The median and mean answer among myself, Ben Todd, Roman Duda and Rob Wiblin was 15%. This number still seems about right to me
To be honest, I don’t think the 15% number is useful; it’s the average of four employee’s guesses, and no supporting evidence for these guesses is presented.
If each employee actually conducted a thoughtful analysis before arriving at an estimate, then maybe the 15% number would be useful, and I think it would be helpful to share those details.
EA survey shows $6.75M total donations by EAs. 2352 self-identifying EAs were surveyed. Let’s say it costs $50K/yr per EA employed full time at a nonprofit. $6.75M divided by $50K is 135. 135 likely overestimates the number of people you’d employ on that budget, given overhead costs and the fact that many cause areas are going to have big expenses unrelated to employment (e.g. AMF has to pay for nets).
Given 2352 self-identifying EAs, if 135 are working for nonprofits full-time and 353 (15%) are optimizing their careers for earning to give, that would leave us with 1864 EAs doing self-supported impact-focused work (e.g. working as a researcher in a lab, working as a journalist, etc.)
Open Phil is a big wildcard. Dustin Moskovitz is worth on the order of ~$10 billion. He says he wants to give away his entire fortune in his lifetime. (Inside Philanthropy describes this as a “supertanker” of money… it’ll be interesting to see if/how the nonprofit world responds.) If he’s got 60 years left, that averages out to around $160M/yr. In reality it will likely be above $10B, if Facebook does well or he diversifies his portfolio and invests wisely. That’d be enough money to employ ~3000 EAs given the $50k/yr spending assumptions above. (But the EA movement is growing.)
I added up the grants described on Open Phil’s website. They’re on the order of $40M. Over the past 3 years, Open Phil has been giving away money at a rate of around $13M/yr. I suppose that rate of giving will gradually increase until they’re giving away money 10x as fast? If so, marginal earning to give could be more valuable in the near term than the long term? This could be an argument against e.g. going to grad school to build certain sorts of career capital. I’m also curious what sort of giving opportunities Open Phil is not willing to fund. It does seem like they’ve demonstrated past reluctance to fund weird causes that might hurt their brand, but that might be changing? And, how reluctant are they to be a charity’s primary or sole funder? (Alluding to Telofy’s comments elsewhere in this thread.)
Funding weird stuff should just be a branding/logistics exercise. Highly exploratory stuff gets put out of sight in an R&D lab like Google X and only the successes are shown off. This is valuable to the degree that there might be valuable interventions cloaked by What You Can’t Say.
Giving away only small amounts for now is consistent with the VoI being much higher in the initial exploratory phase than any actual object level outcome. The outside view says: most charitable efforts in the past have NOT consistently ratcheted towards effectiveness, but have, if anything, ratcheted towards uselessness. Understanding why is potentially worth billions given the existence of the giving pledge and the idea that EA type memes might heavily influence a substantial chunk of that money in the coming decades.
Relevant research questions might include:
How do we form excellent research teams?
How do we divvy up the search space among teams?
What sorts of search and synthesis heuristics should be considered best practice?
This direction or frame sort of hints at a furthering of the frame of EA as a leaking into the charity world the lessons and practices of the for profit world. Can we do lean/agile charity? If so, can we find/develop excellent teams for executing on some part of the search space of charity interventions? Can we give them seed funding and check results? etc.
One of the most common misconceptions that we’ve encountered about 80,000 Hours is that we’re exclusively or predominantly focused on earning to give. This blog post is to say definitively that this is not the case. Moreover, the proportion of people for whom we think earning to give is the best option has gone down over time.
To get a sense of this, I surveyed the 80,000 Hours team on the following question: “At this point in time, and on the margin, what portion of altruistically motivated graduates from a good university, who are open to pursuing any career path, should aim to earn to give in the long term?” (Please note that this is just a straw poll used as a way of addressing the misconception stated; it doesn’t represent a definitive answer to this question).
Will: 15%
Ben: 20%
Rob: 10%
Roman: 15%
Instead, we think that most people should be doing things like politics, policy, high-value research, for-profit and non-profit entrepreneurship, and direct work for highly socially valuable organizations.
The purpose of the number was to show the view of 80k (which we perceived most people to not be aware of). I guess the usefulness of it depends on how reliable you think the gestalt judgment of the employees at 80k are.
Instead, we think that most people should be doing things like politics, policy, high-value research, for-profit and non-profit entrepreneurship, and direct work for highly socially valuable organizations.
Some of these career paths either allow you to earn to give along the way, or I would have thought fall straightforwardly in to the earn to give category (for-profit entrepreneurship). A person hearing the 15% number without context might not realize this.
That’s fair, if I use it again I’ll try to make that explicit. The 15% also doesn’t include skill-building in well-paid jobs as a stepping stone to direct work.
To be honest, I don’t think the 15% number is useful; it’s the average of four employee’s guesses, and no supporting evidence for these guesses is presented.
If each employee actually conducted a thoughtful analysis before arriving at an estimate, then maybe the 15% number would be useful, and I think it would be helpful to share those details.
Some napkin math:
EA survey shows $6.75M total donations by EAs. 2352 self-identifying EAs were surveyed. Let’s say it costs $50K/yr per EA employed full time at a nonprofit. $6.75M divided by $50K is 135. 135 likely overestimates the number of people you’d employ on that budget, given overhead costs and the fact that many cause areas are going to have big expenses unrelated to employment (e.g. AMF has to pay for nets).
Given 2352 self-identifying EAs, if 135 are working for nonprofits full-time and 353 (15%) are optimizing their careers for earning to give, that would leave us with 1864 EAs doing self-supported impact-focused work (e.g. working as a researcher in a lab, working as a journalist, etc.)
Open Phil is a big wildcard. Dustin Moskovitz is worth on the order of ~$10 billion. He says he wants to give away his entire fortune in his lifetime. (Inside Philanthropy describes this as a “supertanker” of money… it’ll be interesting to see if/how the nonprofit world responds.) If he’s got 60 years left, that averages out to around $160M/yr. In reality it will likely be above $10B, if Facebook does well or he diversifies his portfolio and invests wisely. That’d be enough money to employ ~3000 EAs given the $50k/yr spending assumptions above. (But the EA movement is growing.)
I added up the grants described on Open Phil’s website. They’re on the order of $40M. Over the past 3 years, Open Phil has been giving away money at a rate of around $13M/yr. I suppose that rate of giving will gradually increase until they’re giving away money 10x as fast? If so, marginal earning to give could be more valuable in the near term than the long term? This could be an argument against e.g. going to grad school to build certain sorts of career capital. I’m also curious what sort of giving opportunities Open Phil is not willing to fund. It does seem like they’ve demonstrated past reluctance to fund weird causes that might hurt their brand, but that might be changing? And, how reluctant are they to be a charity’s primary or sole funder? (Alluding to Telofy’s comments elsewhere in this thread.)
Funding weird stuff should just be a branding/logistics exercise. Highly exploratory stuff gets put out of sight in an R&D lab like Google X and only the successes are shown off. This is valuable to the degree that there might be valuable interventions cloaked by What You Can’t Say.
Giving away only small amounts for now is consistent with the VoI being much higher in the initial exploratory phase than any actual object level outcome. The outside view says: most charitable efforts in the past have NOT consistently ratcheted towards effectiveness, but have, if anything, ratcheted towards uselessness. Understanding why is potentially worth billions given the existence of the giving pledge and the idea that EA type memes might heavily influence a substantial chunk of that money in the coming decades.
Relevant research questions might include: How do we form excellent research teams? How do we divvy up the search space among teams? What sorts of search and synthesis heuristics should be considered best practice?
This direction or frame sort of hints at a furthering of the frame of EA as a leaking into the charity world the lessons and practices of the for profit world. Can we do lean/agile charity? If so, can we find/develop excellent teams for executing on some part of the search space of charity interventions? Can we give them seed funding and check results? etc.
The accuracy of collective forecasting depends more on the number of contributors than on the intelligence of each individual one.
I agree. I was originally under the impression that 80K had surveyed a lot more than four people to come up with the 15% number.
It’s pretty explicit in the original blogpost:
The purpose of the number was to show the view of 80k (which we perceived most people to not be aware of). I guess the usefulness of it depends on how reliable you think the gestalt judgment of the employees at 80k are.
Some of these career paths either allow you to earn to give along the way, or I would have thought fall straightforwardly in to the earn to give category (for-profit entrepreneurship). A person hearing the 15% number without context might not realize this.
That’s fair, if I use it again I’ll try to make that explicit. The 15% also doesn’t include skill-building in well-paid jobs as a stepping stone to direct work.
Oh yeah that is pretty explicit, I guess I forgot that part and just remembered the 15% part, and then assumed you had surveyed like a dozen people.