While I am in favor of Rethink Priorities and have recommended allocating funding to it multiple times, I do not yet know of any research that is the result of your recent hiring that actually seems useful to me (which is not very surprising, it’s not been very long!).
I think Rethink Priorities is a promising approach to potentially resolve some of these issues, but I would really not count it as a success yet, and I really don’t think it’s obvious that it’s going to work out (though it might, and that’s what makes it exciting). Also, scaling an organization, in particular scaling high-context research organizations, is very hard, and I would not straightforwardly expect you to actually be able to scale (even if you currently believe that you can).
I also think Rethink Priorities is tapping into a talent funnel that was built by other people, and is very much not buying talent “on the open market” so to speak. I do currently think it is a good place for people to work, but I don’t think you would actually be able to hire many people who haven’t been engaged with the broader EA/Rationality/Longtermist community for quite a while, and that talent pool is itself pretty limited.
I do not yet know of any research that is the result of your recent hiring that actually seems useful to me (which is not very surprising, it’s not been very long!).
Yes, naturally that would take more than two months to produce!
~
I also think Rethink Priorities is tapping into a talent funnel that was built by other people, and is very much not buying talent “on the open market” so to speak.
I’d dispute that on two counts:
1.) I do think we have been able to acquire talent that would not have been otherwise counterfactually acquired by other organizations. For the clearest example, Luisa Rodriguez applied to a fair number of EA organizations and was turned down—she was then hired by us, and now has gone on to work with Will Macaskill and will soon be working for 80,000 Hours. Other examples are also available though I’d avoid going into too much detail publicly to respect the privacy of my employees. We also are continuing to invest on further developing talent pipelines across cause areas and think our upcoming internship program will be a big push in this direction.
2.) 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. I think anything Rethink Priorities could be doing to open more slots for researchers is a huge benefit to the talent pipeline even if we aren’t developing the earlier part of the recruitment funnel from scratch (though I do think we are working on that to some extent).
I do think we have been able to acquire talent that would not have been otherwise counterfactually acquired by other organizations.
As an additional data point, I can report that I think it’s very unlikely that I would currently be employed by an EA organization if Rethink Priorities didn’t exist. I applied to Rethink Priorities more or less on a whim, and the extent of my involvement with the EA community in 2018 (when I was hired) was that I was subscribed to the EA newsletter (where I heard about the job) and I donated to GiveWell top charities. At the time, I had completely different career plans.
[Speaking for myself, not for Rethink Priorities.]
>I do not yet know of any research that is the result of your recent hiring that actually seems useful to me (which is not very surprising, it’s not been very long!).
Yes, naturally that would take more than two months to produce!
I think someone reading this thread might (incorrectly) think “Habryka is saying the research that these hires have produced hasn’t actually seemed useful. Peter agrees but emphasises that it’ll take longer for the researchers to produce stuff that’s more useful.” The real situation is simply that the people hired around November haven’t yet published anyproperpublic write-ups (though there are things in the works that should be out in the coming months) - i.e., the situation isn’t that they published stuff that Habryka found non-useful.
Hopefully our upcoming first outputs will indeed seem useful!
(I’m not saying Habryka or Peter said incorrect things; I’m just making a guess as to how someone could’ve interpreted what Habryka said.)
I agree with Peter—ALLFED has been training up volunteers and we could bring on a lot more talent full-time (both our volunteers and from the general EA pool) if we had more money.
[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.)
While I am in favor of Rethink Priorities and have recommended allocating funding to it multiple times, I do not yet know of any research that is the result of your recent hiring that actually seems useful to me (which is not very surprising, it’s not been very long!).
I think Rethink Priorities is a promising approach to potentially resolve some of these issues, but I would really not count it as a success yet, and I really don’t think it’s obvious that it’s going to work out (though it might, and that’s what makes it exciting). Also, scaling an organization, in particular scaling high-context research organizations, is very hard, and I would not straightforwardly expect you to actually be able to scale (even if you currently believe that you can).
I also think Rethink Priorities is tapping into a talent funnel that was built by other people, and is very much not buying talent “on the open market” so to speak. I do currently think it is a good place for people to work, but I don’t think you would actually be able to hire many people who haven’t been engaged with the broader EA/Rationality/Longtermist community for quite a while, and that talent pool is itself pretty limited.
Yes, naturally that would take more than two months to produce!
~
I’d dispute that on two counts:
1.) I do think we have been able to acquire talent that would not have been otherwise counterfactually acquired by other organizations. For the clearest example, Luisa Rodriguez applied to a fair number of EA organizations and was turned down—she was then hired by us, and now has gone on to work with Will Macaskill and will soon be working for 80,000 Hours. Other examples are also available though I’d avoid going into too much detail publicly to respect the privacy of my employees. We also are continuing to invest on further developing talent pipelines across cause areas and think our upcoming internship program will be a big push in this direction.
2.) 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. I think anything Rethink Priorities could be doing to open more slots for researchers is a huge benefit to the talent pipeline even if we aren’t developing the earlier part of the recruitment funnel from scratch (though I do think we are working on that to some extent).
As an additional data point, I can report that I think it’s very unlikely that I would currently be employed by an EA organization if Rethink Priorities didn’t exist. I applied to Rethink Priorities more or less on a whim, and the extent of my involvement with the EA community in 2018 (when I was hired) was that I was subscribed to the EA newsletter (where I heard about the job) and I donated to GiveWell top charities. At the time, I had completely different career plans.
[Speaking for myself, not for Rethink Priorities.]
I think someone reading this thread might (incorrectly) think “Habryka is saying the research that these hires have produced hasn’t actually seemed useful. Peter agrees but emphasises that it’ll take longer for the researchers to produce stuff that’s more useful.” The real situation is simply that the people hired around November haven’t yet published any proper public write-ups (though there are things in the works that should be out in the coming months) - i.e., the situation isn’t that they published stuff that Habryka found non-useful.
Hopefully our upcoming first outputs will indeed seem useful!
(I’m not saying Habryka or Peter said incorrect things; I’m just making a guess as to how someone could’ve interpreted what Habryka said.)
I agree with Peter—ALLFED has been training up volunteers and we could bring on a lot more talent full-time (both our volunteers and from the general EA pool) if we had more money.
[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.)