Thanks for writing this up! I’m also a civil servant with a similar length of tenure. To add my two cents for other readers considering a career in the civil service, I’ve not found particular issues with the democracy and comprehensivity values you raise so far.
On the democracy value—I see a simplified three-staged process for policy work and in my experience if you’re working on an impactful policy area it often leaves lots of space for satisfying EA action:
Provide the most thoughtful and careful advice you can given any institutional constraints you face—this is typically quite aligned with an EA worldview.
Let Ministers make the decision (sometimes this will go against your view of where the evidence leads) - this can be frustrating, but lots in this world is frustrating and outside our control, I think that part of the joy (and pain) of EA is optimising around constraints and this is just another one.
Implement the decision in the most pro-social way within the constraints of the steer you’ve been given—most ministerial steers don’t fill in all the detail meaning it’s a requirement for the civil servant to fill in the blanks, this is also quite aligned with an EA worldview.
On the comprehensivity value—I think the best move for an individual EA civil servant is to spend a bit of time early on in their career gathering some general civil service career capital and rotating around often to get it. Then to seek to specialise in a high-impact policy area and stick around for the long haul trying to become highly skilled at making good policy in that area. The fact that lots of others rotate regularly doesn’t mean we have to. There are also so few EA-aligned civil servants that it doesn’t feel like we’re close to having unhelpful competition for important roles.
Thanks for writing this up! I’m also a civil servant with a similar length of tenure. To add my two cents for other readers considering a career in the civil service, I’ve not found particular issues with the democracy and comprehensivity values you raise so far.
On the democracy value—I see a simplified three-staged process for policy work and in my experience if you’re working on an impactful policy area it often leaves lots of space for satisfying EA action:
Provide the most thoughtful and careful advice you can given any institutional constraints you face—this is typically quite aligned with an EA worldview.
Let Ministers make the decision (sometimes this will go against your view of where the evidence leads) - this can be frustrating, but lots in this world is frustrating and outside our control, I think that part of the joy (and pain) of EA is optimising around constraints and this is just another one.
Implement the decision in the most pro-social way within the constraints of the steer you’ve been given—most ministerial steers don’t fill in all the detail meaning it’s a requirement for the civil servant to fill in the blanks, this is also quite aligned with an EA worldview.
On the comprehensivity value—I think the best move for an individual EA civil servant is to spend a bit of time early on in their career gathering some general civil service career capital and rotating around often to get it. Then to seek to specialise in a high-impact policy area and stick around for the long haul trying to become highly skilled at making good policy in that area. The fact that lots of others rotate regularly doesn’t mean we have to. There are also so few EA-aligned civil servants that it doesn’t feel like we’re close to having unhelpful competition for important roles.
I think we agree on a bunch but do push back :)