I think one assumption is that compared to the main prestigious EA positions now, most jobs are orders of magnitude lower-impact per unit time. OpenPhil has spent a lot of time exploring options and only found a few possible areas, and even some of those (prison reform) don’t seem as good as AI safety, from what I can tell, in many ways. Unless there’s some clever EA analysis that a field is really surprisingly good, I think the burden of proof is on that field to show some surprising insight; in this case, education. If you have a senior role you may be able to do 5x as much, or 15x, but I think the thinking is that the choice of industry could make a 50-200x difference.
I think one assumption is that compared to the main prestigious EA positions now, most jobs are orders of magnitude lower-impact per unit time. OpenPhil has spent a lot of time exploring options and only found a few possible areas, and even some of those (prison reform) don’t seem as good as AI safety, from what I can tell, in many ways. Unless there’s some clever EA analysis that a field is really surprisingly good, I think the burden of proof is on that field to show some surprising insight; in this case, education. If you have a senior role you may be able to do 5x as much, or 15x, but I think the thinking is that the choice of industry could make a 50-200x difference.
Thanks Ozzie, this is helpful!