Thanks for writing this up! I really appreciated how you describe the problem of the competitive hiring landscape within the EA community, and especially that you connected this to a potentially increased risk of value drift for community members who grow frustrated after not being hired by their preferred employers within the community. I agree that this presents a major challenge for the EA community as a whole and would like to see more proposed solutions.
Having said all that, I also have two quarrels with your proposed solutions:
First, the EAs in academia who are in the best positions to be able to ‘steer their fields’ in the future are probably the ones who need this type of advice the least, because they would seem to be in the best position to be hired within the EA community. Of course, if they are in such a special position within their academic field, it might be more impactful for them to stay in academia (depending on their field) regardless of whether they could get a job at an EA org.
Second, I have found it difficult to understand from your two points about local EA groups what you wish they would change about their strategy. You advise them to work on “creating a nice and welcoming environment, where members want to come back to in regular intervals for years”. However this seems like standard local group advice to me that most (all?) local groups aspire to implement anyway. (Note that this advice anyway does not really apply to EA university groups which by their very nature mostly attract students on a fairly short-term basis (~ 1-3 years).
I would be interested in your specific recommendations for how local groups could achieve this goal of long-term member engagement. Thanks!
Not the author but still tempted to reply as I was somewhat involved in the discussion leading to this post :)
Regarding your first point:
I somewhat disagree to your assessment of the situation. Most PhDs seem to don’t even try to steer any stream but simply try to get through their studies. Imho there is no harm in trying to inject new thoughts and ideas through a paper here and there and hope for other researchers to pick up on it.
For example, I am by no means in a special position in my field but wrote a small workshop paper about what my field could learn from EA and have send that around quite heavily and now I am in a collaboration working to make it into a conference and then a journal paper. Time investment so far was maybe a week of fun work. Still I am by no means a sure hire at any of the top EA orgs and have trouble getting funding from anything EA related.
All in all, I think that trying to leverage what you already have and can influence is undervalued compared to trying to “hitchhike” impact (that’s obviously “tongue-in-cheek”). A word one could use for this may be: micro-entrepreneurship.
Regarding your second point:
I guess you have a good point here, the post doesn’t really add much in the role of concrete advice to local groups but I also think that it doesn’t have to. Just highlighting that there is a connection between the role of local groups and what kind of careers we value is something which I haven’t seen much discussion about.
As you highlight student groups are a specific form of a local group which is quite common but doesn’t really respond to the needs outlined in the post. Thus, it would be interesting to start thinking about the systematic coordination of local groups in specific regions. Right now, it seems like groups are popping up and dwindeling along somewhat spontaneously. Some EA hotspots like Oxford, London, Boston, BayArea, etc. might be in a phase with more systematic networking and coordination going on but the vast majority of local groups is just starting to think about connecting and coordinating more systematically.
What I take away from this post is that this kind of regional coordination is important if we want to ensure motivation of EAs in the medium- and long-term. This perspective seems (at least based on personal experience) underdeveloped at the moment. Thus, I am quite happy about this post and your thoughtful engagement with it :)
When I was talking about academia I wasn’t imaging a student that is almost sure to steer a field, but more of a “regular” PhD student. For example I will be finishing a PhD in environmental science soonish. I think I am doing a good job there, but when I see who is applying for EA orgs it seems somewhat unlikely that I will get into one of the main EA orgs anytime soon (or ever^^). Therefore, trying to infuse EA ideas into the general discourse in my field might be one of the few things I can do while in academia.
Regarding what local groups could do, I am still a bit unsure what is the best approach (which is why I did not include it in the post). But a few ideas floating in my head are:
Creating more opportunities for people in local group become friends, as this ensures long time engagement:
Create additional events that are only meant for people to connect with each other
Push for more 1 on 1 talks in the group, so all people in the group know each other well
Using local groups as a support network:
Help each other finding meaningful jobs
Maybe even create something like a local group fund. So everyone in the group gives some money every month and when a member of the group needs financial leeway to create something EA related he/she can get money from that fund.
Creating a tighter network in your country:
Have more and longer coutry wide networking events
Basically all the things GEAN is trying to implement
Probably some of those ideas (or all?) are already included in the bigger EA groups. However, the smaller groups that I have met so far (in Germany) are not yet so sophisticated.
Thanks for writing this up! I really appreciated how you describe the problem of the competitive hiring landscape within the EA community, and especially that you connected this to a potentially increased risk of value drift for community members who grow frustrated after not being hired by their preferred employers within the community. I agree that this presents a major challenge for the EA community as a whole and would like to see more proposed solutions.
Having said all that, I also have two quarrels with your proposed solutions:
First, the EAs in academia who are in the best positions to be able to ‘steer their fields’ in the future are probably the ones who need this type of advice the least, because they would seem to be in the best position to be hired within the EA community. Of course, if they are in such a special position within their academic field, it might be more impactful for them to stay in academia (depending on their field) regardless of whether they could get a job at an EA org.
Second, I have found it difficult to understand from your two points about local EA groups what you wish they would change about their strategy. You advise them to work on “creating a nice and welcoming environment, where members want to come back to in regular intervals for years”. However this seems like standard local group advice to me that most (all?) local groups aspire to implement anyway. (Note that this advice anyway does not really apply to EA university groups which by their very nature mostly attract students on a fairly short-term basis (~ 1-3 years).
I would be interested in your specific recommendations for how local groups could achieve this goal of long-term member engagement. Thanks!
Not the author but still tempted to reply as I was somewhat involved in the discussion leading to this post :)
Regarding your first point:
I somewhat disagree to your assessment of the situation. Most PhDs seem to don’t even try to steer any stream but simply try to get through their studies. Imho there is no harm in trying to inject new thoughts and ideas through a paper here and there and hope for other researchers to pick up on it.
For example, I am by no means in a special position in my field but wrote a small workshop paper about what my field could learn from EA and have send that around quite heavily and now I am in a collaboration working to make it into a conference and then a journal paper. Time investment so far was maybe a week of fun work. Still I am by no means a sure hire at any of the top EA orgs and have trouble getting funding from anything EA related.
All in all, I think that trying to leverage what you already have and can influence is undervalued compared to trying to “hitchhike” impact (that’s obviously “tongue-in-cheek”). A word one could use for this may be: micro-entrepreneurship.
Regarding your second point:
I guess you have a good point here, the post doesn’t really add much in the role of concrete advice to local groups but I also think that it doesn’t have to. Just highlighting that there is a connection between the role of local groups and what kind of careers we value is something which I haven’t seen much discussion about.
As you highlight student groups are a specific form of a local group which is quite common but doesn’t really respond to the needs outlined in the post. Thus, it would be interesting to start thinking about the systematic coordination of local groups in specific regions. Right now, it seems like groups are popping up and dwindeling along somewhat spontaneously. Some EA hotspots like Oxford, London, Boston, BayArea, etc. might be in a phase with more systematic networking and coordination going on but the vast majority of local groups is just starting to think about connecting and coordinating more systematically.
What I take away from this post is that this kind of regional coordination is important if we want to ensure motivation of EAs in the medium- and long-term. This perspective seems (at least based on personal experience) underdeveloped at the moment. Thus, I am quite happy about this post and your thoughtful engagement with it :)
Thank you for the feedback.
When I was talking about academia I wasn’t imaging a student that is almost sure to steer a field, but more of a “regular” PhD student. For example I will be finishing a PhD in environmental science soonish. I think I am doing a good job there, but when I see who is applying for EA orgs it seems somewhat unlikely that I will get into one of the main EA orgs anytime soon (or ever^^). Therefore, trying to infuse EA ideas into the general discourse in my field might be one of the few things I can do while in academia.
Regarding what local groups could do, I am still a bit unsure what is the best approach (which is why I did not include it in the post). But a few ideas floating in my head are:
Creating more opportunities for people in local group become friends, as this ensures long time engagement:
Create additional events that are only meant for people to connect with each other
Push for more 1 on 1 talks in the group, so all people in the group know each other well
Using local groups as a support network:
Help each other finding meaningful jobs
Maybe even create something like a local group fund. So everyone in the group gives some money every month and when a member of the group needs financial leeway to create something EA related he/she can get money from that fund.
Creating a tighter network in your country:
Have more and longer coutry wide networking events
Basically all the things GEAN is trying to implement
Probably some of those ideas (or all?) are already included in the bigger EA groups. However, the smaller groups that I have met so far (in Germany) are not yet so sophisticated.