Is it possible to have a 10% version of pursuing a high-impact career? Instead of donating 10% of your income, you would donate a couple hours a week to high-impact volunteering. I’ve listed a couple opportunities here. In my opinion, many of these would count as a high-impact career if you did full-time.
Or in-person/remote volunteering for a university EA group, to help with managing Airtable, handling operations, designing events, facilitating discussions, etc. Although I don’t know that any local EA groups currently accept remote volunteers, from my experience with running EA at Georgia Tech, I know we’d really benefit from one!
If you’re quite knowledgeable about EA/longtermism and like talking to people about EA, being something like an EA Guides Program mentor could be a great option. One-on-one chats can be quite helpful for enabling people to develop better plans for making an impact throughout their life. I don’t know the Global Challenges Project is looking for more mentors for its EA Guides Program at this time, but it would be valuable if it had a greater capacity.
Facilitating for EA programs that are constrained by the number of (good) facilitators. In Q1 2022, this included the AGI Safety Fundamentals technical alignment and governance tracks. (Edit) EA Virtual Programs is also constrained by the number of facilitators.
Signing up as a personal assistant for Pineapple Operations (assuming this is constrained by the number of PAs, though I have no idea whether it is)
Gaining experience that would be helpful for pursuing a high-impact career (e.g., by taking a MOOC on deep learning to test your fit for machine learning work for AI safety)
Volunteering for Apart Research’s AI safety or meta AI safety projects
Volunteering for projects from Impact CoLabs, perhaps
Running a workplace EA group, especially if you’re able to foster discussion about working on pressing problems
Part-time volunteering might nprovide as much of an opportunity to build unique skills, compared to working full-time on direct work, but I think it could still be pretty valuable depending on what you do.
In a way, sacrificing your time might be more demanding than sacrificing your excess income. But volunteering can help you feel more connected to the community and feel more fulfilling than just donating money as an individual. It might not even be a sacrifice as for some opportunities, you could get paid, either directly (as in the case of Pineapple Operations) or through applying to the EA Infrastructure Fund or Long-Term Future Fund.
I expect 10 people donating 10% of their time to be less effective than 1 person using 100% of their time because you don’t get to reap the benefits of learning for the 10% people. Example: if people work for 40 years, then 10 people donating 10% of their time gives you 10 years with 0 experience, 10 with 1 year, 10 with 2 years, and 10 with 3 years; however, if someone is doing EA work full-time, you get 1 year with 0 exp, 1 with 1, 1 with 2, etc. I expect 1 year with 20 years of experience to plausibly be as good/useful as 10 with 3 years of experience. Caveats to the simple model:
labor-years might be more valuable during the present
if you’re volunteering for a thing that is similar to what you spend the other 90% of your time doing, then you still get better at the thing you’re volunteering for
I expect 10 people donating 10% of their time to be less effective than 1 person using 100% of their time because you don’t get to reap the benefits of learning for the 10% people [emphasize mine]
“benefits of learning” doesn’t feel like the only reason, or even the primary reason, why I expect full-time EA work to be much more impactful than part-time EA work, controlling for individual factors. To me, network/coordination costs seem much higher. E.g. it’s very hard to manage a team of volunteer researchers or run an org where people volunteer 4h/week on average, and presumably less consistently.
My bad, I meant to write “Part-time volunteering might not provide as much of an opportunity to build unique skills, compared to working full-time on direct work”. Fixed.
I think in most cases, this doesn’t look like using 10% of your time, but rather trading off the an optimally effective career for a less effective career with that improves along selfish dimensions such as salary, location, work/life balance, personal engagement, etc.
This picture is complicated by the fact that many of these characteristics are not independent from effectiveness, so it isn’t clean. Personal fit for a career is a good example of this because it’s both selfish and you’ll be better at your job if you find a career with relative better fit.
Is it possible to have a 10% version of pursuing a high-impact career? Instead of donating 10% of your income, you would donate a couple hours a week to high-impact volunteering. I’ve listed a couple opportunities here. In my opinion, many of these would count as a high-impact career if you did full-time.
Organizing a local EA group
Or in-person/remote volunteering for a university EA group, to help with managing Airtable, handling operations, designing events, facilitating discussions, etc. Although I don’t know that any local EA groups currently accept remote volunteers, from my experience with running EA at Georgia Tech, I know we’d really benefit from one!
If you’re quite knowledgeable about EA/longtermism and like talking to people about EA, being something like an EA Guides Program mentor could be a great option. One-on-one chats can be quite helpful for enabling people to develop better plans for making an impact throughout their life. I don’t know the Global Challenges Project is looking for more mentors for its EA Guides Program at this time, but it would be valuable if it had a greater capacity.
Facilitating for EA programs that are constrained by the number of (good) facilitators. In Q1 2022, this included the AGI Safety Fundamentals technical alignment and governance tracks. (Edit) EA Virtual Programs is also constrained by the number of facilitators.
Signing up as a personal assistant for Pineapple Operations (assuming this is constrained by the number of PAs, though I have no idea whether it is)
Phone banking for Carrick Flynn’s campaign (though this opportunity is only available through May 17)
Gaining experience that would be helpful for pursuing a high-impact career (e.g., by taking a MOOC on deep learning to test your fit for machine learning work for AI safety)
Distilling AI safety articles
Volunteering for Apart Research’s AI safety or meta AI safety projects
Volunteering for projects from Impact CoLabs, perhaps
Running a workplace EA group, especially if you’re able to foster discussion about working on pressing problems
Part-time volunteering might nprovide as much of an opportunity to build unique skills, compared to working full-time on direct work, but I think it could still be pretty valuable depending on what you do.
In a way, sacrificing your time might be more demanding than sacrificing your excess income. But volunteering can help you feel more connected to the community and feel more fulfilling than just donating money as an individual. It might not even be a sacrifice as for some opportunities, you could get paid, either directly (as in the case of Pineapple Operations) or through applying to the EA Infrastructure Fund or Long-Term Future Fund.
I expect 10 people donating 10% of their time to be less effective than 1 person using 100% of their time because you don’t get to reap the benefits of learning for the 10% people. Example: if people work for 40 years, then 10 people donating 10% of their time gives you 10 years with 0 experience, 10 with 1 year, 10 with 2 years, and 10 with 3 years; however, if someone is doing EA work full-time, you get 1 year with 0 exp, 1 with 1, 1 with 2, etc. I expect 1 year with 20 years of experience to plausibly be as good/useful as 10 with 3 years of experience. Caveats to the simple model:
labor-years might be more valuable during the present
if you’re volunteering for a thing that is similar to what you spend the other 90% of your time doing, then you still get better at the thing you’re volunteering for
I make a similar argument here.
“benefits of learning” doesn’t feel like the only reason, or even the primary reason, why I expect full-time EA work to be much more impactful than part-time EA work, controlling for individual factors. To me, network/coordination costs seem much higher. E.g. it’s very hard to manage a team of volunteer researchers or run an org where people volunteer 4h/week on average, and presumably less consistently.
My bad, I meant to write “Part-time volunteering might not provide as much of an opportunity to build unique skills, compared to working full-time on direct work”. Fixed.
I think in most cases, this doesn’t look like using 10% of your time, but rather trading off the an optimally effective career for a less effective career with that improves along selfish dimensions such as salary, location, work/life balance, personal engagement, etc.
This picture is complicated by the fact that many of these characteristics are not independent from effectiveness, so it isn’t clean. Personal fit for a career is a good example of this because it’s both selfish and you’ll be better at your job if you find a career with relative better fit.
It is.
Related: Scalaby using labour tag and the concept of Task Y