the primary constraint has shifted from money to people
This seems like an incorrect or at best misleading description of the situation. EA plausibly now has more money than it knows what to do with (at least if you want to do better than GiveDirectly) but it also has more people than it knows what to do with. Exactly what the primary constraint is now is hard to know confidently or summarise succinctly, but it’s pretty clearly neither of those. (80k discusses some of the issues with a “people-constrained” framing here.) In general large-scale problems that can be solved by just throwing money or throwing people at them are the exception and not the rule.
For some cause areas the constraint is plausibly direct workers with some particular set of capabilities. But even most people who want to dedicate their careers to EA could not become effective e.g. AI safety researchers no matter how hard they tried. Indeed merely trying may be negative impact in the typical case due to opportunity cost of interviewers’ time etc (even if EV-positive given the information the applicant has). One of the nice things about money is that it basically can’t hurt, and indeed arguments about the overhead of managing volunteer/unspecialised labour were part of how we wound up with the donation focus in the first place.
I think there is a large fraction of the population for whom donating remains the most good they can do, focusing on whatever problems are still constrained by money (GiveDirectly if nothing else) because the other problems are constrained by capabilities or resources which they don’t personally have or control. The shift from donation focus to direct work focus isn’t just increasing demandingness for these people, it’s telling them they can’t meaningfully contribute at all. Of course inasmuch as it’s true that a particular direct work job is more impactful than a very large amount of donations it’s important to be open and honest about this so those who actually do have the required capabilities can make the right decisions and tradeoffs. But this is fundamentally in tension with building a functioning and supportive community, because people need to feel like their community won’t abandon them if they turn out to be unable to get a direct work job (and this is especially true when a lot of the direct work in question is “hits-based” longshots where failure is the norm). I worry that even people who could potentially have extraordinarily high impact as direct workers might be put off by a community that doesn’t seem like it would continue to value them if their direct work plans didn’t pan out.
I strongly agree with this comment, especially the last bit.
In line with the first two paragraphs, I think the primary constraint is plausibly founders [of orgs and mega-projects], rather than generically ‘switching to direct work’.
Maybe, though given the unilateralist’s curse and other issues of the sort discussed by 80k here I think it might not be good for many people currently on the fence about whether to found EA orgs/megaprojects to do so. There might be a shortage of “good” orgs but that’s not necessarily a problem you can solve by throwing founders at it.
It also often seems to me that orgs with the right focus already exist (and founding additional ones with the same focus would just duplicate effort) but are unable to scale up well, and so I suspect “management capacity” is a significant bottleneck for EA. But scaling up organizations is a fundamentally hard problem, and it’s entirely normal for companies doing so to see huge decreases in efficiency (which if they’re lucky are compensated for by economies of scale elsewhere).
This seems like an incorrect or at best misleading description of the situation. EA plausibly now has more money than it knows what to do with (at least if you want to do better than GiveDirectly) but it also has more people than it knows what to do with. Exactly what the primary constraint is now is hard to know confidently or summarise succinctly, but it’s pretty clearly neither of those. (80k discusses some of the issues with a “people-constrained” framing here.) In general large-scale problems that can be solved by just throwing money or throwing people at them are the exception and not the rule.
For some cause areas the constraint is plausibly direct workers with some particular set of capabilities. But even most people who want to dedicate their careers to EA could not become effective e.g. AI safety researchers no matter how hard they tried. Indeed merely trying may be negative impact in the typical case due to opportunity cost of interviewers’ time etc (even if EV-positive given the information the applicant has). One of the nice things about money is that it basically can’t hurt, and indeed arguments about the overhead of managing volunteer/unspecialised labour were part of how we wound up with the donation focus in the first place.
I think there is a large fraction of the population for whom donating remains the most good they can do, focusing on whatever problems are still constrained by money (GiveDirectly if nothing else) because the other problems are constrained by capabilities or resources which they don’t personally have or control. The shift from donation focus to direct work focus isn’t just increasing demandingness for these people, it’s telling them they can’t meaningfully contribute at all. Of course inasmuch as it’s true that a particular direct work job is more impactful than a very large amount of donations it’s important to be open and honest about this so those who actually do have the required capabilities can make the right decisions and tradeoffs. But this is fundamentally in tension with building a functioning and supportive community, because people need to feel like their community won’t abandon them if they turn out to be unable to get a direct work job (and this is especially true when a lot of the direct work in question is “hits-based” longshots where failure is the norm). I worry that even people who could potentially have extraordinarily high impact as direct workers might be put off by a community that doesn’t seem like it would continue to value them if their direct work plans didn’t pan out.
I strongly agree with this comment, especially the last bit.
In line with the first two paragraphs, I think the primary constraint is plausibly founders [of orgs and mega-projects], rather than generically ‘switching to direct work’.
Maybe, though given the unilateralist’s curse and other issues of the sort discussed by 80k here I think it might not be good for many people currently on the fence about whether to found EA orgs/megaprojects to do so. There might be a shortage of “good” orgs but that’s not necessarily a problem you can solve by throwing founders at it.
It also often seems to me that orgs with the right focus already exist (and founding additional ones with the same focus would just duplicate effort) but are unable to scale up well, and so I suspect “management capacity” is a significant bottleneck for EA. But scaling up organizations is a fundamentally hard problem, and it’s entirely normal for companies doing so to see huge decreases in efficiency (which if they’re lucky are compensated for by economies of scale elsewhere).