The EA movement’s ability to scalably use labour refers to its ability to efficiently allocate many people to valuable work and to recommend valuable actions large segments of the population could take. There have been discussions within EA about the movement’s strengths and weaknesses on those fronts, the consequences of that, how to improve, and how this all might change as EA grows.
A related but narrower discussion centers on the concept of “Task Y”:[1] a task which has one or more of the following properties:
It be performed usefully by people who are not currently able to choose their career path entirely based on EA concerns
It’s clearly effective, and doesn’t become much less effective the more people who are doing it
Its positive effects are obvious to the person doing the task
Other related ideas include the claims that EA is vetting-constrained or that some of the major bottlenecks the EA movement currently faces are related to organizational capacity, infrastructure, and management.[2]
Further reading
EA person (2019) EA is vetting-constrained, Effective Altruism Forum, March 9.
Related entries
career choice | community infrastructure | constraints on effective altruism | criticism of effective altruism | hiring | take action | markets for altruism | research training programs | working at EA vs non-EA orgs | Task Y
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Lawsen, Alex (2019) Can the EA community copy Teach for America? (Looking for Task Y), Effective Altruism Forum, February 21.
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Koehler, Arden & Keiran Harris (2020) Benjamin Todd on what the effective altruism community most needs, 80,000 Hours, November 12.
It took me a minute to understand what “using people” meant here—at first I thought it meant “manipulating people”!
“Scalably involving people” might be better
Good suggestion. I hadn’t considered the “manipulating” interpretation when I originally named the tag, but it does seem worth avoiding!
I think “scalably making use of people” might be the most accurate phrase (since it seems to make it clearer that the goal is about achieving outcomes in the world, not just that people get to be part of something). But it’s a bit long and could sound a bit too hierarchical/directive, so “involving” seems better overall.
“Scalably using labour”? Since it’s about getting people to do things, not about recruiting them.
Regardless of what other terms one uses, is the term “scalably” necessary? It’s a slightly awkward term, and makes the phrase a bit clunky.
To Ryan: I think “Scalably using labour” sounds good to me, so I’ll probably change the name to that in a day or two unless anyone comments to suggest otherwise in the meantime.
To Stefan: I do think “scalably” or something like it is core to what this entry/tag is about. The idea is something like:
“EA is already doing great at helping some especially skilled, dedicated, lucky, etc. people have a lot of impact. But it’s not doing great at helping a larger section of the EA community have a lot of impact, even though it seems likely that there’s useful work they could be doing. This is related to vetting constraints, management constraints, org capacity constraints, etc. And EA has even less to say about particularly useful work that tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions, etc. of people could do, especially people who aren’t as skilled and dedicated as the people already struggling to get into some high impact jobs. So we’re able to use some labour very well, but not really at scale.”
I think just the term “using labour” would technically cover this issue, but it’d also cover other stuff, and wouldn’t highlight that this specific issue is what this entry/tag focuses on.
(But maybe some other term would capture the idea of “scalably using labour” similarly well.)
Maybe part of the issue is that the idea that this tag is for isn’t crisply defined.
But insofar as one wants a tag for precisely this idea, maybe the adverb “scalably” could be replaced with “large-scale” or “at scale” or something like that. E.g. “Large-scale use of labour”.
Apparently you can just edit the tag, so I did!