I think more EAs should consider operations/management/doer careers over research careers, and that operations/management/doer careers should be higher status within the community.
I get a general vibe that in EA (and probably the world at large), that being a “deep thinking researcher”-type is way higher status than being an “operations/management/doer”-type. Yet the latter is also very high impact work, often higher impact than research (especially on the margin).
I see many EAs erroneously try to go into research and stick to research despite having very clear strengths on the operational side and insist that they shouldn’t do operations work unless they clearly fail at research first.
I’ve personally felt this at times where I started my career very oriented towards research, was honestly only average or even below-average at it, and then switched into management, which I think has been much higher impact (and likely counterfactually generated at least a dozen or more researchers).
I don’t really think my ops work is particularly impactful, because I think ops staff are relatively easy to hire for compared to other roles. However I have spent a lot of my time in EA doing ops work.
I was RP’s COO for 4 years, overseeing its non-research work (fiscal sponsorship, finance, HR, communications, fundraising, etc), and helping the organization grow from around 10 to over 100 staff within its legal umbrella.
Worked on several advising and consulting projects for animal welfare and AI organizations
I think the advising work is likely the most impactful ops work I’ve done, though I overall don’t know if I think ops is particularly impactful.
I see both Abraham and yourself as strong thinkers with expertise in this area, which makes me curious about the apparent disagreement. Meanwhile, the ‘correct’ answer to the question of an ops role’s impact relative to that of a research role should presumably inform many EAs’ career decisions, which makes the disagreement here pretty consequential. I wonder if getting to the ground truth of the matter is tractable? (I’m not sure how best to operationalize the disagreement / one’s starting point on the matter, but maybe something like “On the current margin, I believe that the ratio of early-career EAs aiming for operations vs. research roles should be [number]:1.”)
(I understand that you and Abraham overlapped for multiple years at the same org—Rethink Priorities—which makes me all the more curious about how you appear to have reached fairly opposite conclusions.)
I think I’m skeptical of my own impact in ops roles, but it seems likely that senior roles are harder to hire for generally, which might generally mean taking one could be more impactful (if you’re good at it).
I think many other “doer” careers that aren’t ops are very impactful in expectation — in particular founding new organizations (if done well or in an important and neglected area). I also think work like being a programs staff member at a non-research org is very much in the “doer” direction, and could be higher impact than ops or many research roles.
Also, I think our views as expressed here aren’t exactly opposite — I think my work in ops has had relatively little impact ex post, but that’s slightly different than thinking ops careers won’t have impact in expectation (though I think I lean fairly heavily in that direction too, just due to the number of qualified candidates for many ops roles).
Overall, I suspect Peter and I don’t disagree a ton (though haven’t talked with him about it) on any of this, and I agree with his overall assertion (more people should consider “doer” careers over research careers), I think I just also think that more people should consider earning to give over any direct work.
Also, Peter hires for tons of research roles, and I hire for tons of ops roles, so maybe this is also just us having siloed perspectives on the spaces we work in?
Is there a proposed/proven way of coordinating on the prioritization?
Without a good feedback loop I can imagine the majority of the people just jump on the same path which could then run into diminishing returns if there isn’t sufficient capacity.
It would be intersting to see at least the number of people at different career stages on a given path. I assume some data should be available from regular surveys. And maybe also some estimates on the capacity of different paths.
And I assume the career coaching services likely have an even more detailed picture including missing talent/skills/experience that they can utilize for more personalized advice.
I don’t know the true answer to this confusion, but I have some rough (untested, and possibly untestable) hypothesis I can share:
It is really hard to estimate counterfactual scenarios. If you are the project manager (or head of people, or finance lead, or COO), it is really hard to have a good sense of how much better you are than the next-best candidate. Performance in general is hard to measure, but trying to estimate performance of a hypothetical other individual that you have never met strikes me as very challenging. Even if we were to survey 100 people in similar roles at other orgs, the context-specific nature of performance implies that we shouldn’t be too confident about predicting how a person should perform at Org A simply from knowing their performance at Org B.
I’m not quite sure how to phrase this, but it might be something like “the impact of operations work has high variance,” or maybe “good operations results in limiting the downside a lot but does relatively little to increase the upside.” Taking a very simplistic example of accounting, if our org has bad accounting them we don’t know how much money we have, we don’t keep track of accounts payable, and have general administrative sloppiness relating to money which makes decision-making hard. If we have very good accounting, then we have clarity about where our funds are flowing, what we own, and what we owe. Those upsides are nice, but they aren’t as impactful (in a positive way) as the downsides are impactful (in a negative way). Phrased in a different way: many operations roles are a cost center rather than a profit center (although this will certainly vary depending on the role and the organization).
It might just be a thing of marginal value, with non-operations roles being more impactful (overall, in general), but we still need more good operations people than we currently have.
I have a lot of uncertainty as to the reality of this, but I’m always interested in reading thoughts from people about these issues.
Quick response—the way that I reconcile this is that these differences were probably just due to context and competence interactions. Maybe you could call it comparative advantage fluctuations over time?
There probably no reasonable claim that advising is generally higher impact than Ops or vice versa. It will depend on the individual and the context. At some times, some people are going to be able to have much higher impact doing ops than advising, and vice versa.
From a personal perspective my advising opportunities very greatly. There are times where most of my impact comes from helping somebody else because I have been put in contact with them and I happen to have useful things to offer. There are also times where the most obviously counteractually impactful thing for me to do is to do research or some sort of operations work to enable other researchers. Both of these activities kind of have lumpy impact distributions because they only occur when certain rare criteria are collectively met.
In this case Abraham may have had much better advising opportunities relative to operations opportunities while this was not true for Peter.
One question I often grapple with is the true benefit of having EAs fill certain roles, particularly compared to non-EAs. It would be valuable to see an analysis—perhaps there’s something like this on 80,000 Hours—of the types of roles where having an EA as opposed to a non-EA would significantly increase counterfactual impact. If an EA doesn’t outperform the counterfactual non-EA hire, their impact is neutralized. This is why I believe that earning to give should be a strong default for many EAs. If they choose a different path, they should consider whether:
They are providing specialized and scarce labor in a high-impact area where their contribution is genuinely advancing the field. This seems more applicable in specialized research than in general management or operations.
They are exceptionally competent, yet the market might not compensate them adequately, thus allowing highly effective organizations to benefit from their undercompensated talent.
I tend to agree more with you on the “doer” aspect—EAs who independently seek out opportunities to improve the world and act on these insights often have a significant impact.
I didn’t neglect it—I specifically raised the question of in what conditions EAs occupying roles within orgs vs non-EAs adds substantial value. You assume that having EAs in (all?) roles is critical to having a “focused” org. I think this assumption warrants scrutiny, and there may be many roles in orgs for which “identifying as an EA” may not be important and that using it as a requirement could result in neglecting a valuable talent pool.
Additionally, a much wider pool of people could align with the specific mission of an org that don’t identify as EA.
I just reread your comment. Here’s my thoughts, but let me know if I missed anything.
You may have been aware of this concern, but as far as I can tell, your comment didn’t address it. For example, I would have included an additional point:
3. They are in a role where value alignment is important, likely because the role requires significant autonomy and where it is hard to provide effective oversight.
Now it’s reasonable for you to not have mentioned this because no one can cover every possible condition, but I think this breaks your argument that earn-to-give should be the strong default.
I agree that people may identify with the mission without being EA, but for many opportunities EA’s will be a large percentage of the accessible pool (ie. even if only 1% of sufficiently mission-aligned folks in the world are EA, half of the mission-aligned folks who actually see your job advertisement might be EA due to being in your network). People who could do the job well, but who you have no way of accessing are irrelevant to you.
For what it’s worth, the assumption at the start of EA was that you could just earn to give and pay other people to do the job instead. And this is true if the job is just handing out bednets, but it ended up turning out that for a lot of jobs, it’s much more complicated than this. Maybe EA has overcorrected, but it’s worth understanding why the community updated the way that it did.
Also, apologies if my previous comment came off as more critical than I intended. One downside with leaving a short comment is that they often end up sounding quite negative.
I think I considered it prior to the enumerated portion, where I’d said
“it would be valuable to see an analysis—perhaps there’s something like this on 80,000 Hours—of the types of roles where having an EA as opposed to a non-EA would significantly increase counterfactual impact.”
I agree that the “high autonomy and lack of ability to oversee or otherwise measure achievement of objectives” would be a reason that having EAs in the role might be better. The scope of jobs in this category is not clear.
There may have been an overcorrection and I still think ETG is a good default option—the scarcity of “EA jobs” and frequent posts lamenting the difficulty of getting jobs at EA orgs as an EA suggests that there is no shortage of EAs looking to fill roles for which close alignment is critical. Especially in the animal welfare EA space—everyone wants to be doing direct work and so little funding to enable excellent work. There may be more of an “aligned talent constraint” problem in AI Safety.
The scarcity of “EA jobs” and frequent posts lamenting the difficulty of getting jobs at EA orgs as an EA suggests that there is no shortage of EAs looking to fill roles for which close alignment is critical
I think this argument would be stronger if people were better at gauging their potential to go professional, but given that people often can’t do this, I expect that it makes sense for most people who are deciding between earn-to-give and direct work (and who aren’t pulling down crazy trader/lawyer/doctor money) to try making it professionally and to use earn to give as a backup option.
Even then, I honestly think more people should be aiming to find a job where they can work four days a week and volunteer one day. I expect that would be both more impactful and more fulfilling for most people.
The challenge is that strong EtG jobs with four-day workweeks can be hard to find, especially for early to early-mid career roles. Medicine is probably an exception, but in the US you have to make it through four years of med school after undergrad, then a grueling 3-7 year residency first. So you’d be accepting an extended period of ~ no impact.
Hiring a personal assistant for enough hours a week might be another option, though.
It’s an interesting idea. My concern is that dropping the fifth day could have a significantly greater than 20% impact on the person’s ability to give due to cultural expectations, actual value to the main employer, or the fact that a 20% pay cut would mean >20% drop in discretionary income for most people.
It certainly could work, although my intuition is that it would only be more effective than FT work under less common conditions (e.g., where the main job wasn’t as well compensated, where the volunteer work was particularly impactful).
Switching between more impactful and more remunerative work could also be a viable pattern for some to have a mix of well-paid and more impactful work. You see something vaguely like this in some circles where people will move into senior government positions when their team is in power, then decamp for the private sector when it is not. But there’s no inherent reason someone couldn’t switch every few years for other reasons.
Do you have any ideas or suggestions (even rough thoughts) regarding how to make this change, or for interventions that would nudge peoples’ behavior?
Off the top of my head: A subsidized bootcamp on core operations skills? Getting more EAG speakers/sessions focused on operations-type topics? Various respected and well-known EAs publicly stating that Operations is important and valuable? A syllabus (readings, MOOCs, tutorials) that people can work their way through independently?
I have previously suggested a new podcast that features much more “in the trenches” people than currently is the case with e.g. 80k podcast, FLI podcast, etc. While listening to edge researchers is more fun that listening to how someone implemented Asana in an efficient way, I think one can make an “in the trenches” podcast equally, if not more interesting by telling personal stories of challenges, perseverance and mental health. One example of such is Joey at AIM—from the few times I heard him talk he seems to live an unusually interesting life. I also think a lot of ops people have really cool stories to tell, like people into fish welfare poking around at Greek aquaculture installations trying to get to know their “target market”. There must be a ton of good “stories from the field” out there.
Have you listened to 80k Actually After Hours/Off the Clock? This is close to what I was aiming for, though I think we still skew a bit more abstract.
Yes it is good, but I feel like it is more of unstructured conversation and more about ideas than lived experiences. So I am thinking a bit more prepared, perhaps trying to get some narrative arcs with the struggle, the battle, the victory (or defeat!) and then the epilogue. I mean what was super interesting (and shocking in a negative way!) to listen to is “Going Infinite”—I mean it is essentially an EA story. So rich, so gripping and compelling and so dramatic. I think something only 10% as dramatic would be interesting to listen to and there must be stories out there. I think the challenge will be to find the overlap between “juicy stories” and people being willing to tell them—often I think the most interesting stuff is stuff people are concerned about being public! But I guess it also needs to be something that make people think ops work sounds interesting but this could also be examples of how gravely things can go wrong without ops—something I think is a lens one could view the FTX scandal through, for example.
I guess this is the same dynamic as why movie and sports stars are high status in society: they are highly visible compared to more valuable members of society (and more entertaining to watch). We don’t really see much of highly skilled operations people compared to researchers
I’m reminded about The Innovation Delusion (which I’ve mentioned a bit previously on the EA Forum: 1, 2), and ideas of credit, visibility, absence blindness, and maintenance work. An example of Thomas Edison is good enough that I will copy and paste it here:
Edison—widely celebrated as the inventor of the lightbulb, among many other things—is a good example. Edison did not toil alone in his Menlo Park laboratory; rather, he employed a staff of several dozen men who worked as machinists, ran experiments, researched patents, sketched designs, and kept careful records in notebooks. Teams of Irish and African American servants maintained their homes and boardinghouses. Menlo Park also had a boardinghouse for the workers, where Mrs. Sarah Jordan, her daughter Ida, and a domestic servant named Kate Williams cooked for the inventors and provided a clean and comfortable dwelling. But you won’t see any of those people in the iconic images of Edison posing with his lightbulb.
If I imagine being in a hypothetical role that is analogous to Mrs. Sarah Jordan’s role, in which I support other people to accomplish things, am I okay with not getting any credit? Well, like everyone else I have ego and I would like the respect and approval of others. But I guess if I am well-compensated and my colleagues understand how my work contributes to our team’s success I would be okay with somebody else being the public face and getting the book deals and getting the majority of the credit. How did senior people at Apple feel about Steve Jobs being so idolized in the public eye? I don’t care too much if people in general don’t acknowledge my work, as long as the people I care about most acknowledge it.
Of course it would be a lot nicer to be acknowledged widely, but that is generally not how we function. Most of us (unless we specifically investigate how people accomplished things) don’t know who Michael Phelps’s nutritionist was, nor do we know who taught Bill Gates about computers, nor who Magnus Carlsen’s training partners are, nor who Oscar Wilde bounced around ideas with and got feedback from. I think there might be something about replaceability as well. Maybe there are hundreds of different people who could be (for example) a very good nutritionist for Michael Phelps or who could help Magnus Carlsen train, but there are only a handful of people who could be a world-class swimmer or a world class-chess player on that level?
The issue with support roles is that it’s often difficult to assess when someone in that position truly makes a counterfactual difference. These roles can be essential but not always obviously irreplaceable. In contrast, it’s much easier to argue that without the initiator or visionary, the program might never have succeeded in the first place (or at least might have been delayed significantly). Similarly, funders who provide critical resources—especially when alternative funding isn’t available—may also be in a position where their absence would mean failure.
This perspective challenges a more egalitarian view of credit distribution. It suggests that while support roles are crucial, it’s often the key figures—initiators, visionaries, and funders—who are more irreplaceable, and thus more deserving of disproportionate recognition. This may be controversial, but it reflects the reality that some contributions, particularly at the outset, might make all the difference in whether a project can succeed at all.
I do think that the marginal good of additional researchers, journalists, content creators and etc isn’t exactly as high as it is thought to be. But there’s an obvious rational-actor (collective action problem?) explanation: other people may not be needed, but me, with my idiosyncratic ideologies? Yep!
This also entails that the less representative an individual is of the general movement, the higher the marginal value for him in particular to choose a research role.
I suspect it varies by cause area. In AI Safety, the pool of people who can do useful research is smaller than the pool of people who could do good ops work (which is more likely to involve EA’s who prefer a different cause area, but are happy to just have an EA ops job).
Just wanted to quickly say that I hold a similar opinion to the top paragraph and have had similar experiences on terms of where I felt I had most impact.
I think that the choice of whether to be a researcher or do operations is very context dependant.
If there are no other researchers doing something important your competitive advantage may be to do some research because that will probably outperform the counterfactual (no research) and may also catalyze interest and action within that research domain.
However if there are a lot of established organizations and experienced researchers, or just researchers who are more naturally skilled than you already involved in the research domain, then you can often have a more significant impact by helping to support those researchers or attract new researchers.
One way to navigate this is to have a what I call a research hybrid role where you work as researcher but allocate some flexible amount of time to more operations / field building activities depending on what seems most valuable.
Did the research experience help you be a better manager and operator from within research organizations?
I feel like getting an understanding by doing some research could be helpful and probably you could gain generalizable/transferable skills but I’m just speculating here.
I think it might be fine if people have genuine interest in research (though had to be intrinsic motivation), which will make their learning fast with more devoted energy. But overall generally I see a lot of value in operations/management/application work, as it gives people opportunities to learn how to land research into real impacts, and how tricky sometimes real world or applications can be.
I think more EAs should consider operations/management/doer careers over research careers, and that operations/management/doer careers should be higher status within the community.
I get a general vibe that in EA (and probably the world at large), that being a “deep thinking researcher”-type is way higher status than being an “operations/management/doer”-type. Yet the latter is also very high impact work, often higher impact than research (especially on the margin).
I see many EAs erroneously try to go into research and stick to research despite having very clear strengths on the operational side and insist that they shouldn’t do operations work unless they clearly fail at research first.
I’ve personally felt this at times where I started my career very oriented towards research, was honestly only average or even below-average at it, and then switched into management, which I think has been much higher impact (and likely counterfactually generated at least a dozen or more researchers).
For operations roles, and focusing on impact (rather than status), I notice that your view contrasts markedly with @abrahamrowe’s in his recent ‘Reflections on a decade of trying to have an impact’ post:
I see both Abraham and yourself as strong thinkers with expertise in this area, which makes me curious about the apparent disagreement. Meanwhile, the ‘correct’ answer to the question of an ops role’s impact relative to that of a research role should presumably inform many EAs’ career decisions, which makes the disagreement here pretty consequential. I wonder if getting to the ground truth of the matter is tractable? (I’m not sure how best to operationalize the disagreement / one’s starting point on the matter, but maybe something like “On the current margin, I believe that the ratio of early-career EAs aiming for operations vs. research roles should be [number]:1.”)
(I understand that you and Abraham overlapped for multiple years at the same org—Rethink Priorities—which makes me all the more curious about how you appear to have reached fairly opposite conclusions.)
Two caveats on my view:
I think I’m skeptical of my own impact in ops roles, but it seems likely that senior roles are harder to hire for generally, which might generally mean taking one could be more impactful (if you’re good at it).
I think many other “doer” careers that aren’t ops are very impactful in expectation — in particular founding new organizations (if done well or in an important and neglected area). I also think work like being a programs staff member at a non-research org is very much in the “doer” direction, and could be higher impact than ops or many research roles.
Also, I think our views as expressed here aren’t exactly opposite — I think my work in ops has had relatively little impact ex post, but that’s slightly different than thinking ops careers won’t have impact in expectation (though I think I lean fairly heavily in that direction too, just due to the number of qualified candidates for many ops roles).
Overall, I suspect Peter and I don’t disagree a ton (though haven’t talked with him about it) on any of this, and I agree with his overall assertion (more people should consider “doer” careers over research careers), I think I just also think that more people should consider earning to give over any direct work.
Also, Peter hires for tons of research roles, and I hire for tons of ops roles, so maybe this is also just us having siloed perspectives on the spaces we work in?
How does a programs staff role differ from an ops role?
I mean something like directly implementing an intervention vs finance/HR/legal/back office roles, so ops just in the nonprofit sense.
In that case I suspect there’s not disagreement, and you’re just each using ops to mean somewhat different things?
Is there a proposed/proven way of coordinating on the prioritization?
Without a good feedback loop I can imagine the majority of the people just jump on the same path which could then run into diminishing returns if there isn’t sufficient capacity.
It would be intersting to see at least the number of people at different career stages on a given path. I assume some data should be available from regular surveys. And maybe also some estimates on the capacity of different paths.
And I assume the career coaching services likely have an even more detailed picture including missing talent/skills/experience that they can utilize for more personalized advice.
I don’t know the true answer to this confusion, but I have some rough (untested, and possibly untestable) hypothesis I can share:
It is really hard to estimate counterfactual scenarios. If you are the project manager (or head of people, or finance lead, or COO), it is really hard to have a good sense of how much better you are than the next-best candidate. Performance in general is hard to measure, but trying to estimate performance of a hypothetical other individual that you have never met strikes me as very challenging. Even if we were to survey 100 people in similar roles at other orgs, the context-specific nature of performance implies that we shouldn’t be too confident about predicting how a person should perform at Org A simply from knowing their performance at Org B.
I’m not quite sure how to phrase this, but it might be something like “the impact of operations work has high variance,” or maybe “good operations results in limiting the downside a lot but does relatively little to increase the upside.” Taking a very simplistic example of accounting, if our org has bad accounting them we don’t know how much money we have, we don’t keep track of accounts payable, and have general administrative sloppiness relating to money which makes decision-making hard. If we have very good accounting, then we have clarity about where our funds are flowing, what we own, and what we owe. Those upsides are nice, but they aren’t as impactful (in a positive way) as the downsides are impactful (in a negative way). Phrased in a different way: many operations roles are a cost center rather than a profit center (although this will certainly vary depending on the role and the organization).
It might just be a thing of marginal value, with non-operations roles being more impactful (overall, in general), but we still need more good operations people than we currently have.
I have a lot of uncertainty as to the reality of this, but I’m always interested in reading thoughts from people about these issues.
Quick response—the way that I reconcile this is that these differences were probably just due to context and competence interactions. Maybe you could call it comparative advantage fluctuations over time?
There probably no reasonable claim that advising is generally higher impact than Ops or vice versa. It will depend on the individual and the context. At some times, some people are going to be able to have much higher impact doing ops than advising, and vice versa.
From a personal perspective my advising opportunities very greatly. There are times where most of my impact comes from helping somebody else because I have been put in contact with them and I happen to have useful things to offer. There are also times where the most obviously counteractually impactful thing for me to do is to do research or some sort of operations work to enable other researchers. Both of these activities kind of have lumpy impact distributions because they only occur when certain rare criteria are collectively met.
In this case Abraham may have had much better advising opportunities relative to operations opportunities while this was not true for Peter.
One question I often grapple with is the true benefit of having EAs fill certain roles, particularly compared to non-EAs. It would be valuable to see an analysis—perhaps there’s something like this on 80,000 Hours—of the types of roles where having an EA as opposed to a non-EA would significantly increase counterfactual impact. If an EA doesn’t outperform the counterfactual non-EA hire, their impact is neutralized. This is why I believe that earning to give should be a strong default for many EAs. If they choose a different path, they should consider whether:
They are providing specialized and scarce labor in a high-impact area where their contribution is genuinely advancing the field. This seems more applicable in specialized research than in general management or operations.
They are exceptionally competent, yet the market might not compensate them adequately, thus allowing highly effective organizations to benefit from their undercompensated talent.
I tend to agree more with you on the “doer” aspect—EAs who independently seek out opportunities to improve the world and act on these insights often have a significant impact.
This (a strong default towards earn to give) neglects the importance of value alignment for many EA-aligned orgs.
Having an org that is focused, rather than pulled five different directions is invaluable.
I didn’t neglect it—I specifically raised the question of in what conditions EAs occupying roles within orgs vs non-EAs adds substantial value. You assume that having EAs in (all?) roles is critical to having a “focused” org. I think this assumption warrants scrutiny, and there may be many roles in orgs for which “identifying as an EA” may not be important and that using it as a requirement could result in neglecting a valuable talent pool.
Additionally, a much wider pool of people could align with the specific mission of an org that don’t identify as EA.
I just reread your comment. Here’s my thoughts, but let me know if I missed anything.
You may have been aware of this concern, but as far as I can tell, your comment didn’t address it. For example, I would have included an additional point:
3. They are in a role where value alignment is important, likely because the role requires significant autonomy and where it is hard to provide effective oversight.
Now it’s reasonable for you to not have mentioned this because no one can cover every possible condition, but I think this breaks your argument that earn-to-give should be the strong default.
I agree that people may identify with the mission without being EA, but for many opportunities EA’s will be a large percentage of the accessible pool (ie. even if only 1% of sufficiently mission-aligned folks in the world are EA, half of the mission-aligned folks who actually see your job advertisement might be EA due to being in your network). People who could do the job well, but who you have no way of accessing are irrelevant to you.
For what it’s worth, the assumption at the start of EA was that you could just earn to give and pay other people to do the job instead. And this is true if the job is just handing out bednets, but it ended up turning out that for a lot of jobs, it’s much more complicated than this. Maybe EA has overcorrected, but it’s worth understanding why the community updated the way that it did.
Also, apologies if my previous comment came off as more critical than I intended. One downside with leaving a short comment is that they often end up sounding quite negative.
I think I considered it prior to the enumerated portion, where I’d said
“it would be valuable to see an analysis—perhaps there’s something like this on 80,000 Hours—of the types of roles where having an EA as opposed to a non-EA would significantly increase counterfactual impact.”
I agree that the “high autonomy and lack of ability to oversee or otherwise measure achievement of objectives” would be a reason that having EAs in the role might be better. The scope of jobs in this category is not clear.
There may have been an overcorrection and I still think ETG is a good default option—the scarcity of “EA jobs” and frequent posts lamenting the difficulty of getting jobs at EA orgs as an EA suggests that there is no shortage of EAs looking to fill roles for which close alignment is critical. Especially in the animal welfare EA space—everyone wants to be doing direct work and so little funding to enable excellent work. There may be more of an “aligned talent constraint” problem in AI Safety.
I think this argument would be stronger if people were better at gauging their potential to go professional, but given that people often can’t do this, I expect that it makes sense for most people who are deciding between earn-to-give and direct work (and who aren’t pulling down crazy trader/lawyer/doctor money) to try making it professionally and to use earn to give as a backup option.
Even then, I honestly think more people should be aiming to find a job where they can work four days a week and volunteer one day. I expect that would be both more impactful and more fulfilling for most people.
The challenge is that strong EtG jobs with four-day workweeks can be hard to find, especially for early to early-mid career roles. Medicine is probably an exception, but in the US you have to make it through four years of med school after undergrad, then a grueling 3-7 year residency first. So you’d be accepting an extended period of ~ no impact.
Hiring a personal assistant for enough hours a week might be another option, though.
The PA idea is interesting.
My point was that working four days and volunteering one day, instead of donating, may be more effective for most people.
It’s an interesting idea. My concern is that dropping the fifth day could have a significantly greater than 20% impact on the person’s ability to give due to cultural expectations, actual value to the main employer, or the fact that a 20% pay cut would mean >20% drop in discretionary income for most people.
It certainly could work, although my intuition is that it would only be more effective than FT work under less common conditions (e.g., where the main job wasn’t as well compensated, where the volunteer work was particularly impactful).
Switching between more impactful and more remunerative work could also be a viable pattern for some to have a mix of well-paid and more impactful work. You see something vaguely like this in some circles where people will move into senior government positions when their team is in power, then decamp for the private sector when it is not. But there’s no inherent reason someone couldn’t switch every few years for other reasons.
Do you have any ideas or suggestions (even rough thoughts) regarding how to make this change, or for interventions that would nudge peoples’ behavior?
Off the top of my head: A subsidized bootcamp on core operations skills? Getting more EAG speakers/sessions focused on operations-type topics? Various respected and well-known EAs publicly stating that Operations is important and valuable? A syllabus (readings, MOOCs, tutorials) that people can work their way through independently?
I have previously suggested a new podcast that features much more “in the trenches” people than currently is the case with e.g. 80k podcast, FLI podcast, etc. While listening to edge researchers is more fun that listening to how someone implemented Asana in an efficient way, I think one can make an “in the trenches” podcast equally, if not more interesting by telling personal stories of challenges, perseverance and mental health. One example of such is Joey at AIM—from the few times I heard him talk he seems to live an unusually interesting life. I also think a lot of ops people have really cool stories to tell, like people into fish welfare poking around at Greek aquaculture installations trying to get to know their “target market”. There must be a ton of good “stories from the field” out there.
Have you listened to 80k Actually After Hours/Off the Clock? This is close to what I was aiming for, though I think we still skew a bit more abstract.
Yes it is good, but I feel like it is more of unstructured conversation and more about ideas than lived experiences. So I am thinking a bit more prepared, perhaps trying to get some narrative arcs with the struggle, the battle, the victory (or defeat!) and then the epilogue. I mean what was super interesting (and shocking in a negative way!) to listen to is “Going Infinite”—I mean it is essentially an EA story. So rich, so gripping and compelling and so dramatic. I think something only 10% as dramatic would be interesting to listen to and there must be stories out there. I think the challenge will be to find the overlap between “juicy stories” and people being willing to tell them—often I think the most interesting stuff is stuff people are concerned about being public! But I guess it also needs to be something that make people think ops work sounds interesting but this could also be examples of how gravely things can go wrong without ops—something I think is a lens one could view the FTX scandal through, for example.
I once saw a post https://www.alignmentforum.org/posts/ho63vCb2MNFijinzY/agi-safety-career-advice that is specific to AI, detailed the directions within both research and governance, and found it useful. Maybe some general education post (but on more general EA topics) like this would be very helpful.
I guess this is the same dynamic as why movie and sports stars are high status in society: they are highly visible compared to more valuable members of society (and more entertaining to watch). We don’t really see much of highly skilled operations people compared to researchers
I’m reminded about The Innovation Delusion (which I’ve mentioned a bit previously on the EA Forum: 1, 2), and ideas of credit, visibility, absence blindness, and maintenance work. An example of Thomas Edison is good enough that I will copy and paste it here:
If I imagine being in a hypothetical role that is analogous to Mrs. Sarah Jordan’s role, in which I support other people to accomplish things, am I okay with not getting any credit? Well, like everyone else I have ego and I would like the respect and approval of others. But I guess if I am well-compensated and my colleagues understand how my work contributes to our team’s success I would be okay with somebody else being the public face and getting the book deals and getting the majority of the credit. How did senior people at Apple feel about Steve Jobs being so idolized in the public eye? I don’t care too much if people in general don’t acknowledge my work, as long as the people I care about most acknowledge it.
Of course it would be a lot nicer to be acknowledged widely, but that is generally not how we function. Most of us (unless we specifically investigate how people accomplished things) don’t know who Michael Phelps’s nutritionist was, nor do we know who taught Bill Gates about computers, nor who Magnus Carlsen’s training partners are, nor who Oscar Wilde bounced around ideas with and got feedback from. I think there might be something about replaceability as well. Maybe there are hundreds of different people who could be (for example) a very good nutritionist for Michael Phelps or who could help Magnus Carlsen train, but there are only a handful of people who could be a world-class swimmer or a world class-chess player on that level?
The issue with support roles is that it’s often difficult to assess when someone in that position truly makes a counterfactual difference. These roles can be essential but not always obviously irreplaceable. In contrast, it’s much easier to argue that without the initiator or visionary, the program might never have succeeded in the first place (or at least might have been delayed significantly). Similarly, funders who provide critical resources—especially when alternative funding isn’t available—may also be in a position where their absence would mean failure.
This perspective challenges a more egalitarian view of credit distribution. It suggests that while support roles are crucial, it’s often the key figures—initiators, visionaries, and funders—who are more irreplaceable, and thus more deserving of disproportionate recognition. This may be controversial, but it reflects the reality that some contributions, particularly at the outset, might make all the difference in whether a project can succeed at all.
I do think that the marginal good of additional researchers, journalists, content creators and etc isn’t exactly as high as it is thought to be. But there’s an obvious rational-actor (collective action problem?) explanation: other people may not be needed, but me, with my idiosyncratic ideologies? Yep!
This also entails that the less representative an individual is of the general movement, the higher the marginal value for him in particular to choose a research role.
Which of these two things do you mean?
operations/management/doer careers should be higher status than they currently are within EA
operations/management/doer careers should be higher status than research careers within EA
I suspect it varies by cause area. In AI Safety, the pool of people who can do useful research is smaller than the pool of people who could do good ops work (which is more likely to involve EA’s who prefer a different cause area, but are happy to just have an EA ops job).
Just wanted to quickly say that I hold a similar opinion to the top paragraph and have had similar experiences on terms of where I felt I had most impact.
I think that the choice of whether to be a researcher or do operations is very context dependant.
If there are no other researchers doing something important your competitive advantage may be to do some research because that will probably outperform the counterfactual (no research) and may also catalyze interest and action within that research domain.
However if there are a lot of established organizations and experienced researchers, or just researchers who are more naturally skilled than you already involved in the research domain, then you can often have a more significant impact by helping to support those researchers or attract new researchers.
One way to navigate this is to have a what I call a research hybrid role where you work as researcher but allocate some flexible amount of time to more operations / field building activities depending on what seems most valuable.
Did the research experience help you be a better manager and operator from within research organizations?
I feel like getting an understanding by doing some research could be helpful and probably you could gain generalizable/transferable skills but I’m just speculating here.
I think it might be fine if people have genuine interest in research (though had to be intrinsic motivation), which will make their learning fast with more devoted energy. But overall generally I see a lot of value in operations/management/application work, as it gives people opportunities to learn how to land research into real impacts, and how tricky sometimes real world or applications can be.