Thanks so much for this, that was informative. A few quick thoughts:
“Projects that result in a team covering a space or taking on some coordination role that is worse than the next person who could have come along”
I’ve heard this one before and I could sympathize with it, but it strikes me as a red flag that something is going a bit wrong. ( I’m not saying that this is your fault, but am flagging it is an issue for the community more broadly.) Big companies often don’t have the ideal teams for new initiatives. Often urgency is very important so they put something together relatively quickly. If it doesn’t work well is not that big of a deal, it is to spend the team and have them go to other projects, and perhaps find better people to take their place.
In comparison with nonprofits it’s much more difficult. My read is that we sort of expect the nonprofits to never die, which means we need to be *very very* sure about them before setting them up. But if this is the case it would be obviously severely limiting. The obvious solution to this would be to have bigger orgs with more possibility. Perhaps of specific initiatives were going well and demanded independence it could happen later on, but hopefully not for the first few years.
“I think it would be good to have scalable interventions for impact.” In terms of money, I’ve been thinking about this too. If this were a crucial strategy it seems like the kind of thing that could get a lot more attention. For instance, new orgs that focus heavily on ways to decently absorb a lot of money in the future.
Some ideas I’ve had:
- Experiment with advertising campaigns that could be clearly scaled up. Some of them seem linearly useful up to millions of dollars.
- Add additional resources to make existing researchers more effective.
- Buy the rights to books and spend on marketing for the key ones.
- Pay for virtual assistants and all other things that could speed researchers out.
- Add additional resources to make nonprofits more effective, easily.
- Better budgets for external contractors.
- Focus heavily on funding non-EA projects that are still really beneficial. This could mean an emphasis on funding new nonprofits that do nothing but rank and do strategy for more funding.
While it might be a strange example, the wealthy, or in particular, the Saudi government are examples of how to spend lots of money with relatively few trusted people, semi-successfully.
Having come from the tech sector, in particular, it feels like there are often much more stingy expectations placed on EA researchers.
In comparison with nonprofits it’s much more difficult. My read is that we sort of expect the nonprofits to never die, which means we need to be *very very* sure about them before setting them up. But if this is the case it would be obviously severely limiting.
To clarify, I don’t think that most projects will be actively harmful—in particular, the “projects that result in a team covering a space that is worse than the next person who have come along” case seems fairly rare to me, and would mostly apply to people who’d want to do certain movement-facing work or engage with policymakers. From a purely hits-based perspective, I think there’s still a dearth of projects that have a non-trivial chance of being successful, and this is much more limiting than projects being not as good as the next project to come along.
The obvious solution to this would be to have bigger orgs with more possibility.
I agree with this. Maybe another thing that could help would be to have safety nets such that EAs who overall do good work could start and wind down projects without being worried about sustaining their livelihood or the livelihood of their employees? Though this could also create some pretty bad incentives.
Some ideas I’ve had:
Thanks for these, I haven’t thought about this much in depth and think these are overall very good ideas that I would be excited to fund. In particular:
- Experiment with advertising campaigns that could be clearly scaled up. Some of them seem linearly useful up to millions of dollars.
I agree with this; I think there’s a big opportunity to do better and more targeted marketing in a way that could scale. I’ve discussed this with people and would be interested in funding someone who wanted to do this thoughtfully.
- Add additional resources to make existing researchers more effective.
- Pay for virtual assistants and all other things that could speed researchers out.
- Add additional resources to make nonprofits more effective, easily.
Also super agree with this. I think an unfortunate component here is that many altruistic people are irrationally frugal, including me—I personally feel somewhat weird about asking for money to have a marginally more ergonomic desk set-up or an assistant, but I generally endorse people doing this and would be happy to fund them (or other projects making researchers more effective).
- Focus heavily on funding non-EA projects that are still really beneficial. This could mean an emphasis on funding new nonprofits that do nothing but rank and do strategy for more funding.
I think historically, people have found it pretty hard to outsource things like this to non-EAs, though I agree with this in theory.
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One total guess at an overarching theme for why we haven’t done some of these things already is that people implicitly model longtermist movement growth on the growth of academic fields, which grow via slowly accruing prestige and tractable work to do over time, rather than modeling them as a tech company the way you describe. I think there could be good reasons for this—in particular, putting ourselves in the reference class of an academic field might attract the kind of people who want to be academics, which are generally the kinds of people we want—people who are very smart and highly-motivated by the work itself rather than other perks of the job. For what it’s worth, though, my guess is that the academic model is suboptimal, and we should indeed move to a more tech-company like model on many dimensions.
- Pay for virtual assistants and all other things that could speed researchers out.
As someone who has experience with hiring all kinds of virtual and personal assistants for myself and others, I think the problem here is not the money, but finding assistants who will actually do a good job, and organizing the entire thing in a way that’s convenient for the researchers/professionals who need support. More than half of the assistants I’ve worked with cost me more time than they saved me. Others were really good and saved me a lot of time, but it’s not straightforward to find them. If someone came up with a good proposal for this, I’d want to fund them and help them.
Similar points apply to some of the other ideas. We can’t just spend money on these things; we need to receive corresponding applications (which generally hasn’t happened) or proactively work to bring such projects into existence (which is a lot of work).
Thanks so much for this, that was informative. A few quick thoughts:
I’ve heard this one before and I could sympathize with it, but it strikes me as a red flag that something is going a bit wrong. ( I’m not saying that this is your fault, but am flagging it is an issue for the community more broadly.) Big companies often don’t have the ideal teams for new initiatives. Often urgency is very important so they put something together relatively quickly. If it doesn’t work well is not that big of a deal, it is to spend the team and have them go to other projects, and perhaps find better people to take their place.
In comparison with nonprofits it’s much more difficult. My read is that we sort of expect the nonprofits to never die, which means we need to be *very very* sure about them before setting them up. But if this is the case it would be obviously severely limiting. The obvious solution to this would be to have bigger orgs with more possibility. Perhaps of specific initiatives were going well and demanded independence it could happen later on, but hopefully not for the first few years.
Some ideas I’ve had:
- Experiment with advertising campaigns that could be clearly scaled up. Some of them seem linearly useful up to millions of dollars.
- Add additional resources to make existing researchers more effective.
- Buy the rights to books and spend on marketing for the key ones.
- Pay for virtual assistants and all other things that could speed researchers out.
- Add additional resources to make nonprofits more effective, easily.
- Better budgets for external contractors.
- Focus heavily on funding non-EA projects that are still really beneficial. This could mean an emphasis on funding new nonprofits that do nothing but rank and do strategy for more funding.
While it might be a strange example, the wealthy, or in particular, the Saudi government are examples of how to spend lots of money with relatively few trusted people, semi-successfully.
Having come from the tech sector, in particular, it feels like there are often much more stingy expectations placed on EA researchers.
To clarify, I don’t think that most projects will be actively harmful—in particular, the “projects that result in a team covering a space that is worse than the next person who have come along” case seems fairly rare to me, and would mostly apply to people who’d want to do certain movement-facing work or engage with policymakers. From a purely hits-based perspective, I think there’s still a dearth of projects that have a non-trivial chance of being successful, and this is much more limiting than projects being not as good as the next project to come along.
I agree with this. Maybe another thing that could help would be to have safety nets such that EAs who overall do good work could start and wind down projects without being worried about sustaining their livelihood or the livelihood of their employees? Though this could also create some pretty bad incentives.
Thanks for these, I haven’t thought about this much in depth and think these are overall very good ideas that I would be excited to fund. In particular:
I agree with this; I think there’s a big opportunity to do better and more targeted marketing in a way that could scale. I’ve discussed this with people and would be interested in funding someone who wanted to do this thoughtfully.
Also super agree with this. I think an unfortunate component here is that many altruistic people are irrationally frugal, including me—I personally feel somewhat weird about asking for money to have a marginally more ergonomic desk set-up or an assistant, but I generally endorse people doing this and would be happy to fund them (or other projects making researchers more effective).
I think historically, people have found it pretty hard to outsource things like this to non-EAs, though I agree with this in theory.
---
One total guess at an overarching theme for why we haven’t done some of these things already is that people implicitly model longtermist movement growth on the growth of academic fields, which grow via slowly accruing prestige and tractable work to do over time, rather than modeling them as a tech company the way you describe. I think there could be good reasons for this—in particular, putting ourselves in the reference class of an academic field might attract the kind of people who want to be academics, which are generally the kinds of people we want—people who are very smart and highly-motivated by the work itself rather than other perks of the job. For what it’s worth, though, my guess is that the academic model is suboptimal, and we should indeed move to a more tech-company like model on many dimensions.
Again, I agree with Asya. A minor side remark:
As someone who has experience with hiring all kinds of virtual and personal assistants for myself and others, I think the problem here is not the money, but finding assistants who will actually do a good job, and organizing the entire thing in a way that’s convenient for the researchers/professionals who need support. More than half of the assistants I’ve worked with cost me more time than they saved me. Others were really good and saved me a lot of time, but it’s not straightforward to find them. If someone came up with a good proposal for this, I’d want to fund them and help them.
Similar points apply to some of the other ideas. We can’t just spend money on these things; we need to receive corresponding applications (which generally hasn’t happened) or proactively work to bring such projects into existence (which is a lot of work).