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).
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).