I ran the Forum for three years. Iâm no longer an active moderator.
I write web content for 80,000 Hours. Previously:
2022-2025: I worked in communications at Coefficient Giving.
2019-2021: I worked at CEA, on the Forum and other projects.
2016-18: Alongside non-EA gigs, I did piecemeal ops work for CEA and CFAR.
2014-15: I founded and ran Yaleâs student EA group.
Outside of EA, I play Magic: the Gathering on a semi-professional level and donate most of my winnings to charity (this amounts to ~$60K so far).
Outside of EA, Iâve been a tutor, a freelance writer, a tech support agent, and (very briefly) a music journalist. I blog, and keep a public list of my donations, at aarongertler.com.
Thanks for the nitpick, fixed!
I mean something like âthe average person in the EA communityâ or âthe average person who is interested enough in EAâs ideas and methods to take actionâ â that seems like the relevant audience for the question of what the community should focus on.
(This is complicated by giving being an easier pitch/âreaching more people than career choice â but thatâs beyond the scope of this comment.)
Some thoughts:
Iâm not sure what it means for a candidate to be âmore cost-effectiveâ, but I assume it equates to âbetter at their jobâ (assuming a fixed salary).
My impression, from spending a lot of time in EA orgs and working on several hiring rounds, is that the difference between âbest candidateâ and âsecond-best candidateâ is often well over 10% (though, to be fair, orgs may be wrong about which candidate is best).
And even a candidate who is only 10% âbetterâ might have additional impact worth far more than 10% of their salary. Letâs say an average org employee generates $2 million in value for the organization (seems realistic based on this). Getting the âbestâ candidate for a job would then be worth $200,000 to the org. If that employee earned a $100,000 salary (and donated $10,000/âyear), theyâd generate more value by working than giving even if their donation target was 10x as cost-effective as their employer.
The linked figures are old and could be flawed in many ways, but Iâm not aware of anything better.
The implicit assumption Iâm reading from your model is that someoneâs impact within a job is worth exactly what they are paid. But I may be misunderstanding something â you have much more experience with this kind of modeling than I do!
Your model seems to assume that a donor will support the most cost-effective intervention in an area. But if less cost-effective interventions have a lot more jobs, doesnât that imply they also have more funding, and thus that the average donor is more likely to support them?
This is hard to support empirically without some shared views on which interventions are best. But I will say that donors, relative to job-seekers, have historically been much more interested in global health than animal welfare or X-risk â if you think the most effective interventions are in the latter categories, thatâs some evidence in favor of prioritizing career choice over giving.
If new donors did reliably support the most cost-effective interventions, that seems like it would open up many more jobs in those interventions and boost the impact of an expected career change (though perhaps not above the impact of donating).
People who decide to change their careers donât just add to existing interventions â they sometimes make it possible to support new interventions (e.g. by founding an org, or bringing a new kind of expertise into an existing org).
Donors can also do this, but itâs hard â Iâd guess the average EA-interested person is more likely to be capable of starting a new org than providing sufficient seed funding to get one running.
In my experience, EA orgs tend to describe themselves as much more limited by talent than funding. This doesnât disprove your model â it could be that orgs are broadly wrong about this, or that the most effective orgs are more likely to be primarily funding-bottlenecked, or that the average person can do more to resolve a funding bottleneck than a talent bottleneck, etc. â but it seems like evidence that the model is incomplete.
In theory, the best outcome is for someone to change their career and start donating. And I think someone who changes their career is more likely to start donating than vice-versa. A career change is a big change to someoneâs environment/âwhat they think about all day, and likely connects them to lots of other people who donate, while donating is a smaller change with little day-to-day impact on how the donor thinks about their career.
If you think most people make far more impact by donating than working, and that itâs much easier to convince people to donate than change careers, this factor wonât change much; youâd still prefer lots of new donors to a small number of new workers who also donate. But I still thought it was worth noting.
I probably wonât have time to respond to more comments at length (if at all), but I appreciate the impetus to think about the question!