The first thing that comes to mind here is that replaceability is a concern for direct work, but not for donations. Previously, the argument has been that replaceability does not matter as much for the very high impact roles as they are likely heavy tailed and therefore the gap between the first and second applicant large.
But that is not true anymore once you leave the tails, you get the full impact from donations but less impact from direct work due to replaceability concerns. This also makes me a bit confused about your statement that income is unusually heavy-tailed compared to direct work—possibly, but I am specifically not talking about the tails, but about everyone who isn’t in the top ~3% for “ability”.
Or looking at this differently: for the top few percent we think they should try to have their impact via direct work first. But it seems pretty clear (at least I think so?) that a person in the bottom 20% percentile in a rich country should try to maximise income to donate instead of direct work.
The crossover point where one should switch from focusing on direct work instead of donations therefore needs to be somewhere between the 20% and 97%. It is entirely possible that it is pretty low on that curve and admittedly most people interested in EA are above average in ability, but the crossover point has to be somewhere and then we need to figure out where.
For working in government policy I also expect only the top ~3% in ability have a shot at highly impactful roles or are able to shape their role in an impactful way outside of their job description. When you talk about advocacy I am not sure whether you still mean full-time roles. If so, I find it plausible that you do not need to be in the top ~3% for community building roles, but that is mostly because we have plenty of geographical areas where noone is working on EA community building full-time, which lowers the bar for having an impact.
The first thing that comes to mind here is that replaceability is a concern for direct work, but not for donations. Previously, the argument has been that replaceability does not matter as much for the very high impact roles as they are likely heavy tailed and therefore the gap between the first and second applicant large.
But that is not true anymore once you leave the tails, you get the full impact from donations but less impact from direct work due to replaceability concerns. This also makes me a bit confused about your statement that income is unusually heavy-tailed compared to direct work—possibly, but I am specifically not talking about the tails, but about everyone who isn’t in the top ~3% for “ability”.
Or looking at this differently: for the top few percent we think they should try to have their impact via direct work first. But it seems pretty clear (at least I think so?) that a person in the bottom 20% percentile in a rich country should try to maximise income to donate instead of direct work. The crossover point where one should switch from focusing on direct work instead of donations therefore needs to be somewhere between the 20% and 97%. It is entirely possible that it is pretty low on that curve and admittedly most people interested in EA are above average in ability, but the crossover point has to be somewhere and then we need to figure out where.
For working in government policy I also expect only the top ~3% in ability have a shot at highly impactful roles or are able to shape their role in an impactful way outside of their job description. When you talk about advocacy I am not sure whether you still mean full-time roles. If so, I find it plausible that you do not need to be in the top ~3% for community building roles, but that is mostly because we have plenty of geographical areas where noone is working on EA community building full-time, which lowers the bar for having an impact.