The problem here is that people in the EA movement overtly associate being EA not with ‘doing high-impact things’ but with ‘do EA-approved work, ideally at an EA org’.
It is not obvious to me how this is fixable. It doesn’t help that recommendations change frequently, so that entering paths that were ‘EA-approved’ once aren’t any longer. As Greg said, people won’t want to risk that. It’s unfortunate that we punish people for following previous recommendations. This also doesn’t exactly incentivize people to follow current recommendations and leads to EAs being flakey, which is bad for long-term impact.
I think one thing that would be good for people is to have a better professional & do-gooding network outside of EA. If you are considering entering a profession, you can find dedicated people there and coordinate. You can also find other do-gooding communities. In both cases you can bring the moral motivations and the empirical standards to other aligned people.
The problem here is that people in the EA movement overtly associate being EA not with ‘doing high-impact things’ but with ‘do EA-approved work, ideally at an EA org’.
It is not obvious to me how this is fixable. It doesn’t help that recommendations change frequently, so that entering paths that were ‘EA-approved’ once aren’t any longer. As Greg said, people won’t want to risk that. It’s unfortunate that we punish people for following previous recommendations. This also doesn’t exactly incentivize people to follow current recommendations and leads to EAs being flakey, which is bad for long-term impact.
I think one thing that would be good for people is to have a better professional & do-gooding network outside of EA. If you are considering entering a profession, you can find dedicated people there and coordinate. You can also find other do-gooding communities. In both cases you can bring the moral motivations and the empirical standards to other aligned people.
+1
I’ve been pretty impressed by the level of professional support & general benevolence of people who work in non-EA domains.
(Most of my experience here is with the Bay Area tech scene & the payments antifraud scene; unsure how far this generalizes.)