“There’s no point working on a problem if you can’t find any roles that are a good fit for you – you won’t be satisfied or have much impact.”
“If you’re already an expert in a problem, then it’s probably best to work within your area of expertise. It wouldn’t make sense for, say, an economist who’s crushing it to switch into something totally different. However, you could still use the framework to narrow down sub-fields e.g. development economics vs. employment policy.”
In my understanding, EA also considers personal fit and thus working on other problems if the person can make a bigger impact from there. For example, if somebody alive today possesses the same aptitudes as (with all due respect) Martin Luther King Jr., then he’d be better in tackling Racism than Malaria nets and AI risks.
EA career advice often starts with a pressing global problem, thinks about what skills could help solve that problem, and then recommends that you personally go acquire those skills. What if we ask the question from the other direction: For any given skillset or background, how can EA nudge people towards more impactful careers?
Racism causes a lot of suffering, and some of the best minds of this generation are working towards ending it. If EA helped those people find the most effective ways to advance racial justice, it would benefit the world and expose more people to EA ways of thinking.
One way the EA movement could succeed over the next few decades is by becoming a source of information for a broad popular audience about how to be more impactful in the most popular causes.
This is a good marketing strategy, but it risks becoming “Moloch;” The popular cause (originally intended as marketing) might eat away the others.
Other than that, why do you expect EA to more successful than other groups? Big, popular, entrenched problems are seldom easily exploitable. In the case of inequality; There are some conservative suggestions I have heard that seem worth trying out (e.g., public minority-only schools with strong selection filters and high academic/behavioral standards), but are readily dismissed because they are not politically desirable. So the challenge is to present ideas that are simultaneously appealing and effective and actualizable and new. I don’t see EA having much luck. Posting this from the Middle East, it is laughably clear to me that this is very ineffective use of resources.
Hi, interesting post. I’m new here so please excuse faults in my comment.
“Is EA really all about taking every question and twisting it back to malaria nets and AI risk?”
Based on this article https://80000hours.org/career-guide/most-pressing-problems/:
“There’s no point working on a problem if you can’t find any roles that are a good fit for you – you won’t be satisfied or have much impact.”
“If you’re already an expert in a problem, then it’s probably best to work within your area of expertise. It wouldn’t make sense for, say, an economist who’s crushing it to switch into something totally different. However, you could still use the framework to narrow down sub-fields e.g. development economics vs. employment policy.”
In my understanding, EA also considers personal fit and thus working on other problems if the person can make a bigger impact from there. For example, if somebody alive today possesses the same aptitudes as (with all due respect) Martin Luther King Jr., then he’d be better in tackling Racism than Malaria nets and AI risks.
That’s an interesting point.
EA career advice often starts with a pressing global problem, thinks about what skills could help solve that problem, and then recommends that you personally go acquire those skills. What if we ask the question from the other direction: For any given skillset or background, how can EA nudge people towards more impactful careers?
Racism causes a lot of suffering, and some of the best minds of this generation are working towards ending it. If EA helped those people find the most effective ways to advance racial justice, it would benefit the world and expose more people to EA ways of thinking.
One way the EA movement could succeed over the next few decades is by becoming a source of information for a broad popular audience about how to be more impactful in the most popular causes.
This is a good marketing strategy, but it risks becoming “Moloch;” The popular cause (originally intended as marketing) might eat away the others.
Other than that, why do you expect EA to more successful than other groups? Big, popular, entrenched problems are seldom easily exploitable. In the case of inequality; There are some conservative suggestions I have heard that seem worth trying out (e.g., public minority-only schools with strong selection filters and high academic/behavioral standards), but are readily dismissed because they are not politically desirable. So the challenge is to present ideas that are simultaneously appealing and effective and actualizable and new. I don’t see EA having much luck. Posting this from the Middle East, it is laughably clear to me that this is very ineffective use of resources.