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.
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.