational patterns, etc. to a lot of Wikipedia editors, so it does seem like it could be interesting to try to learn from how Wikipedia “recruits”, motivates, and retains editors.
Could you expand on what you mean by “Maybe we could have „Pledge“ badges”? E.g., where are you envisioning those badges being displayed? Are you envisioning them just being for taking the pledge, or also for other actions (e.g., recording donations, hitting some milestone in donations, being in the first 10,000 members, a badge another pledger can give you to say you helped them decide where to give...)?
(Your other ideas also seem potentially interesting, but I don’t have anything in particular to say about them :) )
I thought about people’s forum accounts. There are also the EA hub accounts, but I basically never open it, not sure about others. I’d probably do it similar to Wikipedia (e.g. here), just having a small icon for the pledge and when you hover on it “GivingWhatWeCan member since April 2nd, 2020”. I didn’t think about other ideas, e.g. being helpful for a person deciding on a donation! I like the idea. One worry that comes up is that it could get a bit cluttered. Also, something in me feels a bit awkward when proudly displaying something, like I could become the target of the bullies of my highschool for feeling “too cool”. The GWWC pledge is already so socially accepted as something cool that I don’t feel this in that case.
Yeah, I think this idea—and other things in the same neighbourhood—is worth considering.
One thing worth mentioning is that GWWC already have badges you can display on websites, as well as Facebook photo frames. (This is where I found them.) So I think the intervention here wouldn’t be creating them, but rather:
getting the EA Forum—and maybe other sites—to have a clearly visible option for putting a badge there if one is a GWWC member
normalising using them
E.g., by directly talking to a few people about using them, and making a public statement to let people know about the idea
maybe creating variants
I think it could be worth talking to people like Luke Freeman (who’s head of GWWC) and/or Aaron Gertler (the lead Forum moderator) about this.
See also the post EA jobs provide scarce non-monetary goods, which probably influenced the views I expressed here but which I’d forgotten about till recently.
I was just re-reading the transcript of the 80k interview with Ben Todd from November 2020 and saw that that includes a section that’s relevant to what I was saying here, which I’ll quote below in case it’s of interest to any future readers:
(I’d heard that episode back in November 2020, so it may have been one of many influences informing my comment.)
I also made a tag this morning for posts relevant to Working at EA vs Non-EA Orgs (and tagged this post), so readers interested in this topic may be interested in those posts as well.