Aaron Gertler 🔸 comments on What to do with people?

[Aaron Gertler 🔸]

Upvoted. This is a good summary of several different community structures, and you represent the strengths of hierarchy well (though I wish there’d been examples of what an individual’s “journey through the hierarchy process” might look like).

I think of EA as being fairly hierarchical already. There are dozens of different organizations geared toward different task/​cause combinations; if you tell me you’re a person with X experience who wants to do work of type Y in country Z, there’s a good chance an organization exists for that, at least for the most common causes/​most EA-populated countries.

There’s also a reasonably large population of people within EA who can offer suggestions if you ask “what should I do next?” I sometimes see questions like that on Facebook or in CEA surveys (though not often on the Forum, yet), and I try to advise where I can. 80,000 Hours may not have the resources to coach hundreds of additional people, but I’d hope that people in the informal EA community (at least those who are pretty familiar with the landscape) would spend time giving advice.

Perhaps some of the available resources for finding one’s next move aren’t well-known enough? If anyone reading this found themselves in a place where they wanted to do EA work, didn’t know what to do next, and didn’t find a good way to learn about their options, I’d appreciate hearing your story!

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Regarding this quote:

I would consider it a good result if the “trail” behind the core of effective altruism movement was dotted with structures and organizations working on highly impactful problems, even if the problems are no longer on the exactly first place in current prioritization.

This seems… kind of true already? It’s hard to say what “current prioritization” entails, since “global health and poverty” gets more money from the EA community and has more open jobs than any other major area, but some of the largest EA organizations are more focused on long-term work. But since most people think of LTF as the “current” priority, I’ll use global poverty as an example.

There are plenty of active, even thriving organizations working on global health/​poverty that have strong connections to EA. 80,000 Hours’ job board lists dozens of positions in the area, and Tom Wein’s collection of job boards features hundreds more (not all of those jobs are necessarily “EA-aligned”, but many are, and even organizations that aren’t maximally effective may offer great learning opportunities and much higher impact than an “average” job).

A job at the United Nations (there are a ton of those at the first non-80K link I clicked on from Tom Wein’s list) may not have the same kind of prestige as an Open Phil job, but I still can’t imagine meeting someone who works for the UN at EA Global and not having (a) a bunch of questions I’m eager to ask them, and (b) respect for their perspective on global development causes.

Jan: How might the “trail” you envision look different than what we have now? Is there some cause you’re thinking of that doesn’t have good organizations/​structures because it is “no longer first place”? (If the argument was “there should be more orgs working on promising-but-seldom-prioritized topics like mental health”, I think I’d be more in agreement.)

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Also, this looks like a typo:

For example, part of the answers to the question “how to influence the long-term future” depend on the extent to which the world is world, or random, or predictable.