Very interesting report. It provided a lot of visibility into how these funders think.
Geographically, India may be a standout opportunity for getting talent to do research/direct work in a counterfactually cheap way.
I would have embraced that more in the past, but I’m a lot more skeptical of this these days and I think that if it were possible then it would have worked out. For many tasks, EA wants the best talent that is available. Top talent is best able to access overseas opportunities and so the price is largely independent of current location.
In terms of age prioritization, it is suboptimal that EA focuses more on outreach to university students or young professionals as opposed to mid-career people with greater expertise and experience.
I agree that there is a lot of alpha in reaching out to mid-career professionals—if you are able to successfully achieve this. This work is a lot more challenging—mid-career professionals are often harder to reach, less able to pivot and have less time available to upskill. Less people are able to do this kind of outreach because these professionals may take current students or recent grads less seriously. So for a lot of potential movement builders, focusing on students or young professionals is a solid play because it is the best combination of impact and personal fit.
The report writes “80,000 Hours in particular, has been singled out for its work not having a clear positive impact, despite the enormous sums they have spent.
As an on-the-ground community builder, I’m skeptical of your take. So many people that I’ve talked to became interested in EA or AI safety through 80,000 Hours. Regarding: “misleading the community that it is cause neutral while being almost exclusively focused on AI risk”, I was more concerned about this in the past, but I feel that they’re handling this pretty well these days. Would be quite interested to hear if you had specific ways you thought they should change. Regarding, causing early career EA’s to choose suboptimal early career jobs that mess up their CVs, I’d love to hear more detail on this if you can. Has anyone written up a post on this?
On funding Rethink Priorities specifically – a view floated is that there is value in RP as a check on OP, and yet if OP doesn’t think RP is worth funding beyond a certain point, it’s hard to gainsay them
Rethink Priorities seems to be a fairly big org—especially taking into account that it operates on the meta-level—so I understand why OpenPhil might be reluctant to spend even more money there. I suspect that there’s a feeling that even if they are doing good work, that meta work should only be a certain portion of their budge. I wouldn’t take that as a strong signal.
In practice, it’s unclear if the community building actually translates to money/talent moved, as opposed to getting people into EA socially.
As someone on the ground, I can say that community building has translated to talent moved at the very least. Money moved is less visible to me because a lot of people aren’t shouting about the pledges from the rooftops, plus the fact that donations are very heavy-tailed. Would love to hear some thoughtful discussion of how this could be better measured.
What would interest OP might be a project about getting in more people who are doing the best things in GHW (e.g. Buddy Shah, Eirik Mofoss).
Very curious about what impressed Open Philanthropy about these people since I’m not familiar with their work. Would be keen to learn more though!
(1) With respect to prioritize India/developing country talent, it probably depends on the type of work (e.g. direct work in GHD/AW suffers less for this), but in any case, the pool of talent is big, and the cost savings are substantial, so it might be reasonably to go this route regardless.
(2) Agreed that it’s challenging, but I guess it’s a chicken vs egg problem—we probably have to start somewhere (e.g. HIP etc does good work in the space, we understand).
(3) For 80k, see my discussion with Arden above—AGB’s views are also reasonably close to my own.
(4) On Rethink—to be fair, our next statement after that sentence is “This objection holds less water if one is disinclined to accept OP’s judgement as final.” I think OP’s moral weights work, especially, is very valuable.
(5) There’s a huge challenge over valuing talent, especially early career talent (especially if you consider the counterfactual being earning to give at a normal job). One useful heuristic is: Would the typical EA organization prefer an additional 5k in donations (from an early career EA giving 10% of their income annually) or 10 additional job applications to a role? My sense from talking to organizations in the space is that (a) the smaller orgs are far more funding constrained, so prefer the former, and (b) the bigger orgs are more agnostic, because funding is less a challenge but also there is a lot of demand for their jobs anyway.
(6) I can’t speak for OP specifically, but I (and others in the GHD policy space I’ve spoken to) think that Eirik is great. And generally, in GHD, the highest impact work is convincing governments to change the way they do things, and you can’t really do that without positions of influence.
For 1: A lot of global health and development is much less talent-hungry than animal welfare work or x-risk work. Take for example the Against Malaria Foundation. They receive hundreds of millions of dollars, but they only have a core team of 13. Sure you need a bunch of people to hand out bed nets, but the requirements for that aren’t that tight and sure you need some managers, but lots of people are capable of handling this kind of logistics, you don’t really have to headhunt them. I suppose this could change if there was more of a pivot into policy where talent really matters. However, in that case, you would probably want people from the country whose policy you want to influence, moreso then thinking about cost.
For 5: It’s not clear to me that the way you’re thinking about this makes sense to me. If you’re asking about the trade-off between direct work and donations, it seems as though we should ask about $5k from the job vs. a new candidate who is better than your current candidate as, in a lot of circumstances, they will have the option of doing earn to give so long as they don’t take an EA job (I suppose there is the additional factor of how much chasing EA jobs detracts from chasing earn to give jobs).
1) It agree that policy talent is important but comparatively scarce, even in GHD. It’s the biggest bottleneck that Charity Entrepreneurship is facing on incubating GHD policy organizations right now, unfortunately.
5) I don’t think it’s safe to assume that the new candidate is better than your current candidate? While I agree that’s fine for dedicated talent pipeline programmes, I’m not confident of making this assumption for general community building, is by its nature less targeted and typically more university/early-career oriented.
I apologize if we’re talking at cross purposes, but the original idea I was trying to get across is that when valuing additional talent from community building, there is the opportunity cost of a non-EA career where you just give. So basically you’re comparing (a) the value of money from that earning to give vs (b) the value of the same individual trying for various EA jobs.
The complication is that (i) the uncertainty of the individual really following through on the intention to earn to give (or going into an impactful career) applies to both branches; however, (ii) the uncertainty of success only applies to (b). If they really try to earn to give they can trivially succeed (e.g. give 10% of the average American salary—so maybe $5k, ignoring adjustments for lower salaries for younger individual and higher salaries for typically elite educated EAs). However, if they apply to a bunch of EA jobs, the aren’t necessarily going to succeed (i.e. they aren’t necessary going to be better than the counterfactual hire). So ultimately we’re comparing the value an additional $5k annual donation vs additional ~10 applications of average quality to various organizations (depends on how many organizations an application will apply to per annum—very uncertain).
I also can’t speak with certainty as to how organizations will choose, but my sense is that (a) smaller EA organizations are funding constrained and would prefer getting the money; while (b) larger EA organizations are more agnostic because they have both more money and the privilege of getting the pick of the crop for talent (c.f. high demand for GiveWell/OP jobs).
Okay, I guess parts of that framework make a bit more sense now that you’ve explained it.
At the same time, it feels that people can always decide to earn to give if they fail to land an EA-relevant gig, so I’m not sure why you’re modeling it as a $5k annual donation vs. a one-time $5k donation for someone spending a year focusing on upskilling for EA roles. Maybe you could add an extra factor for the slowdown in their career advancement, but $50k extra per year is unrealistic.
I think it’s also worth considering that there are selection effects here. So insofar as EA promotes direct work, people with higher odds of being successful in landing a direct work position are more likely to pursue that and people with better earn-to-give potential are less likely to take the advice.
Additionally, I wonder whether the orgs you surveyed understood ten additional applications as ten additional average applications or ten additional applications from EA’s (more educated and valued-aligned than the general population) who were dedicated enough to actually follow through on earning to give.
I think you’re right in pointing out the limitations of the toy model, and I strongly agree that the trade-off is not as stark as it seems—it’s more realistic that we model it aa a delay from applying to EA jobs before settling for a non EA job (and that this wont be like a year or anything)
However, I do worry that the focus on direct work means people generally neglect donations as a path to impact and so the practical impact of deciding to go for an EA career is that people decide not to give. An unpleasant surprise I got from talking to HIP and others in the space is that the majority of EAs probably don’t actually give. Maybe it’s the EA boomer in me speaking, but it’s a fairly different culture compared to 10+ years ago where being EA meant you bought into the drowning child arguments and gave 10% or more to whatever cause you thought most important
Very interesting report. It provided a lot of visibility into how these funders think.
I would have embraced that more in the past, but I’m a lot more skeptical of this these days and I think that if it were possible then it would have worked out. For many tasks, EA wants the best talent that is available. Top talent is best able to access overseas opportunities and so the price is largely independent of current location.
I agree that there is a lot of alpha in reaching out to mid-career professionals—if you are able to successfully achieve this. This work is a lot more challenging—mid-career professionals are often harder to reach, less able to pivot and have less time available to upskill. Less people are able to do this kind of outreach because these professionals may take current students or recent grads less seriously. So for a lot of potential movement builders, focusing on students or young professionals is a solid play because it is the best combination of impact and personal fit.
As an on-the-ground community builder, I’m skeptical of your take. So many people that I’ve talked to became interested in EA or AI safety through 80,000 Hours. Regarding: “misleading the community that it is cause neutral while being almost exclusively focused on AI risk”, I was more concerned about this in the past, but I feel that they’re handling this pretty well these days. Would be quite interested to hear if you had specific ways you thought they should change. Regarding, causing early career EA’s to choose suboptimal early career jobs that mess up their CVs, I’d love to hear more detail on this if you can. Has anyone written up a post on this?
Rethink Priorities seems to be a fairly big org—especially taking into account that it operates on the meta-level—so I understand why OpenPhil might be reluctant to spend even more money there. I suspect that there’s a feeling that even if they are doing good work, that meta work should only be a certain portion of their budge. I wouldn’t take that as a strong signal.
As someone on the ground, I can say that community building has translated to talent moved at the very least. Money moved is less visible to me because a lot of people aren’t shouting about the pledges from the rooftops, plus the fact that donations are very heavy-tailed. Would love to hear some thoughtful discussion of how this could be better measured.
Very curious about what impressed Open Philanthropy about these people since I’m not familiar with their work. Would be keen to learn more though!
Hi Chris,
Just to respond to the points you raised
(1) With respect to prioritize India/developing country talent, it probably depends on the type of work (e.g. direct work in GHD/AW suffers less for this), but in any case, the pool of talent is big, and the cost savings are substantial, so it might be reasonably to go this route regardless.
(2) Agreed that it’s challenging, but I guess it’s a chicken vs egg problem—we probably have to start somewhere (e.g. HIP etc does good work in the space, we understand).
(3) For 80k, see my discussion with Arden above—AGB’s views are also reasonably close to my own.
(4) On Rethink—to be fair, our next statement after that sentence is “This objection holds less water if one is disinclined to accept OP’s judgement as final.” I think OP’s moral weights work, especially, is very valuable.
(5) There’s a huge challenge over valuing talent, especially early career talent (especially if you consider the counterfactual being earning to give at a normal job). One useful heuristic is: Would the typical EA organization prefer an additional 5k in donations (from an early career EA giving 10% of their income annually) or 10 additional job applications to a role? My sense from talking to organizations in the space is that (a) the smaller orgs are far more funding constrained, so prefer the former, and (b) the bigger orgs are more agnostic, because funding is less a challenge but also there is a lot of demand for their jobs anyway.
(6) I can’t speak for OP specifically, but I (and others in the GHD policy space I’ve spoken to) think that Eirik is great. And generally, in GHD, the highest impact work is convincing governments to change the way they do things, and you can’t really do that without positions of influence.
For 1: A lot of global health and development is much less talent-hungry than animal welfare work or x-risk work. Take for example the Against Malaria Foundation. They receive hundreds of millions of dollars, but they only have a core team of 13. Sure you need a bunch of people to hand out bed nets, but the requirements for that aren’t that tight and sure you need some managers, but lots of people are capable of handling this kind of logistics, you don’t really have to headhunt them. I suppose this could change if there was more of a pivot into policy where talent really matters. However, in that case, you would probably want people from the country whose policy you want to influence, moreso then thinking about cost.
For 5: It’s not clear to me that the way you’re thinking about this makes sense to me. If you’re asking about the trade-off between direct work and donations, it seems as though we should ask about $5k from the job vs. a new candidate who is better than your current candidate as, in a lot of circumstances, they will have the option of doing earn to give so long as they don’t take an EA job (I suppose there is the additional factor of how much chasing EA jobs detracts from chasing earn to give jobs).
1) It agree that policy talent is important but comparatively scarce, even in GHD. It’s the biggest bottleneck that Charity Entrepreneurship is facing on incubating GHD policy organizations right now, unfortunately.
5) I don’t think it’s safe to assume that the new candidate is better than your current candidate? While I agree that’s fine for dedicated talent pipeline programmes, I’m not confident of making this assumption for general community building, is by its nature less targeted and typically more university/early-career oriented.
My point was that presumably the org thinks they’re better if they decide to hire them as opposed to the next best person.
I apologize if we’re talking at cross purposes, but the original idea I was trying to get across is that when valuing additional talent from community building, there is the opportunity cost of a non-EA career where you just give. So basically you’re comparing (a) the value of money from that earning to give vs (b) the value of the same individual trying for various EA jobs.
The complication is that (i) the uncertainty of the individual really following through on the intention to earn to give (or going into an impactful career) applies to both branches; however, (ii) the uncertainty of success only applies to (b). If they really try to earn to give they can trivially succeed (e.g. give 10% of the average American salary—so maybe $5k, ignoring adjustments for lower salaries for younger individual and higher salaries for typically elite educated EAs). However, if they apply to a bunch of EA jobs, the aren’t necessarily going to succeed (i.e. they aren’t necessary going to be better than the counterfactual hire). So ultimately we’re comparing the value an additional $5k annual donation vs additional ~10 applications of average quality to various organizations (depends on how many organizations an application will apply to per annum—very uncertain).
I also can’t speak with certainty as to how organizations will choose, but my sense is that (a) smaller EA organizations are funding constrained and would prefer getting the money; while (b) larger EA organizations are more agnostic because they have both more money and the privilege of getting the pick of the crop for talent (c.f. high demand for GiveWell/OP jobs).
Okay, I guess parts of that framework make a bit more sense now that you’ve explained it.
At the same time, it feels that people can always decide to earn to give if they fail to land an EA-relevant gig, so I’m not sure why you’re modeling it as a $5k annual donation vs. a one-time $5k donation for someone spending a year focusing on upskilling for EA roles. Maybe you could add an extra factor for the slowdown in their career advancement, but $50k extra per year is unrealistic.
I think it’s also worth considering that there are selection effects here. So insofar as EA promotes direct work, people with higher odds of being successful in landing a direct work position are more likely to pursue that and people with better earn-to-give potential are less likely to take the advice.
Additionally, I wonder whether the orgs you surveyed understood ten additional applications as ten additional average applications or ten additional applications from EA’s (more educated and valued-aligned than the general population) who were dedicated enough to actually follow through on earning to give.
I think you’re right in pointing out the limitations of the toy model, and I strongly agree that the trade-off is not as stark as it seems—it’s more realistic that we model it aa a delay from applying to EA jobs before settling for a non EA job (and that this wont be like a year or anything)
However, I do worry that the focus on direct work means people generally neglect donations as a path to impact and so the practical impact of deciding to go for an EA career is that people decide not to give. An unpleasant surprise I got from talking to HIP and others in the space is that the majority of EAs probably don’t actually give. Maybe it’s the EA boomer in me speaking, but it’s a fairly different culture compared to 10+ years ago where being EA meant you bought into the drowning child arguments and gave 10% or more to whatever cause you thought most important