The answer to this question depends somewhat on your focus area, but my experience so far has been that almost all the organizations I work with could use more money (including ACE, Animal Ethics, most Swiss EA projects, MIRI, FHI, and most object-level charities except those that get saturated by Good Ventures). Many of these groups need money more than talent right now.
I also think the people who can be hired for an opportunity cost of ~$50K aren’t 4 times less talented than those who can be hired for an opportunity cost of $200K. This belief is partly based on what I’ve seen at current charities and partly based on the premise that EAs aren’t as special as they can sometimes seem. When you do nonprofit startups, most of the time goes toward ordinary tasks that lots of people could do.
I enjoy working on nonprofit stuff, so I don’t find EtG psychologically more attractive, but after a lot of thinking about this question, I’ve tentatively concluded that I can make a bigger impact EtGing. I think this would be true even if I could only make ~$150K/year, which is too low as an estimate of long-term future earnings.
The answer to this question depends somewhat on your focus area, but my experience so far has been that almost all the organizations I work with could use more money (including ACE, Animal Ethics, most Swiss EA projects, MIRI, FHI, and most object-level charities except those that get saturated by Good Ventures). Many of these groups need money more than talent right now.
I also think the people who can be hired for an opportunity cost of ~$50K aren’t 4 times less talented than those who can be hired for an opportunity cost of $200K. This belief is partly based on what I’ve seen at current charities and partly based on the premise that EAs aren’t as special as they can sometimes seem. When you do nonprofit startups, most of the time goes toward ordinary tasks that lots of people could do.
I enjoy working on nonprofit stuff, so I don’t find EtG psychologically more attractive, but after a lot of thinking about this question, I’ve tentatively concluded that I can make a bigger impact EtGing. I think this would be true even if I could only make ~$150K/year, which is too low as an estimate of long-term future earnings.