[Speaking for myself, not for Rethink Priorities.]
Even if we concede that we are using a talent funnel created by other people, I don’t think it is a bad thing. There still is a massive oversupply of junior researchers who could potentially do good work, and a massive undersupply of open roles with available mentorship and management.
Yeah, I agree with this (and already thought so before joining Rethink Priorities). Various people have made claims like that EA is vetting-constrained or that some of EA’s main bottlenecks at the moment are “organizational capacity, infrastructure, and management to help train people up” (Ben Todd). This seems right to me, and seems to align with the idea that there is important work to be done improving parts of the talent funnel in ways other than bringing new people into the funnel in the first place.
(Related things were also discussed here and here.)
(That said, I definitely would agree that bringing more people into the funnel is also good. And I would agree that, all else held constant, it’d typically be more impactful to find, vet, train, manage, etc. someone who wouldn’t have otherwise been working on EA-related stuff at all, relative to doing that with someone who would’ve done something EA-related anyway.)
[Speaking for myself, not for Rethink Priorities.]
Yeah, I agree with this (and already thought so before joining Rethink Priorities). Various people have made claims like that EA is vetting-constrained or that some of EA’s main bottlenecks at the moment are “organizational capacity, infrastructure, and management to help train people up” (Ben Todd). This seems right to me, and seems to align with the idea that there is important work to be done improving parts of the talent funnel in ways other than bringing new people into the funnel in the first place.
(Related things were also discussed here and here.)
(That said, I definitely would agree that bringing more people into the funnel is also good. And I would agree that, all else held constant, it’d typically be more impactful to find, vet, train, manage, etc. someone who wouldn’t have otherwise been working on EA-related stuff at all, relative to doing that with someone who would’ve done something EA-related anyway.)