Thanks, this post is interesting. I’ve often experienced the frustration that EA seems to really emphasise the importance of cause prioritisation, but also that the resources for how to actually do it are pretty sparse. I’ve also fallen into the trap of ‘apply for any EA job, it doesn’t matter which’, and have recently been thinking that this was a mistake and that I should invest more time in personal cause prioritization, including more strongly considering causes that EAs don’t tend to prioritize, but that I think are important.
I think the idea of ‘heavy-tailedness’ can be overused. I’d need to look more into the links to thoroughly discuss this, but a few points:
(1) By definition, not everyone can be in the heavy tail. Therefore, while it might be true that some job opportunities that exist are orders-of-magnitude more impactful than my current job, it’s less clear to me that those opportunities aren’t already taken.
Concretely, a job at AMF is orders-of-magnitude more impactful than most jobs, but they’re not hiring afaik, and even if they were, they might not hire me.
And you might say ’ok, well, but that’s a failure of imagination if you only think that roles at famous EA orgs are super high impact—maybe you should be an entrepreneur, or...‘
But my point is… it seems like by definition, not everyone can have exceptional impact/be in the heavy tail.
(2) As an EA, I shouldn’t care about whether I personally am in an unusually-high-impact role, but that the best-suited person does it, by which I mean ‘the person who is most competent at this job but who also wouldn’t do some other, more impactful job, even more competently’. So maybe some EAs take a view like ‘well, I’m not sure exactly which EA jobs are the most impactful, but I’ll just contribute to the EA ecosystem which supports whichever people end up with those super-impactful roles’.
Thanks for the thoughtful comment Amber! I appreciate the honesty in saying both that you think people should think more about prioritisation and that you haven’t always yourself. I have definitely been like this at times and I think it is good/important to be able to say both statements together. I would be happy/interested to talk through your thinking about prioritisation if you wanted. I have some other accounts of people finding me helpful to talk to about that kind of thing as it happens frequently in my community building work.
Re. (1), I agree that not everyone can be in the heavy tail of the community distribution, but I don’t think there’s strong reasons to think that people can’t reach their “personal heavy tail” of their career options as per the graph. Ie. they might not all be able to have exceptional impact on a scale relative to the world/EA population, but they can have exceptional impact relative to different counterfactuals of them, and I think that is something still worth striving for.
For (1) and (2), I guess my model of the job market/impact opportunities is less static than I think your phrasing suggests you think about it. I don’t think I conceive of impact opportunities as being a fixed number of “impactful” jobs at EA orgs that we need to fill, and I think you often don’t need to be super “entrepreneurial” per your words to look beyond this. Perhaps ironically, I think your work is a great example of this (from what I understand). You use your particular writing skills to help other EAs in a way that could plausibly be very impactful, and this isn’t necessarily a niche that would have been filled if you hadn’t taken it. It seems like there are also lots of other career paths (eg. journalism, politics, earn to give etc) which have impact potential probably higher for many people than typical EA orgs, but aren’t necessarily represented in viewing things the way I perceived you to be. Of course there are also different “levels” of being entrepreneurial too which mean you aren’t really directly substituting for someone else even if you aren’t founding your own organisation (such as deciding on a new research agenda, taking a team in a new direction etc).
I think you might have already captured a lot of this with your “failure of imagination...” sentence, but I do think that what I am saying implies that people are capable of finding their path such that they can reach their impact potential. Perhaps some people will be the very best for particular “EA org” jobs, but that doesn’t mean others can’t make very impactful career paths for themselves. I agree that in some cases this might look like contributing to the EA ecosystem and using particular skills to be a multiplier on others doing work you think is really important, but I don’t think it is a binary between this and working in a key role at an “EA org”.
Thanks, this post is interesting. I’ve often experienced the frustration that EA seems to really emphasise the importance of cause prioritisation, but also that the resources for how to actually do it are pretty sparse. I’ve also fallen into the trap of ‘apply for any EA job, it doesn’t matter which’, and have recently been thinking that this was a mistake and that I should invest more time in personal cause prioritization, including more strongly considering causes that EAs don’t tend to prioritize, but that I think are important.
I think the idea of ‘heavy-tailedness’ can be overused. I’d need to look more into the links to thoroughly discuss this, but a few points:
(1) By definition, not everyone can be in the heavy tail. Therefore, while it might be true that some job opportunities that exist are orders-of-magnitude more impactful than my current job, it’s less clear to me that those opportunities aren’t already taken.
Concretely, a job at AMF is orders-of-magnitude more impactful than most jobs, but they’re not hiring afaik, and even if they were, they might not hire me.
And you might say ’ok, well, but that’s a failure of imagination if you only think that roles at famous EA orgs are super high impact—maybe you should be an entrepreneur, or...‘
But my point is… it seems like by definition, not everyone can have exceptional impact/be in the heavy tail.
(2) As an EA, I shouldn’t care about whether I personally am in an unusually-high-impact role, but that the best-suited person does it, by which I mean ‘the person who is most competent at this job but who also wouldn’t do some other, more impactful job, even more competently’. So maybe some EAs take a view like ‘well, I’m not sure exactly which EA jobs are the most impactful, but I’ll just contribute to the EA ecosystem which supports whichever people end up with those super-impactful roles’.
Thanks for the thoughtful comment Amber! I appreciate the honesty in saying both that you think people should think more about prioritisation and that you haven’t always yourself. I have definitely been like this at times and I think it is good/important to be able to say both statements together. I would be happy/interested to talk through your thinking about prioritisation if you wanted. I have some other accounts of people finding me helpful to talk to about that kind of thing as it happens frequently in my community building work.
Re. (1), I agree that not everyone can be in the heavy tail of the community distribution, but I don’t think there’s strong reasons to think that people can’t reach their “personal heavy tail” of their career options as per the graph. Ie. they might not all be able to have exceptional impact on a scale relative to the world/EA population, but they can have exceptional impact relative to different counterfactuals of them, and I think that is something still worth striving for.
For (1) and (2), I guess my model of the job market/impact opportunities is less static than I think your phrasing suggests you think about it. I don’t think I conceive of impact opportunities as being a fixed number of “impactful” jobs at EA orgs that we need to fill, and I think you often don’t need to be super “entrepreneurial” per your words to look beyond this. Perhaps ironically, I think your work is a great example of this (from what I understand). You use your particular writing skills to help other EAs in a way that could plausibly be very impactful, and this isn’t necessarily a niche that would have been filled if you hadn’t taken it. It seems like there are also lots of other career paths (eg. journalism, politics, earn to give etc) which have impact potential probably higher for many people than typical EA orgs, but aren’t necessarily represented in viewing things the way I perceived you to be. Of course there are also different “levels” of being entrepreneurial too which mean you aren’t really directly substituting for someone else even if you aren’t founding your own organisation (such as deciding on a new research agenda, taking a team in a new direction etc).
I think you might have already captured a lot of this with your “failure of imagination...” sentence, but I do think that what I am saying implies that people are capable of finding their path such that they can reach their impact potential. Perhaps some people will be the very best for particular “EA org” jobs, but that doesn’t mean others can’t make very impactful career paths for themselves. I agree that in some cases this might look like contributing to the EA ecosystem and using particular skills to be a multiplier on others doing work you think is really important, but I don’t think it is a binary between this and working in a key role at an “EA org”.