there seems to have been a trend of former leaders and managers switching back to object level work
Guess: people who enjoy object level work ended up doing leadership and management because EA catastrophic risk work was so low on experience there. As this crunch has somewhat resolved those people are able to go back to the work they like and are good at?
(But you probably know more than I do about whether the management/leadership experience crunch has actually lessened)
My guess is Ben’s referring to people like Holden Karnofsky, who went from working in finance to co-founding and -running GiveWell and then Open Phil to now doing research at a think tank.
Guess: people who enjoy object level work ended up doing leadership and management because EA catastrophic risk work was so low on experience there. As this crunch has somewhat resolved those people are able to go back to the work they like and are good at?
(But you probably know more than I do about whether the management/leadership experience crunch has actually lessened)
Another guess: people who were competent in individual contributor roles got promoted into people management roles because of issues I mentioned here:
My guess is Ben’s referring to people like Holden Karnofsky, who went from working in finance to co-founding and -running GiveWell and then Open Phil to now doing research at a think tank.
Also Nick Bostrom, Nick Beckstead, Will Macaskill, Ben Todd, some of whom have been lifelong academics.
Probably different factors in different cases.
I’d love to hear from other people whether the management/leadership crunch has lessened?