More could be done about the vale drift on the structural level, e.g. it might be also explained by the main bottlenecks in the community itself, like the Mid-Tire Trap (e.g. too good for running local group, but no good enough to be hired by main EA organizations → multiple unsuccessful job applications → frustration → drop out).
Doing effective altruistic things ≠ Doing Effective Altruism™ things
All the main Effective Altruism orgs together employ only a few dozen people. There are two orders of magnitude more people interested in Effective Altruism. They can’t all work at the main EA orgs.
There are lots of highly impactful opportunities out there that aren’t branded as EA—check out the career profiles on 80,000hours for reference. Academia, politics, tech startups, doing EtG in random places, etc.
We should be interested in having as high an impact as possible and not in ‘performing EA-ness’.
I do think that EA orgs dominate the conversations within the EA sphere which can lead to this unfortunate effect where people quite understandably feel that the best thing they can do is work there (or at an ‘EA approved’ workplace like D pmind or J n Street) - or nothing. That’s counterproductive and sad.
A potential explanation: it’s difficult for people to evaluate the highly impactful positions in other fields. Therefore the few organisations and firms we can all agree on are Effectively Altruistic get a disproportionate amount of attention and ‘status’.
As the community, we should try to encourage to find the highest impact opportunity for them out of many possible options, of which only a tiny fraction is working at EA orgs.
Doing effective altruistic things ≠ Doing Effective Altruism™ things
All the main Effective Altruism orgs together employ only a few dozen people. There are two orders of magnitude more people interested in Effective Altruism. They can’t all work at the main EA orgs.
There are lots of highly impactful opportunities out there that aren’t branded as EA—check out the career profiles on 80,000hours for reference. Academia, politics, tech startups, doing EtG in random places, etc.
We should be interested in having as high an impact as possible and not in ‘performing EA-ness’.
I do think that EA orgs dominate the conversations within the EA sphere which can lead to this unfortunate effect where people quite understandably feel that the best thing they can do is work there (or at an ‘EA approved’ workplace like D pmind or J n Street) - or nothing. That’s counterproductive and sad.
A potential explanation: it’s difficult for people to evaluate the highly impactful positions in other fields. Therefore the few organisations and firms we can all agree on are Effectively Altruistic get a disproportionate amount of attention and ‘status’.
As the community, we should try to encourage to find the highest impact opportunity for them out of many possible options, of which only a tiny fraction is working at EA orgs.