Building effective altruism is currently one of 80000 Hours’s four top cause areas. One of the most promising avenues for doing this is to do safe and reputable high-school outreach—about a dozen people seem to be currently pursuing this. If at least a couple of people doing this had experience teaching, especially at a magnet school, or a gifted program, then their skills and credentials could move the needle on the quality of these summer programs, and have an impact via teaching itself. Especially so if one wanted to start a new school for kids interested in public service and EA.
So I think a teaching career, properly designed, could be pretty good by EA standards. Suppose you plan to teach at a gifted school, while helping with EA high-school summer programs, and eventually to make oneself available to work at any EA-leaning school. For such a career, I’d be inclined to update the 80,000 Hours’ review rates teaching as follows:
career capital: 1⁄5 → 2⁄5
earnings: 2⁄5 → 3⁄5
ease of competition: 5⁄5 → 4⁄5
direct impact: 2⁄5 → 2⁄5
advocacy potential: 2⁄5 → 5⁄5 [assuming you count the effects of training up altruistic kids here]
job satisfaction: 4⁄5 → 4⁄5
I’d speculate that this could be a good idea for those EAs who love teaching, and are US-based, and want a career that’s not extremely competitive—something like 0.3-1% of the EA community.
An EA teaching pathway?
Building effective altruism is currently one of 80000 Hours’s four top cause areas. One of the most promising avenues for doing this is to do safe and reputable high-school outreach—about a dozen people seem to be currently pursuing this. If at least a couple of people doing this had experience teaching, especially at a magnet school, or a gifted program, then their skills and credentials could move the needle on the quality of these summer programs, and have an impact via teaching itself. Especially so if one wanted to start a new school for kids interested in public service and EA.
So I think a teaching career, properly designed, could be pretty good by EA standards. Suppose you plan to teach at a gifted school, while helping with EA high-school summer programs, and eventually to make oneself available to work at any EA-leaning school. For such a career, I’d be inclined to update the 80,000 Hours’ review rates teaching as follows:
career capital: 1⁄5 → 2⁄5
earnings: 2⁄5 → 3⁄5
ease of competition: 5⁄5 → 4⁄5
direct impact: 2⁄5 → 2⁄5
advocacy potential: 2⁄5 → 5⁄5 [assuming you count the effects of training up altruistic kids here]
job satisfaction: 4⁄5 → 4⁄5
I’d speculate that this could be a good idea for those EAs who love teaching, and are US-based, and want a career that’s not extremely competitive—something like 0.3-1% of the EA community.