The fact that everyone in EA finds the work we do interesting and/or fun should be treated with more suspicion.
I would like to agree with Aaron’s comment and make a stronger claim—my impression is that many EAs around me in Israel, especially those coming from a strong technical background, don’t find most direct EA-work very intellectually interesting or fun (ignoring its impact).
Speaking for myself, my background is mostly in pure math and in cyber-security research / software engineering. Putting aside managerial and entrepreneurial roles, it seems to me that most of the roles in EA(-adjacent) organizations open for someone with background similar to mine are:
Research similar to research at Rethink Priorities or GiveWell—It seems to me that this research mostly involves literature review and analysis of existing research. I find this kind of work to be somewhat interesting, but not nearly as intrinsically interesting as the things I have done so far.
Technical AI safety—This could potentially be very interesting for someone like me, however, I am not convinced by the arguments for the relatively high importance or tractability of AI safety conveyed by EA. In fact, this is where I worry said critique might be right, on the community level, I worry that we are biased by motivated reasoning.
Software engineering—Most of the software needs in EA(-adjacent) organizations seem to be fairly simple technically (but the product and “market-fit” could be hard). As such, for someone looking for more research type of work or more complicated technical problems, this is not very appealing.
Additionally, most of the roles are not available in Israel or open for remote work.
In fact, I think this is a point where the EA community misses many highly capable individuals who could otherwise do great work, if we had interesting enough roles for them.
That’s interesting and makes sense — for reference I work in EA research, and I’d guess ~90%+ of the people I regularly engage with in the EA community are really interested / excited about EA ideas. But that percentage is heavily influenced by the fact that I work at an EA organization.
Yeah, that makes sense, and is fairly clear selection bias. Since here in Israel we have a very strong tech hub and many people finishing their military service in elite tech units, I see the opposite selection bias, of people not finding too many EA (or even EA-inspired) opportunities that are of interest to them.
I failed to mention that I think your post was great, and I would also love to see (most of) these critiques flashed out.
I would like to agree with Aaron’s comment and make a stronger claim—my impression is that many EAs around me in Israel, especially those coming from a strong technical background, don’t find most direct EA-work very intellectually interesting or fun (ignoring its impact).
Speaking for myself, my background is mostly in pure math and in cyber-security research / software engineering. Putting aside managerial and entrepreneurial roles, it seems to me that most of the roles in EA(-adjacent) organizations open for someone with background similar to mine are:
Research similar to research at Rethink Priorities or GiveWell—It seems to me that this research mostly involves literature review and analysis of existing research. I find this kind of work to be somewhat interesting, but not nearly as intrinsically interesting as the things I have done so far.
Technical AI safety—This could potentially be very interesting for someone like me, however, I am not convinced by the arguments for the relatively high importance or tractability of AI safety conveyed by EA. In fact, this is where I worry said critique might be right, on the community level, I worry that we are biased by motivated reasoning.
Software engineering—Most of the software needs in EA(-adjacent) organizations seem to be fairly simple technically (but the product and “market-fit” could be hard). As such, for someone looking for more research type of work or more complicated technical problems, this is not very appealing.
Additionally, most of the roles are not available in Israel or open for remote work.
In fact, I think this is a point where the EA community misses many highly capable individuals who could otherwise do great work, if we had interesting enough roles for them.
That’s interesting and makes sense — for reference I work in EA research, and I’d guess ~90%+ of the people I regularly engage with in the EA community are really interested / excited about EA ideas. But that percentage is heavily influenced by the fact that I work at an EA organization.
Yeah, that makes sense, and is fairly clear selection bias. Since here in Israel we have a very strong tech hub and many people finishing their military service in elite tech units, I see the opposite selection bias, of people not finding too many EA (or even EA-inspired) opportunities that are of interest to them.
I failed to mention that I think your post was great, and I would also love to see (most of) these critiques flashed out.