Executive summary: The Effective Altruism (EA) movement faces an inherent tension between its focus on neglected causes and its own growth, as increased attention to previously neglected areas makes them less neglected and potentially less impactful for new participants.
Key points:
EA’s success in attracting talent has led to severe oversubscription in EA jobs, challenging the assumption that these positions remain the highest-impact opportunities.
The movement creates institutional lock-in through career paths and expertise development, making it difficult to maintain pure cause neutrality.
EA organizations face public choice theory challenges as they build infrastructure and careers around specific cause areas.
Proposed solution: EA could shift focus to primarily raising and allocating capital rather than providing subsidized labor, leveraging market mechanisms instead.
Current model of requiring value-aligned teams may be unnecessarily restrictive, as corporations successfully handle similar incentive alignment challenges.
This comment was auto-generated by the EA Forum Team. Feel free to point out issues with this summary by replying to the comment, andcontact us if you have feedback.
Executive summary: The Effective Altruism (EA) movement faces an inherent tension between its focus on neglected causes and its own growth, as increased attention to previously neglected areas makes them less neglected and potentially less impactful for new participants.
Key points:
EA’s success in attracting talent has led to severe oversubscription in EA jobs, challenging the assumption that these positions remain the highest-impact opportunities.
The movement creates institutional lock-in through career paths and expertise development, making it difficult to maintain pure cause neutrality.
EA organizations face public choice theory challenges as they build infrastructure and careers around specific cause areas.
Proposed solution: EA could shift focus to primarily raising and allocating capital rather than providing subsidized labor, leveraging market mechanisms instead.
Current model of requiring value-aligned teams may be unnecessarily restrictive, as corporations successfully handle similar incentive alignment challenges.
This comment was auto-generated by the EA Forum Team. Feel free to point out issues with this summary by replying to the comment, and contact us if you have feedback.