Obviously I’m biased, but I think 80,000 Hours has one of the best track record of creating new members of the EA community, and we have scalable ways to continue doing that at the margin, so I think we should at least be a candidate for best EA movement building project. EAO and EAV might turn out to be even better, and there’s strong reasons in favor of them, but the evidence is much weaker so far.
Again this is just a list of CEA organizations and a pitch for continually growing funding. But I’ll go with that and ask you to expand on the track record: what are the best examples of someone trying to make the strongest case for and strongest case against it? When I’ve heard people make the case against, it’s that people counselled (at least in the northeast megalopolis and London) have been EA’s before.
Sorry, I was just responding to Ryan’s comment, not addressing your overall point.
You’re correct that some people we coach are already EAs, but the majority of coachees and especially the 25k monthly website readers either (i) know about EA but aren’t actively involved or especially well linked into the community (ii) don’t know much about EA. But many people we coach end up active in the community. There’s a clear mechanism for this: we make introductions, talk about EA with them, persuade them of the key ideas, and help them figure out how they can be more EA in their career.
I’d recommend reading through some of our last evaluation to see the types of career changes people made, many of which involve becoming “more EA”.
https://80000hours.org/2014/05/plan-change-analysis-and-cost-effectiveness/
Since hardly any recent graduates making career decisions already know about effective altruism, there’s huge room of expansion. And talking about career decisions is a great platform for discussing EA ideas, because it’s a very big decision but existing advice is so bad.
There’s also many people involved with effective altruism but who only donate income and don’t know how to apply effective altruism to their career. 80k provides motivation and information to people in this category, making the EA community more effective. Many of our past plan changers are in this category e.g. Peter Hurford.
https://80000hours.org/career-guide/member-stories/peter-hurford/
I think there’s a lot more that could be done to improve the career choices of existing EAs. Although our general frameworks are good, the next stage of our research is to investigate all the specific neglected paths EAs could follow e.g. policy careers, what to do within international development, various types of academic research and so on. This is becoming more and more pressing as earning to give looks less important on the margin.
Major arguments against:
You can always argue much of our movement building impact would have happened anyway, just later. That’s generally true, but it applies to every EA movement building organisation. Since 80k has been one of the main contributors to growing the community, 80k is causing a portion of the impact. Also speeding up growth is still highly valuable.
You may just think there’s some other project at the margin which offers much higher returns for getting new people involved, like investing in EA student groups.
And you could think it’s just very hard to improve an EAs career choices, so more research is also not helpful.
Obviously I’m biased, but I think 80,000 Hours has one of the best track record of creating new members of the EA community, and we have scalable ways to continue doing that at the margin, so I think we should at least be a candidate for best EA movement building project. EAO and EAV might turn out to be even better, and there’s strong reasons in favor of them, but the evidence is much weaker so far.
Again this is just a list of CEA organizations and a pitch for continually growing funding. But I’ll go with that and ask you to expand on the track record: what are the best examples of someone trying to make the strongest case for and strongest case against it? When I’ve heard people make the case against, it’s that people counselled (at least in the northeast megalopolis and London) have been EA’s before.
Sorry, I was just responding to Ryan’s comment, not addressing your overall point.
You’re correct that some people we coach are already EAs, but the majority of coachees and especially the 25k monthly website readers either (i) know about EA but aren’t actively involved or especially well linked into the community (ii) don’t know much about EA. But many people we coach end up active in the community. There’s a clear mechanism for this: we make introductions, talk about EA with them, persuade them of the key ideas, and help them figure out how they can be more EA in their career. I’d recommend reading through some of our last evaluation to see the types of career changes people made, many of which involve becoming “more EA”. https://80000hours.org/2014/05/plan-change-analysis-and-cost-effectiveness/
Since hardly any recent graduates making career decisions already know about effective altruism, there’s huge room of expansion. And talking about career decisions is a great platform for discussing EA ideas, because it’s a very big decision but existing advice is so bad.
There’s also many people involved with effective altruism but who only donate income and don’t know how to apply effective altruism to their career. 80k provides motivation and information to people in this category, making the EA community more effective. Many of our past plan changers are in this category e.g. Peter Hurford. https://80000hours.org/career-guide/member-stories/peter-hurford/
One reflection of this is that we’ve catalysed the development of 8 new EA non-profits (5 of which have full-time staff) which likely wouldn’t have been created if 80k hadn’t existed. https://80000hours.org/2015/04/10-new-organisations-founded-due-to-80000-hours/
I think there’s a lot more that could be done to improve the career choices of existing EAs. Although our general frameworks are good, the next stage of our research is to investigate all the specific neglected paths EAs could follow e.g. policy careers, what to do within international development, various types of academic research and so on. This is becoming more and more pressing as earning to give looks less important on the margin.
Major arguments against:
You can always argue much of our movement building impact would have happened anyway, just later. That’s generally true, but it applies to every EA movement building organisation. Since 80k has been one of the main contributors to growing the community, 80k is causing a portion of the impact. Also speeding up growth is still highly valuable.
You may just think there’s some other project at the margin which offers much higher returns for getting new people involved, like investing in EA student groups.
And you could think it’s just very hard to improve an EAs career choices, so more research is also not helpful.
Disclosure: I work at 80,000 Hours.