Hypothesis: there’s lots of good, informal meta work to be done, like telling convincing your aunt to donate to GiveWell rather than Heiffer International or your company to do a cash fundraiser rather than a canned food drive. But the marginal returns diminish real quickly: once you’ve convinced all the relatives that are amenable, it is really hard to convince the holdouts or find new relatives. But the remaining work isn’t just lower expected value, it has much slower, more ambiguous feedback loops, so it’s easy to miss the transition.
Object level work is hard, and there are few opportunities to do it part time. Part time meta work is easy to find and sometimes very high value. My hypothesis is that when people think about doing direct work full time, these facts conspire to make meta work the default choice. In fact full time meta work is the most difficult thing, because of poor feedback loops, and the easiest to be actively harmful with, because you risk damaging the reputation of EA or charity as a whole.
I think we need to flip the default so that people look to object work, not meta, when they have exhausted their personal low hanging fruit.
My hypothesis is that when people think about doing direct work full time, these facts conspire to make meta work the default choice.
I’m confused about what you mean by the “default”. Do you mean the default career choice?
My impression was that most people don’t even do their personal low hanging fruit because of the social awkwardness around it. What sorts of things do you think people do after exhausting their personal low hanging fruit?
If you mean that the default choice is to work at a meta organization, that seems unlikely—most meta organizations are small, and it’s my impression that CEA often has trouble filling positions. According to the annual survey, 512 people said they were going to earn to give, while only 190 people said “direct charity/non-profit work”, and only a portion of those would be at meta organizations. So it seems like earning to give is the default choice.
In fact full time meta work is the most difficult thing, because of poor feedback loops
The feedback loops don’t seem poor to me. If you’re trying to do outreach, you can see exactly how your techniques are working based on how many people you get interested and how interested they are and what they go on to do.
and the easiest to be actively harmful with, because you risk damaging the reputation of EA or charity as a whole.
If you’re working in animal welfare, you could turn off a lot of people (“those preachy vegans, they’re all crazy”), harming animals. If you’re working in x-risk, there can often be the chance that you actually increase x-risk (for example, you show how to have some basic AI safety features, and then people think the safety problem is solved and build an AGI with those safety features which turns out not to be enough). Even in global poverty, we have stories like PlayPump, though in theory we should be able to avoid that.
If you include long-run far future effects there are tons of arguments that action X could actually be net negative.
Hypothesis: there’s lots of good, informal meta work to be done, like telling convincing your aunt to donate to GiveWell rather than Heiffer International or your company to do a cash fundraiser rather than a canned food drive. But the marginal returns diminish real quickly: once you’ve convinced all the relatives that are amenable, it is really hard to convince the holdouts or find new relatives. But the remaining work isn’t just lower expected value, it has much slower, more ambiguous feedback loops, so it’s easy to miss the transition.
Object level work is hard, and there are few opportunities to do it part time. Part time meta work is easy to find and sometimes very high value. My hypothesis is that when people think about doing direct work full time, these facts conspire to make meta work the default choice. In fact full time meta work is the most difficult thing, because of poor feedback loops, and the easiest to be actively harmful with, because you risk damaging the reputation of EA or charity as a whole.
I think we need to flip the default so that people look to object work, not meta, when they have exhausted their personal low hanging fruit.
I’m confused about what you mean by the “default”. Do you mean the default career choice?
My impression was that most people don’t even do their personal low hanging fruit because of the social awkwardness around it. What sorts of things do you think people do after exhausting their personal low hanging fruit?
If you mean that the default choice is to work at a meta organization, that seems unlikely—most meta organizations are small, and it’s my impression that CEA often has trouble filling positions. According to the annual survey, 512 people said they were going to earn to give, while only 190 people said “direct charity/non-profit work”, and only a portion of those would be at meta organizations. So it seems like earning to give is the default choice.
The feedback loops don’t seem poor to me. If you’re trying to do outreach, you can see exactly how your techniques are working based on how many people you get interested and how interested they are and what they go on to do.
If you’re working in animal welfare, you could turn off a lot of people (“those preachy vegans, they’re all crazy”), harming animals. If you’re working in x-risk, there can often be the chance that you actually increase x-risk (for example, you show how to have some basic AI safety features, and then people think the safety problem is solved and build an AGI with those safety features which turns out not to be enough). Even in global poverty, we have stories like PlayPump, though in theory we should be able to avoid that.
If you include long-run far future effects there are tons of arguments that action X could actually be net negative.