Thanks for this post—this seems like an important and under-discussed idea!
It’s not obvious to me that status effects will be that important. Influential positions in any government are pretty well-regarded, and it could be easier to climb the policy ladder in innovative governments (e.g. if they are smaller).
I think that that should indeed help increase the status that people can expect from pursuing this path, and thereby reduce the extent to which worries about status will stop people going into this path. But I’d guess that what Jia had in mind might’ve been primarily about status within EA/among EAs.
In general, EAs might be biased towards roles in explicitly EA organisations partly because that gives them more status among other EAs, because it’s easier for other EAs to understand whether and why those roles are important. If you’re doing a really important role in some important government/foundation/company, other EAs may just not know whether or why that role or org is important. (See e.g. here and here for some similar arguments.)
And this issue may be more intense the less well known or influential-seeming the government/foundation/company is. So this might make EAs biased towards working at EA orgs rather than the US government, and being towards the latter rather than a smaller and more innovation government.
This definitely isn’t a reason why we shouldn’t highlight the value of this path, though—if anything, it would push in favour of saying more loudly and more often how useful this path would be! (Conditional on this path indeed being a good idea, which I’d currently guess it is.) That way, we can increase how well EAs understand the value of this path, and thus allow people pursuing this path to get a more appropriate level of status (relative to e.g. people working at EA orgs).
(I’d probably prefer it if people in general cared less about status. But I think a lot of people do care about status, myself included, and it seems hard to make oneself care substantially less. So it might sometimes be best to just try to make status more aligned with impact.)
Thanks for this post—this seems like an important and under-discussed idea!
I think that that should indeed help increase the status that people can expect from pursuing this path, and thereby reduce the extent to which worries about status will stop people going into this path. But I’d guess that what Jia had in mind might’ve been primarily about status within EA/among EAs.
In general, EAs might be biased towards roles in explicitly EA organisations partly because that gives them more status among other EAs, because it’s easier for other EAs to understand whether and why those roles are important. If you’re doing a really important role in some important government/foundation/company, other EAs may just not know whether or why that role or org is important. (See e.g. here and here for some similar arguments.)
And this issue may be more intense the less well known or influential-seeming the government/foundation/company is. So this might make EAs biased towards working at EA orgs rather than the US government, and being towards the latter rather than a smaller and more innovation government.
This definitely isn’t a reason why we shouldn’t highlight the value of this path, though—if anything, it would push in favour of saying more loudly and more often how useful this path would be! (Conditional on this path indeed being a good idea, which I’d currently guess it is.) That way, we can increase how well EAs understand the value of this path, and thus allow people pursuing this path to get a more appropriate level of status (relative to e.g. people working at EA orgs).
(I’d probably prefer it if people in general cared less about status. But I think a lot of people do care about status, myself included, and it seems hard to make oneself care substantially less. So it might sometimes be best to just try to make status more aligned with impact.)