I really wish we (as an EA community) didn’t work so hard to accidentally make earning to give so uncool. It’s a job that is well within the reach of anyone, especially if you don’t have unrealistic expectations of how much money you need to make and donate to feel good about your contributions. It’s also a very flexible career path and can build you good career capital along the way.
Sure talent gaps are pressing, but many EA orgs also need more money. We also need more people looking to donate, as the current pool of EA funding feels very over-concentrated in the hands of too few decision-makers right now.
I also wish we didn’t accidentally make donating to AMF or GiveDirectly so uncool. Those orgs could continually absorb the money of everyone in EA and do great, life-saving work.
(Also, not to mention all the career paths that aren’t earning to give or “work in an EA org”...)
FWIW, without having thought systematically about this, my intuition is to agree. I’d be particularly keen to see:
More explicit models for what trainable skills and experiences are useful for improving the long-term future, or will become so in the future (as new institutions such as CSET are being established).
More actionable advice on how to train these skills.
My gut feeling is that in many places we could do a better job at utilizing skills and experiences people can get pretty reliably in the for-profit world, academia, or from other established ‘institutions’.
I’m aware this is happening to some extent already, e.g. GPI trying to interface with academia or 80K’s guide on US policy. I think both are great!
NB this is different from the idea that there are many other career paths that would be high-impact to stay in indefinitely. I think this is also true, but at least if one has a narrow focus on the long-term future I feel less sure if there are ‘easy wins’ left here.
(An underlying disagreement here might be: Is this feasible, or are we just too much bottlenecked by something like what Carrick Flynn has called ‘disentanglement’. Very crudely, I tend to agree that we’re bottlenecked by disentanglement but that there are still some improvements we can make along the above lines. A more substantive underlying question might be how important domain knowledge and domain-specific skills are for being able to do disentanglement, where my impression is that I place an unusually high value on them whereas other EAs are closer to ‘the most important thing is to hang out with other EAs and absorb the epistemic norms, results, and culture’.)
I think that earning-to-give and donating to AMF and GiveDirectly is very cool. (I did this full-time for a while, and now advise a private foundation whose funders also do this full-time.)
In fact, I can’t think of any people I’ve met within EA who don’t think doing this is very cool, and I can only think of a few who would clearly “rank” ETG below other types of work in terms of “coolness”. The most common reaction I’ve heard to people who discussed their choice to pursue ETG or direct work outside of EA (for example, studying public health with an eye toward biosecurity or neglected tropical diseases) hasn’t been “okay, good for you, too bad you don’t work at an EA org”. It’s been “that’s really wonderful, congratulations!”
(I do know that some people have heard something closer to the first reaction, which is disappointing—and part of the reason I’m so forcefully expressing my beliefs here.)
Note that “coolness” is not the same as “impact”; personally, I think it’s likely that working at GiveWell is probably higher-impact than earning-to-give and donating $10,000/year. But that doesn’t mean that working at GiveWell is cooler. In both cases, someone is devoting their life to helping others in a way that aligns with my core values in life.
The fact that the GiveWell person passed an extra work trial (assuming they both applied to GiveWell—maybe they didn’t, and the ETG person just really likes their job!) is trivial compared to the overarching fact of “holy cow, you’re both using your lives to improve other lives, it doesn’t get much cooler than that”.
I’d feel exactly the same way about someone whose life didn’t lead them down the “fancy four-year degree” plan and who donates $1000/year because that’s really all they can spare. When it comes to my internal view of “coolness”, it’s actually the thought that counts, as long as the thought involves carefully considering the best ways to use one’s resources.
The most common reaction I’ve heard to people who discussed their choice to pursue ETG or direct work outside of EA (for example, studying public health with an eye toward biosecurity or neglected tropical diseases) hasn’t been “okay, good for you, too bad you don’t work at an EA org”. It’s been “that’s really wonderful, congratulations!”
I’m really glad that’s been your experience and I acknowledge that maybe my experience isn’t typical.
My experience has been more pessimistic. Honestly, I usually encounter conversations that feel more like this:
Bob: “Hi, I can donate $10,000 a year to the EA movement. GiveWell says that could save 4-5 lives a year, and it’s quite possible we could even find better giving opportunities than GiveWell top charities. This is super exciting!”
Alice: “Pff, $10K/yr isn’t really that much. We don’t need that. You should do direct work instead.”
Bob: “Ok, how about I research biosecurity?”
Alice: “Nah, you’d probably mess that up. We should just let FHI handle that. We can’t talk about this further because of infohazards.”
...Obviously this is dramatized for effect, but I’ve never seen a community so excited to turn away money.
In addition to what Peter describes, if we do a simple content analysis of forum threads or blog posts in the last 3 or so years, ETG feels like it’s become invisible. Long term EAs like you and me most likely do still think it’s cool because when we became EAs it was a huge part of it and probably a big part of what drew us in (in my case, certainly—I became an EA the year GWWC was launched). But that doesn’t mean that this is the subtext that newer EAs are getting. I feel like the opposite is true, and I find that deeply concerning.
I really wish we (as an EA community) didn’t work so hard to accidentally make earning to give so uncool. It’s a job that is well within the reach of anyone, especially if you don’t have unrealistic expectations of how much money you need to make and donate to feel good about your contributions. It’s also a very flexible career path and can build you good career capital along the way.
Sure talent gaps are pressing, but many EA orgs also need more money. We also need more people looking to donate, as the current pool of EA funding feels very over-concentrated in the hands of too few decision-makers right now.
I also wish we didn’t accidentally make donating to AMF or GiveDirectly so uncool. Those orgs could continually absorb the money of everyone in EA and do great, life-saving work.
(Also, not to mention all the career paths that aren’t earning to give or “work in an EA org”...)
+1 for pointing out the hazard of having funding concentrated in the hands of a very few decision makers
>Also, not to mention all the career paths that aren’t earning to give or “work in an EA org”
While I share your concern about the way earning to give is portrayed, I think this issue might be even more pressing.
FWIW, without having thought systematically about this, my intuition is to agree. I’d be particularly keen to see:
More explicit models for what trainable skills and experiences are useful for improving the long-term future, or will become so in the future (as new institutions such as CSET are being established).
More actionable advice on how to train these skills.
My gut feeling is that in many places we could do a better job at utilizing skills and experiences people can get pretty reliably in the for-profit world, academia, or from other established ‘institutions’.
I’m aware this is happening to some extent already, e.g. GPI trying to interface with academia or 80K’s guide on US policy. I think both are great!
NB this is different from the idea that there are many other career paths that would be high-impact to stay in indefinitely. I think this is also true, but at least if one has a narrow focus on the long-term future I feel less sure if there are ‘easy wins’ left here.
(An underlying disagreement here might be: Is this feasible, or are we just too much bottlenecked by something like what Carrick Flynn has called ‘disentanglement’. Very crudely, I tend to agree that we’re bottlenecked by disentanglement but that there are still some improvements we can make along the above lines. A more substantive underlying question might be how important domain knowledge and domain-specific skills are for being able to do disentanglement, where my impression is that I place an unusually high value on them whereas other EAs are closer to ‘the most important thing is to hang out with other EAs and absorb the epistemic norms, results, and culture’.)
I agree—I just felt like it was well covered already by Luke’s comments.
Nice point.
‘I also wish we didn’t accidentally make donating to AMF or GiveDirectly so uncool.’
This reminds me of the pattern where we want to do something original, so we don’t take the obvious solution.
I think that earning-to-give and donating to AMF and GiveDirectly is very cool. (I did this full-time for a while, and now advise a private foundation whose funders also do this full-time.)
In fact, I can’t think of any people I’ve met within EA who don’t think doing this is very cool, and I can only think of a few who would clearly “rank” ETG below other types of work in terms of “coolness”. The most common reaction I’ve heard to people who discussed their choice to pursue ETG or direct work outside of EA (for example, studying public health with an eye toward biosecurity or neglected tropical diseases) hasn’t been “okay, good for you, too bad you don’t work at an EA org”. It’s been “that’s really wonderful, congratulations!”
(I do know that some people have heard something closer to the first reaction, which is disappointing—and part of the reason I’m so forcefully expressing my beliefs here.)
Note that “coolness” is not the same as “impact”; personally, I think it’s likely that working at GiveWell is probably higher-impact than earning-to-give and donating $10,000/year. But that doesn’t mean that working at GiveWell is cooler. In both cases, someone is devoting their life to helping others in a way that aligns with my core values in life.
The fact that the GiveWell person passed an extra work trial (assuming they both applied to GiveWell—maybe they didn’t, and the ETG person just really likes their job!) is trivial compared to the overarching fact of “holy cow, you’re both using your lives to improve other lives, it doesn’t get much cooler than that”.
I’d feel exactly the same way about someone whose life didn’t lead them down the “fancy four-year degree” plan and who donates $1000/year because that’s really all they can spare. When it comes to my internal view of “coolness”, it’s actually the thought that counts, as long as the thought involves carefully considering the best ways to use one’s resources.
I’m really glad that’s been your experience and I acknowledge that maybe my experience isn’t typical.
My experience has been more pessimistic. Honestly, I usually encounter conversations that feel more like this:
Bob: “Hi, I can donate $10,000 a year to the EA movement. GiveWell says that could save 4-5 lives a year, and it’s quite possible we could even find better giving opportunities than GiveWell top charities. This is super exciting!”
Alice: “Pff, $10K/yr isn’t really that much. We don’t need that. You should do direct work instead.”
Bob: “Ok, how about I research biosecurity?”
Alice: “Nah, you’d probably mess that up. We should just let FHI handle that. We can’t talk about this further because of infohazards.”
...Obviously this is dramatized for effect, but I’ve never seen a community so excited to turn away money.
In addition to what Peter describes, if we do a simple content analysis of forum threads or blog posts in the last 3 or so years, ETG feels like it’s become invisible. Long term EAs like you and me most likely do still think it’s cool because when we became EAs it was a huge part of it and probably a big part of what drew us in (in my case, certainly—I became an EA the year GWWC was launched). But that doesn’t mean that this is the subtext that newer EAs are getting. I feel like the opposite is true, and I find that deeply concerning.