And I think it’s not necessarily about people’s ability to do work, but people’s perceived commitment to ‘the cause’ and their perceived ‘moral fit’ with the organisation.
I think there’s a higher importance placed on this by some organisations, and for some roles. But it seems that some degree of ‘alignment’ is required to be recruited to almost all roles in the EA eco-system.
I’m not taking a stance on whether this is good or bad—people can rightly have opinions both ways on this I think. Just making an observation that it’s a factor.
I’m also going to refer to this post that is based on ‘context’ being a missing criteria for external candidates, but I think this concept includes alignment.
I think context and alignment are quite different. I would say context is basically role-specific knowledge. For some roles, like grantmaker, it’s very useful to have an in-depth understanding of the technical issues of AI safety, the history of the field, the people and organisations involved, etc. For other roles, like comms, you might need less or different knowledge. For example, if you do comms for an alignment research org, you probably need the technical knowledge to roughly understand what your org is working on so that you can explain it to other people. But you don’t need sufficient technical knowledge to be able to predict if it’s a viable approach, as an ideal grantmaker might.
Whereas I would say alignment is not just understanding but actually believing. A long history in EA/LW/various AI safety spaces predicts that you’ll be committed to AI safety and won’t just jump to a better paying job if it comes along.
In my current role (which has nothing whatsoever to do with AI) I think I have pretty good context—I understand the product, I know why we’re building it, I know all the key internal and external stakeholders, etc. But I actually think the product is not that great, and if someone came along and offered me a job that was better, I would probably leave.
I think alignment -is- the right word.
And I think it’s not necessarily about people’s ability to do work, but people’s perceived commitment to ‘the cause’ and their perceived ‘moral fit’ with the organisation.
I think there’s a higher importance placed on this by some organisations, and for some roles. But it seems that some degree of ‘alignment’ is required to be recruited to almost all roles in the EA eco-system.
I’m not taking a stance on whether this is good or bad—people can rightly have opinions both ways on this I think. Just making an observation that it’s a factor.
I’m also going to refer to this post that is based on ‘context’ being a missing criteria for external candidates, but I think this concept includes alignment.
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/b82SLXwEHRCs3TFJA/why-experienced-professionals-fail-to-land-high-impact-roles
I think context and alignment are quite different. I would say context is basically role-specific knowledge. For some roles, like grantmaker, it’s very useful to have an in-depth understanding of the technical issues of AI safety, the history of the field, the people and organisations involved, etc. For other roles, like comms, you might need less or different knowledge. For example, if you do comms for an alignment research org, you probably need the technical knowledge to roughly understand what your org is working on so that you can explain it to other people. But you don’t need sufficient technical knowledge to be able to predict if it’s a viable approach, as an ideal grantmaker might.
Whereas I would say alignment is not just understanding but actually believing. A long history in EA/LW/various AI safety spaces predicts that you’ll be committed to AI safety and won’t just jump to a better paying job if it comes along.
In my current role (which has nothing whatsoever to do with AI) I think I have pretty good context—I understand the product, I know why we’re building it, I know all the key internal and external stakeholders, etc. But I actually think the product is not that great, and if someone came along and offered me a job that was better, I would probably leave.