I’m happy to write this up. One thing I think driving these considerations is a mismatch of priorities, leading people not to communicate about the right things to get on the same page. For example, central EA orgs like 80k and the CEA, with their priority on x-risk reduction, may pay most attention to helping x-risk orgs find hires. This comes out in what they do. There is nothing wrong with this, because I don’t even necessarily events like EAG have to necessarily trade-off between focusing on different causes. It’s just there is more to EA than x-risk, in terms of both supply of and demand for labour. If things like the EA FB groups directory, which includes different groups for different professional fields within EA for people to network within, are not something people working at EA organizations nor many community members at large are aware of, nobody will bring them up. So it can create a mutual impression there is less opportunity in EA for different kinds of people to work on different kinds of things there actually. A lot of this is the self-fulfilling prophecy of confidence. Believing there is room to create new opportunities in EA is the thing itself that drives people to create those opportunities. If nobody is pointing out how possible these opportunities are, nobody will believe they’re possible.
Admittedly, since I know more about the resources, to make them more accessible to the community is something I’d like. The Local EA Network (LEAN), a project of Rethink Charity (RC), has been revamping the EA Hub this year, an online portal that could make accessing these things for all EAs much easier. I don’t if the EA Hub is back up and running for anyone to access, or when that would be. This post itself were more my preliminary thoughts on how many people could better reframe disagreements within EA.
For what it’s worth, I shared the EA Facebook group directory in the last issue of the EA Newsletter, and I plan to share more resources like that as they arise (since the Newsletter is meant to be useful to a wide audience). Feel free to reach out if there’s something you think should be included in a future issue, though I can’t promise that we’ll have room for any particular link.
Yeah, that’s great. I think the next step would be to find a way to translate and integrate this info into other forms, like ensuring the info gets out at EAG, or university EA groups are made aware of them, but that’s a more complex process.
...because I don’t even necessarily events like EAG have to necessarily trade-off between focusing on different causes. It’s just there is more to EA than x-risk, in terms of both supply of and demand for labour.
I think I follow you here? But the syntax could be cleaned up.
Right, in organizing events like EAG, the CEA may optimize for matching up labour supply and demand for x-risk. They may not have the capacity or know-how to do this for every cause area at every event. This could create the impression there are only jobs at x-risk orgs, or only people with the respective credentials are welcomed to EA. So the appearance EA only focuses on one or the other is due to an artificial as opposed to a real problem. So I think people are likely to blame or point fingers, when I think that misunderstand the nature of the problem, and it requires a different kind of solution.
I’m happy to write this up. One thing I think driving these considerations is a mismatch of priorities, leading people not to communicate about the right things to get on the same page. For example, central EA orgs like 80k and the CEA, with their priority on x-risk reduction, may pay most attention to helping x-risk orgs find hires. This comes out in what they do. There is nothing wrong with this, because I don’t even necessarily events like EAG have to necessarily trade-off between focusing on different causes. It’s just there is more to EA than x-risk, in terms of both supply of and demand for labour. If things like the EA FB groups directory, which includes different groups for different professional fields within EA for people to network within, are not something people working at EA organizations nor many community members at large are aware of, nobody will bring them up. So it can create a mutual impression there is less opportunity in EA for different kinds of people to work on different kinds of things there actually. A lot of this is the self-fulfilling prophecy of confidence. Believing there is room to create new opportunities in EA is the thing itself that drives people to create those opportunities. If nobody is pointing out how possible these opportunities are, nobody will believe they’re possible.
Admittedly, since I know more about the resources, to make them more accessible to the community is something I’d like. The Local EA Network (LEAN), a project of Rethink Charity (RC), has been revamping the EA Hub this year, an online portal that could make accessing these things for all EAs much easier. I don’t if the EA Hub is back up and running for anyone to access, or when that would be. This post itself were more my preliminary thoughts on how many people could better reframe disagreements within EA.
For what it’s worth, I shared the EA Facebook group directory in the last issue of the EA Newsletter, and I plan to share more resources like that as they arise (since the Newsletter is meant to be useful to a wide audience). Feel free to reach out if there’s something you think should be included in a future issue, though I can’t promise that we’ll have room for any particular link.
Yeah, that’s great. I think the next step would be to find a way to translate and integrate this info into other forms, like ensuring the info gets out at EAG, or university EA groups are made aware of them, but that’s a more complex process.
Thanks, Evan.
I think I follow you here? But the syntax could be cleaned up.
Right, in organizing events like EAG, the CEA may optimize for matching up labour supply and demand for x-risk. They may not have the capacity or know-how to do this for every cause area at every event. This could create the impression there are only jobs at x-risk orgs, or only people with the respective credentials are welcomed to EA. So the appearance EA only focuses on one or the other is due to an artificial as opposed to a real problem. So I think people are likely to blame or point fingers, when I think that misunderstand the nature of the problem, and it requires a different kind of solution.