(These are personal comments, I’m not sure to what extent they are endorsed by others at CEA.)
Thanks for writing this up Ozzie! For what it’s worth, I’m not sure that you and Max disagree too much, though I don’t want to speak for him.
Here’s my attempt at a crux: suppose CEA takes on some new thing, and as a result Max manages me less well, making my work worse, but does that new thing better (or at all) because Max is spending time on it.
My view is that the marginal value of a Max hour is inverse U-shaped for both of these, and the maxima are fairly far out. (E.g. Max meeting with his directs once every two weeks would be substantially worse than meeting once a week.) As CEA develops, the maximum marginal value of his management hour will shift left while the curve for new projects remains constant, and at some point it will be more valuable for him to think about a new thing than speak with me about an old thing.
Please enjoy my attached paint image illustrating this:
I can think of two objections:
1. Management: Max is currently spending too much time managing me. Processes are well-developed and don’t need his oversight (or I’m too stubborn to listen to him anyway or something) so there’s no point in him spending so much time. (I.e. my “CEA in the future” picture is actually how CEA looks today for management.) 2. New projects: there is super low hanging fruit, and even doing a half-assed version of some new project would be way more valuable than making our existing projects better. (I.e. my “CEA in the future” picture is actually how CEA looks today for new projects.)
I’m curious if either of those seem right/useful to you?
I think when I see the diagrams, I think of these as “low overhead roles” vs “high overhead roles”; where “low overhead roles” have peak marginal value much earlier than high overhead roles. If one is interested in scaling work, and assuming that requires also scaling labor, then scalable strategies would be ones that would have many low overhead roles, similar to your second diagram of “CEA in the Future”
That said, my main point above wasn’t that CEA should definitely grow, but that if CEA is having trouble/hesitancy/it-isn’t-ideal growing, I would expect that the strategy of “encouraging a bunch of new external nonprofits” to be limited in potential.
If CEA thinks it could help police new nonprofits, that would also take Max’s time or similar; the management time is coming from the same place, it’s just being used in different ways and there would ideally be less of it.
In the back of my mind, I’m thinking that OpenPhil theoretically has access to +$10Bil, and hypothetically much of this could go towards promotion of EA or EA-related principles, but right now there’s a big bottleneck here. I could imagine that it’s possible it could make sense to be rather okay wasting a fair bit of money and doing things quite unusual in order to get expansion to work somehow.
Around CEA and related organizations in particular, I am a bit worried that not all of the value of taking in good people is transparent. For example, if an org takes in someone promising and trains them up for 2 years, and then they leave for another org, that could have been a huge positive externality, but I’d bet it would get overlooked by funders. I’ve seen this happen previously. Right now it seems like there are a bunch of rather young EAs who really could use some training, but there are relatively few job openings, in part because existing orgs are quite hesitant to expand.
I imagine that hypothetically this could be an incredibly long conversation, and you definitely have a lot more inside knowledge than I do. I’d like to personally do more investigation to better understand what the main EA growth constraints are, we’ll see about this.
One thing we could make tractable progress in is in forecasting movement growth or these other things. I don’t have things in mind at the moment, but if you ever have ideas, do let me know, and we could see about developing them into questions in Metaculus or similar. I imagine having a group understanding of total EA movement growth could help a fair bit and make conversations like this more straightforward.
(These are personal comments, I’m not sure to what extent they are endorsed by others at CEA.)
Thanks for writing this up Ozzie! For what it’s worth, I’m not sure that you and Max disagree too much, though I don’t want to speak for him.
Here’s my attempt at a crux: suppose CEA takes on some new thing, and as a result Max manages me less well, making my work worse, but does that new thing better (or at all) because Max is spending time on it.
My view is that the marginal value of a Max hour is inverse U-shaped for both of these, and the maxima are fairly far out. (E.g. Max meeting with his directs once every two weeks would be substantially worse than meeting once a week.) As CEA develops, the maximum marginal value of his management hour will shift left while the curve for new projects remains constant, and at some point it will be more valuable for him to think about a new thing than speak with me about an old thing.
Please enjoy my attached paint image illustrating this:
I can think of two objections:
1. Management: Max is currently spending too much time managing me. Processes are well-developed and don’t need his oversight (or I’m too stubborn to listen to him anyway or something) so there’s no point in him spending so much time. (I.e. my “CEA in the future” picture is actually how CEA looks today for management.)
2. New projects: there is super low hanging fruit, and even doing a half-assed version of some new project would be way more valuable than making our existing projects better. (I.e. my “CEA in the future” picture is actually how CEA looks today for new projects.)
I’m curious if either of those seem right/useful to you?
Thanks for the diagrams and explanation!
I think when I see the diagrams, I think of these as “low overhead roles” vs “high overhead roles”; where “low overhead roles” have peak marginal value much earlier than high overhead roles. If one is interested in scaling work, and assuming that requires also scaling labor, then scalable strategies would be ones that would have many low overhead roles, similar to your second diagram of “CEA in the Future”
That said, my main point above wasn’t that CEA should definitely grow, but that if CEA is having trouble/hesitancy/it-isn’t-ideal growing, I would expect that the strategy of “encouraging a bunch of new external nonprofits” to be limited in potential.
If CEA thinks it could help police new nonprofits, that would also take Max’s time or similar; the management time is coming from the same place, it’s just being used in different ways and there would ideally be less of it.
In the back of my mind, I’m thinking that OpenPhil theoretically has access to +$10Bil, and hypothetically much of this could go towards promotion of EA or EA-related principles, but right now there’s a big bottleneck here. I could imagine that it’s possible it could make sense to be rather okay wasting a fair bit of money and doing things quite unusual in order to get expansion to work somehow.
Around CEA and related organizations in particular, I am a bit worried that not all of the value of taking in good people is transparent. For example, if an org takes in someone promising and trains them up for 2 years, and then they leave for another org, that could have been a huge positive externality, but I’d bet it would get overlooked by funders. I’ve seen this happen previously. Right now it seems like there are a bunch of rather young EAs who really could use some training, but there are relatively few job openings, in part because existing orgs are quite hesitant to expand.
I imagine that hypothetically this could be an incredibly long conversation, and you definitely have a lot more inside knowledge than I do. I’d like to personally do more investigation to better understand what the main EA growth constraints are, we’ll see about this.
One thing we could make tractable progress in is in forecasting movement growth or these other things. I don’t have things in mind at the moment, but if you ever have ideas, do let me know, and we could see about developing them into questions in Metaculus or similar. I imagine having a group understanding of total EA movement growth could help a fair bit and make conversations like this more straightforward.