There was a lot of discussion in the early days of EA about replacement effects in jobs, and also about giving now vs giving later (for a taste of how much, see my list here, and Julia Weiss’ disjoint list here).
The latter debate is still fairly prominent now. But I think that arguments about replacement effects became largely redundant when we started considering the value of becoming excellent in high-leverage domains like altruistically-focused research (for which the number of jobs isn’t fixed like it is in, say, medicine).
One claim that I haven’t seen yet, though: that the debate about giving now vs giving later is redundant for similar reasons (albeit on a larger scale). In other words, the benefits of building up strong effectively altruistic communities with sound methodologies and proven track records seem much more important than any benefits of saving discussed so far, because if we do well then we’ll attract orders of magnitude more money later on (and if we don’t, then maybe we don’t deserve the money later on). Like in the debate about replacement effects, removing the assumption that certain factors are fixed (number of jobs and amount of money, respectively) transforms the way we should think about the problem.
I think that’s a good point, though I’ve heard it discussed a fair amount. One way of thinking about it is that ‘direct work’ also has movement building benefits. This makes the ideal fraction of direct work in the portfolio higher than it first seems.
I’m not sure. Unfortunately there’s a lot of things like this that aren’t yet written up. There might be some discussion of the movement building value of direct work in our podcast with Phil Trammell.
I see. Yeah, Phil and Rob do discuss it, but focused on movement-building via fundraising/recruitment/advocacy/etc, rather than via publicly doing amazing direct work. Perhaps they were implicitly thinking about the latter as well, though. But I suspect the choice of examples shapes people’s impression of the argument pretty significantly.
E.g. when it comes to your individual career, you’ll think of “investing in yourself” very differently if the central examples are attending training programs and going to university, versus if the central example is trying to do more excellent and eye-catching work.
Agree. I’ve definitely heard the other point though—it’s a common concern with 80k among donors (e.g. maybe ‘concrete problems in AI safety’ does far more to get people into the field than an explicit movement building org ever would). Not sure where to find a write up!
There was a lot of discussion in the early days of EA about replacement effects in jobs, and also about giving now vs giving later (for a taste of how much, see my list here, and Julia Weiss’ disjoint list here).
The latter debate is still fairly prominent now. But I think that arguments about replacement effects became largely redundant when we started considering the value of becoming excellent in high-leverage domains like altruistically-focused research (for which the number of jobs isn’t fixed like it is in, say, medicine).
One claim that I haven’t seen yet, though: that the debate about giving now vs giving later is redundant for similar reasons (albeit on a larger scale). In other words, the benefits of building up strong effectively altruistic communities with sound methodologies and proven track records seem much more important than any benefits of saving discussed so far, because if we do well then we’ll attract orders of magnitude more money later on (and if we don’t, then maybe we don’t deserve the money later on). Like in the debate about replacement effects, removing the assumption that certain factors are fixed (number of jobs and amount of money, respectively) transforms the way we should think about the problem.
I think that’s a good point, though I’ve heard it discussed a fair amount. One way of thinking about it is that ‘direct work’ also has movement building benefits. This makes the ideal fraction of direct work in the portfolio higher than it first seems.
Cool, good to know. Any pointers to places where people have made this argument at more length?
I’m not sure. Unfortunately there’s a lot of things like this that aren’t yet written up. There might be some discussion of the movement building value of direct work in our podcast with Phil Trammell.
I see. Yeah, Phil and Rob do discuss it, but focused on movement-building via fundraising/recruitment/advocacy/etc, rather than via publicly doing amazing direct work. Perhaps they were implicitly thinking about the latter as well, though. But I suspect the choice of examples shapes people’s impression of the argument pretty significantly.
E.g. when it comes to your individual career, you’ll think of “investing in yourself” very differently if the central examples are attending training programs and going to university, versus if the central example is trying to do more excellent and eye-catching work.
Agree. I’ve definitely heard the other point though—it’s a common concern with 80k among donors (e.g. maybe ‘concrete problems in AI safety’ does far more to get people into the field than an explicit movement building org ever would). Not sure where to find a write up!
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I think most of the 80,000 hours priority career paths qualify, as well as work on the other problem areas which seem important to them.