A general question about this advice, and other pieces in the same vein: What areas should fewer EAs work in? We’ve got to come from somewhere.
More broadly, EA thinking places a high value on cost-benefit analysis. When talking about career stuff, that means opportunity costs. A version of that claim here would sound something like, “[some cause area] is oversaturated and could probably lose half of its current human capital without meaningful loss, which I believe for [reasons] and if those people moved into government and did [some stuff] then [good things] would happen...”
Without such a comparison, I’m afraid this case is not expressed in terms that EAs are likely to find persuasive.
I feel like as a general rule of thumb, and this doesn’t really fall on the gov/not gov axis but can be applied, too many EAs work in intellectual pursuits and not enough in power/relationship pursuits.
This isn’t based on a numerical analysis or anything, just my intuition of the status incentives and personal passions of group members.
So e.g. I wouldn’t necessarily expect the amount of EAs in government to be too low but maybe those working directly in partisan politics/organizing/fundraising to be too low. If I had to guess we are ~properly allocating towards policy makers both within think tanks and within executive branch orgs.
Yes, I think there is something to this. We might have suboptimal talent distributions from a social POV if EAs are naturally attracted to certain kinds of work in a way that unconsciously/consciously influences career calculuses.
A general question about this advice, and other pieces in the same vein: What areas should fewer EAs work in? We’ve got to come from somewhere.
More broadly, EA thinking places a high value on cost-benefit analysis. When talking about career stuff, that means opportunity costs. A version of that claim here would sound something like, “[some cause area] is oversaturated and could probably lose half of its current human capital without meaningful loss, which I believe for [reasons] and if those people moved into government and did [some stuff] then [good things] would happen...”
Without such a comparison, I’m afraid this case is not expressed in terms that EAs are likely to find persuasive.
I feel like as a general rule of thumb, and this doesn’t really fall on the gov/not gov axis but can be applied, too many EAs work in intellectual pursuits and not enough in power/relationship pursuits.
This isn’t based on a numerical analysis or anything, just my intuition of the status incentives and personal passions of group members.
So e.g. I wouldn’t necessarily expect the amount of EAs in government to be too low but maybe those working directly in partisan politics/organizing/fundraising to be too low. If I had to guess we are ~properly allocating towards policy makers both within think tanks and within executive branch orgs.
Yes, I think there is something to this. We might have suboptimal talent distributions from a social POV if EAs are naturally attracted to certain kinds of work in a way that unconsciously/consciously influences career calculuses.