Thanks for this post! I found it quite interesting and useful.
I feel like some parts of this post could give the (very likely inaccurate) impression that you/â80,000 Hours thinks working at an EA organisation is distinctly better than essentially all other roles. Specifically, I think this might result from the post repeatedly talking about people who work(ed) at EA orgs, and whether they left, without as repeatedly/âprominently talking about people working in other high-impact roles (e.g., in non-EA academia, politics, or AI labs).
Iâm pretty sure that the real reasons why this post gives disproportionate attention to data from EA orgs are simply that:
Itâs easier to get data about people who were working at EA orgs than about EAs in other high-impact roles
âHigh-impact rolesâ is a less clear-cut category, different people have different views, and âtypical EA viewsâ on that have changed in various ways over the last decade
And those seems to me to be good reasons for this post to be the way it is.
But I felt like it might be worth making those reasons explicit, to counter potential (very likely mistaken) inferences that Ben Todd/â80k considers working at EA orgs to be essentially the most impactful thing to do. Thatâs because, historically, many people seem to have updated hard on what they perceived 80k to be saying, even when 80k didnât mean that, including on this topic in particular. (And there are also other things that seem to bias EAs towards focusing overly much on roles at EA orgs, as discussed e.g. here.)
Is there even 1 exclusively about people working at EA organisations?
If someone had taken a different job with the goal of having a big social impact, and we didnât think what they were doing was horribly misguided, I donât think we would count them as having âdropped out of EAâ in any of the 6 data sets.
I was referring to things like phrasings used and how often someone working for an EA org vs not was discussed relative to other things; I wasnât referring to the actual criteria used to classify people as having dropping out /â reduced involvement or not.
Given that Ben says heâs now made some edits, it doesnât seem worth combing through the post again in detail to find examples of the sort of thing I mean. But I just did a quick ctrl+f for âorganisationsâ, and found this, as one example:
Of the 14 classified as staff, I donât count any clear cases of drop out. 12 are working at EA organisations, and I think the remaining 2 would still be interested in working at an EA organisation in the future.
So, we could summarise this as 0% drop out over 6 years, and 14% becoming less involved, though not clearly in a permanent way.
Of the 24 categorised as âspeakersâ (which mostly donât overlap), I could only count 1 case of drop out (4%).
Itâs also interesting to note that 20 out of the 24 (83%) are currently working in EA organisations.
This is definitely not explicitly saying ânot dropping out = working at an EA orgâ. Instead, I think itâs meant as something more like âThere are many ways one can stay involved in EA, but in this case we had the obvious evidence that most of these people were still working at EA orgs, making it unnecessary to check if they were still involved in other ways.â
That said:
I think that, for various reasons that I mostly donât pin on 80k[1], various people feel like working at an EA org is one of the most impactful and/âor âEA-yâ things to do, even if they donât necessarily explicitly believe that. (I think you highlighted this well in your own recent post.) So it seems worth being extra careful about things that could accidentally exacerbate that feeling.
The text I quoted does sound like it categorises 2 of the first set of 14 people as âbecoming less involvedâ because theyâre not working at an EA org, without saying anything about whether theyâre still doing potentially high-impact things.
On the other hand, it also suggests that 3 of the set of 24 people arenât working at EA orgs but are still not considered to have not dropped out, which pushes against this.
Plus, itâs totally plausible Ben did consider whether those 2 people were doing other potentially high-impact things, found they seemed not to be (or not as much as they had been), and just didnât mention that.
Also, to be clear, I didnât mean my original comment as even a mild criticism of this post, really. I just thought it would be useful for this point to be explicitly made, to push against an impression some people might erroneously form after reading this post.
[1] To the extent to which it seems plausible that 80k has contributed to this phenomena, I donât think it wouldâve been easy for someone else to have done better. I think 80k has an unusual degree of prominence and respect in the EA community that makes it unusually likely that people will be influenced by 80k in ways that 80k didnât intend, even if 80k is doing a well-above-average job of communicating carefully and with nuance. (And I indeed think 80k is doing a well-above-average job of that.)
Thanks for this post! I found it quite interesting and useful.
I feel like some parts of this post could give the (very likely inaccurate) impression that you/â80,000 Hours thinks working at an EA organisation is distinctly better than essentially all other roles. Specifically, I think this might result from the post repeatedly talking about people who work(ed) at EA orgs, and whether they left, without as repeatedly/âprominently talking about people working in other high-impact roles (e.g., in non-EA academia, politics, or AI labs).
Iâm pretty sure that the real reasons why this post gives disproportionate attention to data from EA orgs are simply that:
Itâs easier to get data about people who were working at EA orgs than about EAs in other high-impact roles
âHigh-impact rolesâ is a less clear-cut category, different people have different views, and âtypical EA viewsâ on that have changed in various ways over the last decade
And those seems to me to be good reasons for this post to be the way it is.
But I felt like it might be worth making those reasons explicit, to counter potential (very likely mistaken) inferences that Ben Todd/â80k considers working at EA orgs to be essentially the most impactful thing to do. Thatâs because, historically, many people seem to have updated hard on what they perceived 80k to be saying, even when 80k didnât mean that, including on this topic in particular. (And there are also other things that seem to bias EAs towards focusing overly much on roles at EA orgs, as discussed e.g. here.)
Hi Michael, I made some quick edits to help reduce this impression.
I also want to clarify that out of the 6 methods given, only 1 is about people working at EA organisations.
Is there even 1 exclusively about people working at EA organisations?
If someone had taken a different job with the goal of having a big social impact, and we didnât think what they were doing was horribly misguided, I donât think we would count them as having âdropped out of EAâ in any of the 6 data sets.
I was referring to things like phrasings used and how often someone working for an EA org vs not was discussed relative to other things; I wasnât referring to the actual criteria used to classify people as having dropping out /â reduced involvement or not.
Given that Ben says heâs now made some edits, it doesnât seem worth combing through the post again in detail to find examples of the sort of thing I mean. But I just did a quick ctrl+f for âorganisationsâ, and found this, as one example:
This is definitely not explicitly saying ânot dropping out = working at an EA orgâ. Instead, I think itâs meant as something more like âThere are many ways one can stay involved in EA, but in this case we had the obvious evidence that most of these people were still working at EA orgs, making it unnecessary to check if they were still involved in other ways.â
That said:
I think that, for various reasons that I mostly donât pin on 80k[1], various people feel like working at an EA org is one of the most impactful and/âor âEA-yâ things to do, even if they donât necessarily explicitly believe that. (I think you highlighted this well in your own recent post.) So it seems worth being extra careful about things that could accidentally exacerbate that feeling.
The text I quoted does sound like it categorises 2 of the first set of 14 people as âbecoming less involvedâ because theyâre not working at an EA org, without saying anything about whether theyâre still doing potentially high-impact things.
On the other hand, it also suggests that 3 of the set of 24 people arenât working at EA orgs but are still not considered to have not dropped out, which pushes against this.
Plus, itâs totally plausible Ben did consider whether those 2 people were doing other potentially high-impact things, found they seemed not to be (or not as much as they had been), and just didnât mention that.
Also, to be clear, I didnât mean my original comment as even a mild criticism of this post, really. I just thought it would be useful for this point to be explicitly made, to push against an impression some people might erroneously form after reading this post.
[1] To the extent to which it seems plausible that 80k has contributed to this phenomena, I donât think it wouldâve been easy for someone else to have done better. I think 80k has an unusual degree of prominence and respect in the EA community that makes it unusually likely that people will be influenced by 80k in ways that 80k didnât intend, even if 80k is doing a well-above-average job of communicating carefully and with nuance. (And I indeed think 80k is doing a well-above-average job of that.)