I agree narrowly with the idea that the option people could have the most impact in isn’t necessarily the thing they like.
But the option a person could have the most early career impact in isn’t necessarily what’s on EA-recommended lists either:
The fact climate change is not “neglected” from a funding and organizations working on it perspective actually means more good opportunities for the median nonspecialist graduate to find impactful early career work in that field,. Whereas EA orgs are famously not easy to get into.
Individual impact is not the same as organization-level or dollar spend impact. So a graduate with quantitative research skills probably won’t produce very different output to anyone else GiveWell could have hired for that role instead, but they might radically change the impactfulness of a charity focused on gender-equality interventions. And there can be potentially very impactful interventions in QALY/WELLBY terms in gender equality, and low-impact or even negative interventions in x-risk or health fields. (Effective organizations probably aren’t improved by hiring less engaged candidates either)
And they’re not entirely wrong that doing stuff they’re already engaged with is a “fit” even if they don’t have any specialist skills in that field because
There’s an opportunity cost to investing time into learning about new fields rather than just doing.
People generally perform better for longer at things they like, and comparative advantage is a thing.
Some fields are much more accepting of “generalists” than others, especially some of the most-recommended EA fields
So whilst it’s entirely possible that people are engaging in motivated reasoning, there’s also reason to be cautious about going the other way, and deferring too much to impactful cause area recommendations, or assuming that people can’t be more impactful in cause areas the likes of OpenPhil think are not neglected.
I agree narrowly with the idea that the option people could have the most impact in isn’t necessarily the thing they like.
But the option a person could have the most early career impact in isn’t necessarily what’s on EA-recommended lists either:
The fact climate change is not “neglected” from a funding and organizations working on it perspective actually means more good opportunities for the median nonspecialist graduate to find impactful early career work in that field,. Whereas EA orgs are famously not easy to get into.
Individual impact is not the same as organization-level or dollar spend impact. So a graduate with quantitative research skills probably won’t produce very different output to anyone else GiveWell could have hired for that role instead, but they might radically change the impactfulness of a charity focused on gender-equality interventions. And there can be potentially very impactful interventions in QALY/WELLBY terms in gender equality, and low-impact or even negative interventions in x-risk or health fields. (Effective organizations probably aren’t improved by hiring less engaged candidates either)
And they’re not entirely wrong that doing stuff they’re already engaged with is a “fit” even if they don’t have any specialist skills in that field because
There’s an opportunity cost to investing time into learning about new fields rather than just doing.
People generally perform better for longer at things they like, and comparative advantage is a thing.
Some fields are much more accepting of “generalists” than others, especially some of the most-recommended EA fields
So whilst it’s entirely possible that people are engaging in motivated reasoning, there’s also reason to be cautious about going the other way, and deferring too much to impactful cause area recommendations, or assuming that people can’t be more impactful in cause areas the likes of OpenPhil think are not neglected.