I suspect that the motivation hacking you describe is significantly harder for researchers than for, say, operations, HR, software developers, etc. To take your language, I do not think that the cause area beliefs are generally ‘prudentially useful’ for these roles, whereas in research a large part of your job may on justifying, developing, and improving the accuracy of those exact beliefs.
Indeed, my gut says that most people who would be good fits for these many critical and under-staffed supporting roles don’t need to have a particularly strong or well-reasoned opinion on which cause area is ‘best’ in order to do their job extremely well. At which point I expect factors like ‘does the organisation need the particular skills I have’, and even straightforward issues like geographical location, to dominate cause prioritisation.
I speculate that the only reason this fact hasn’t permeated into these discussions is that many of the most active participants, including yourself and Denise, are in fact researchers or potential researchers and so naturally view the world through that lens.
I’d hesitate to extrapolate my experience across to operational roles for the reasons you say. That said, my impression was operations folks place a similar emphasis on these things as I. Tanya Singh (one my colleagues) gave a talk on ‘x risk/EA ops’. From the Q&A (with apologies to Roxanne and Tanya for my poor transcription):
One common retort we get about people who are interested in operations is maybe they don’t need to be value-aligned. Surely we can just hire someone who has operations skills but doesn’t also buy into the cause. How true do you think this claim is?
I am by no means an expert, but I have a very strong opinion. I think it is extremely important to be values aligned to the cause, because in my narrow slice of personal experience that has led to me being happy, being content, and that’s made a big difference as to how I approach work. I’m not sure you can be a crucial piece of a big puzzle or a tightly knit group if you don’t buy into the values that everyone is trying to push towards. So I think it’s very very important.
I suspect that the motivation hacking you describe is significantly harder for researchers than for, say, operations, HR, software developers, etc. To take your language, I do not think that the cause area beliefs are generally ‘prudentially useful’ for these roles, whereas in research a large part of your job may on justifying, developing, and improving the accuracy of those exact beliefs.
Indeed, my gut says that most people who would be good fits for these many critical and under-staffed supporting roles don’t need to have a particularly strong or well-reasoned opinion on which cause area is ‘best’ in order to do their job extremely well. At which point I expect factors like ‘does the organisation need the particular skills I have’, and even straightforward issues like geographical location, to dominate cause prioritisation.
I speculate that the only reason this fact hasn’t permeated into these discussions is that many of the most active participants, including yourself and Denise, are in fact researchers or potential researchers and so naturally view the world through that lens.
I’d hesitate to extrapolate my experience across to operational roles for the reasons you say. That said, my impression was operations folks place a similar emphasis on these things as I. Tanya Singh (one my colleagues) gave a talk on ‘x risk/EA ops’. From the Q&A (with apologies to Roxanne and Tanya for my poor transcription):