This is quite half-baked because I think my social circle contains not very many E2G folks, but I have a feeling that when EA suddenly came into a lot more funding and the word on the street was that we were “talent constrained, not funding constrained”, some people earning to give ended up pretty jerked around, or at least feeling that way. They may have picked jobs and life plans based on the earn to give model, where it would be years before the plans came to fruition, and in the middle, they lost status and attention from their community. There might have been an additional dynamic where people who took the advice the most seriously ended up deeply embedded in other professional communities, so heard about the switch later or found it harder to reconnect with the community and the new priorities.
I really don’t have an overall view on how bad all of this was, or if anyone should have done anything differently, but I do have a sense that EA has a bit of a feature of jerking people around like this, where priorities and advice change faster than the advice can be fully acted on. The world and the right priorities really do change, though; I’m not sure what should be done except to be clearer about all this, but I suspect it’s hard to properly convey “this seems like the absolute best thing in the world to do, also next year my view could be that it’s basically useless” even if you use those exact words. And maybe people have done this, or maybe it’s worth trying harder. Another approach would be something like insurance.
A frame I’ve been more interested in lately (definitely not original to me) is that earning to give is a kind of resilience / robustness-add for EA, where more donors just means better ability to withstand crazy events, even if in most worlds the small donors aren’t adding much in the way of impact. Not clear that that nets out, but “good in case of tail risk” seems like an important aspect.
A more out-there idea, sort of cobbled together from a me-idea and Ben West-understanding is that, among the many thinking and working styles of EAs, one axis of difference might be “willing to pivot quickly, change their mind and their life plan intensely and often” vs “not as subject to changing EA winds” (not necessarily in tension, but illustrative). Staying with E2G over many years might be related to having being closer to the latter; this might be an under-rated virtue and worth leveraging.
I think another example of the jerking people around thing could be the vibes from summer 2021 to summer 2022 that if you weren’t exceptionally technically competent and had the skills to work on object-level stuff, you should do full-time community building like helping run university EA groups. And then that idea lost steam this year.
Yeah I think EA just neglects the downside of career whiplash a bit. Another instance is how EA orgs sometimes offer internships where only a tiny fraction of interns will get a job, or hire and then quickly fire staff. In a more ideal world, EA orgs would value rejected & fired applicants much more highly than non-EA orgs, and so low-hit-rate internships, and rapid firing would be much less common in EA than outside.
Hmm, this doesn’t seem obvious to me – if you care more about people’s success then you are more willing to give offers to people who don’t have a robust resume etc., which is going to lead to a lower hit rate than usual.
It’s an interesting point about the potential for jerking people around and alienating them from the movement and ideals. It could also (maybe) have something to do with having a lot of philosophers leading the movement too. It’s easier to change from writing philosophically about short termism “doing good better” to long termism “what we owe the future”, to writing essays about talent constraint over money constraint, but harder to psychologically and practically (although still very possible) switch from being a mid career global health worker or earning to giver to working on AI alignment.
This isn’t a criticism, of course it makes sense for the philosophy driving the movement to develop, just highlighting the difference in “pivotability” between leaders and some practitioners and the obvious potential for “jerking people around” collateral as the philosophy evolves.
Also having lots of young people in the movement who haven’t committed years of their life to things can make changing tacks more viable for many and seem more normal, while perhaps it is harder for those who have committed a few years to something. This “Willingness to pivot quickly, change their mind and their life plan intensely and often” could be as much about stage of career than it is personality.
Besides earning to give people being potentially “jerked around”, there are some other categories with considering too.
Global health people as the relative importance within the movement seems to have slowly faded.
if (just possibilities) AI becomes far less neglected in general in the next 3 to 5 years, or it becomes apparent that policy work seems far more important/tractable than technical alignment, then a lot of people who have devoted their careers to these may be left out in the cold.
Makes sense that there would be some jerk-around in a movement that focuses a lot on prioritization and re-prioritization, with folks who are invested in finding the highest priority thing to do. Career capital takes time to build and can’t be re-prioritized at the same speed. Hopefully as EA matures, there can be some recognition that diversification is also important, because our information and processes are imperfect, and so there should be a few viable strategies going at the same time about how to do the most good. This is like your tail-risk point. And some diversity in thought will benefit the whole movement, and thoughtful people pursuing those strategies with many years of experience will result in better thinking, mentorship, and advice to share.
I don’t really see a world in which earning to give can’t do a whole lot of good, even if it isn’t the highest priority at the moment… unless perhaps the negative impacts of the high-earning career in question haven’t been thought through or weighed highly enough.
Perhaps making a stronger effort to acknowledge and appreciate people who acted altruistically based on our guesses at the time, before explaining why our guesses are different now, would help? (And for this particular case, even apologizing to EtG people who may have felt scorned?)
I think there’s a natural tendency to compete to be “fashion-forward”, but that seems harmful for EA. Competing to be fashion-forward means targeting what others will approve of (or what others think others will approve of), as opposed to the object-level question of what actually works.
Maybe the sign of true altruism in an EA is willingness to argue for boring conventional wisdom, or willingness to defy a shift in conventional wisdom if you don’t think the shift makes sense for your particular career situation. 😛 (In particular, we shouldn’t discount switching costs and comparative advantage. I can make a radical change to the advice I give an aimless 20-year-old, while still believing that a mid-career professional should stay on their current path, e.g. due to hedging/diminishing marginal returns to the new hot thing.)
Burnout is extremely expensive, because it does not just cost time in and of itself but can move your entire future trajectory. If I were writing practical career tips for young EAs, my first headline would be “Whatever you do, don’t burn out.”
Plenty of people in the EA community have burned out. A small number of us talk about it. Most people, understandably, prefer to forget and move on. Beware this and other selection effects in (a) who is successful enough that you are listening to them in the first place and (b) what those people choose to talk about.
IMO, acknowledging and appreciating the effort people put in is the best way to prevent burnout. Implying that “your career path is boring now” is the opposite. Almost everyone in EA is making some level of sacrifice to do good for others; let’s thank them for that!
Effective giving quick take for giving season
This is quite half-baked because I think my social circle contains not very many E2G folks, but I have a feeling that when EA suddenly came into a lot more funding and the word on the street was that we were “talent constrained, not funding constrained”, some people earning to give ended up pretty jerked around, or at least feeling that way. They may have picked jobs and life plans based on the earn to give model, where it would be years before the plans came to fruition, and in the middle, they lost status and attention from their community. There might have been an additional dynamic where people who took the advice the most seriously ended up deeply embedded in other professional communities, so heard about the switch later or found it harder to reconnect with the community and the new priorities.
I really don’t have an overall view on how bad all of this was, or if anyone should have done anything differently, but I do have a sense that EA has a bit of a feature of jerking people around like this, where priorities and advice change faster than the advice can be fully acted on. The world and the right priorities really do change, though; I’m not sure what should be done except to be clearer about all this, but I suspect it’s hard to properly convey “this seems like the absolute best thing in the world to do, also next year my view could be that it’s basically useless” even if you use those exact words. And maybe people have done this, or maybe it’s worth trying harder. Another approach would be something like insurance.
A frame I’ve been more interested in lately (definitely not original to me) is that earning to give is a kind of resilience / robustness-add for EA, where more donors just means better ability to withstand crazy events, even if in most worlds the small donors aren’t adding much in the way of impact. Not clear that that nets out, but “good in case of tail risk” seems like an important aspect.
A more out-there idea, sort of cobbled together from a me-idea and Ben West-understanding is that, among the many thinking and working styles of EAs, one axis of difference might be “willing to pivot quickly, change their mind and their life plan intensely and often” vs “not as subject to changing EA winds” (not necessarily in tension, but illustrative). Staying with E2G over many years might be related to having being closer to the latter; this might be an under-rated virtue and worth leveraging.
I think another example of the jerking people around thing could be the vibes from summer 2021 to summer 2022 that if you weren’t exceptionally technically competent and had the skills to work on object-level stuff, you should do full-time community building like helping run university EA groups. And then that idea lost steam this year.
Yeah I think EA just neglects the downside of career whiplash a bit. Another instance is how EA orgs sometimes offer internships where only a tiny fraction of interns will get a job, or hire and then quickly fire staff. In a more ideal world, EA orgs would value rejected & fired applicants much more highly than non-EA orgs, and so low-hit-rate internships, and rapid firing would be much less common in EA than outside.
Hmm, this doesn’t seem obvious to me – if you care more about people’s success then you are more willing to give offers to people who don’t have a robust resume etc., which is going to lead to a lower hit rate than usual.
It’s an interesting point about the potential for jerking people around and alienating them from the movement and ideals. It could also (maybe) have something to do with having a lot of philosophers leading the movement too. It’s easier to change from writing philosophically about short termism “doing good better” to long termism “what we owe the future”, to writing essays about talent constraint over money constraint, but harder to psychologically and practically (although still very possible) switch from being a mid career global health worker or earning to giver to working on AI alignment.
This isn’t a criticism, of course it makes sense for the philosophy driving the movement to develop, just highlighting the difference in “pivotability” between leaders and some practitioners and the obvious potential for “jerking people around” collateral as the philosophy evolves.
Also having lots of young people in the movement who haven’t committed years of their life to things can make changing tacks more viable for many and seem more normal, while perhaps it is harder for those who have committed a few years to something. This “Willingness to pivot quickly, change their mind and their life plan intensely and often” could be as much about stage of career than it is personality.
Besides earning to give people being potentially “jerked around”, there are some other categories with considering too.
Global health people as the relative importance within the movement seems to have slowly faded.
if (just possibilities) AI becomes far less neglected in general in the next 3 to 5 years, or it becomes apparent that policy work seems far more important/tractable than technical alignment, then a lot of people who have devoted their careers to these may be left out in the cold.
Just some very low confidence musings!
Makes sense that there would be some jerk-around in a movement that focuses a lot on prioritization and re-prioritization, with folks who are invested in finding the highest priority thing to do. Career capital takes time to build and can’t be re-prioritized at the same speed. Hopefully as EA matures, there can be some recognition that diversification is also important, because our information and processes are imperfect, and so there should be a few viable strategies going at the same time about how to do the most good. This is like your tail-risk point. And some diversity in thought will benefit the whole movement, and thoughtful people pursuing those strategies with many years of experience will result in better thinking, mentorship, and advice to share.
I don’t really see a world in which earning to give can’t do a whole lot of good, even if it isn’t the highest priority at the moment… unless perhaps the negative impacts of the high-earning career in question haven’t been thought through or weighed highly enough.
Perhaps making a stronger effort to acknowledge and appreciate people who acted altruistically based on our guesses at the time, before explaining why our guesses are different now, would help? (And for this particular case, even apologizing to EtG people who may have felt scorned?)
I think there’s a natural tendency to compete to be “fashion-forward”, but that seems harmful for EA. Competing to be fashion-forward means targeting what others will approve of (or what others think others will approve of), as opposed to the object-level question of what actually works.
Maybe the sign of true altruism in an EA is willingness to argue for boring conventional wisdom, or willingness to defy a shift in conventional wisdom if you don’t think the shift makes sense for your particular career situation. 😛 (In particular, we shouldn’t discount switching costs and comparative advantage. I can make a radical change to the advice I give an aimless 20-year-old, while still believing that a mid-career professional should stay on their current path, e.g. due to hedging/diminishing marginal returns to the new hot thing.)
BTW this recent post made a point that seems important:
IMO, acknowledging and appreciating the effort people put in is the best way to prevent burnout. Implying that “your career path is boring now” is the opposite. Almost everyone in EA is making some level of sacrifice to do good for others; let’s thank them for that!
Thank you, whoever’s reading this!