Iâm currently facing a career choice between a role working on AI safety directly and a role at 80,000 Hours. I donât want to go into the details too much publicly, but one really key component is how to think about the basic leverage argument in favour of 80k. This is the claim thatâs like: well, in fact I heard about the AIS job from 80k. If I ensure even two (additional) people hear about AIS jobs by working at 80k, isnât it possible going to 80k could be even better for AIS than doing the job could be?
In that form, the argument is naive and implausible. But I donât think I know what the âsophisticatedâ argument that replaces it is. Here are some thoughts:
Working in AIS also promotes growth of AIS. It would be a mistake to only consider the second-order effects of a job when youâre forced to by the lack of first-order effects.
OK, but focusing on org growth fulltime seems surely better for org growth than having it be a side effect of the main thing youâre doing.
One way to think about this is to compare two strategies of improving talent at a target org, between âtry to find people to move them into roles in the org, as part of cultivating a whole overall talent pipeline into the org and related orgsâ, and âput all of your fulltime effort into having a single person, i.e. you, do a job at the orgâ. It seems pretty easy to imagine that the former would be a better strategy?
I think this is the same intuition that makes pyramid schemes seem appealing (something like: surely I can recruit at least 2 people into the scheme, and surely they can recruit more people, and surely the norm is actually that you recruit a tonne of peopleâ and itâs really only by looking at the mathematics of the population as a whole you can see that it canât possibly work, and that actually itâs necessarily the case that most people in the scheme will recruit exactly zero people ever.
Maybe a pyramid scheme is the extreme of âwhat if literally everyone in EA worked at 80kâ, and serves as a reducto ad absurdum for always going into meta, but doesnât tell you precisely when to stop going meta. It could simultaneously be the case that pyramid schemes stop far too late, but everyone else stops significantly too early.
OK, so perhaps the thing to do is try to figure out what the bottleneck is in recruitment, and try to figure out when it would flip from ânot enough people are working on recruitmentâ to âthere isnât more work to do in recruitmentâ, e.g. because youâve already reached most of the interested population, and the people youâve already reached donât need more support, or in practice giving them more support doesnât improve outcomes.
OK, so when recruiting stops working, stop doing it (hardly a shocking revelation). But even that seems much more recruiting-heavy in implication than the norm. Surely you donât only stop when recruiting is useless, but when it is not as useful as your alternative.
In a lot of for-profit organisations, you need to stop recruiting because you need to start making money to pay the recruiters and the people they recruit. Even if it is worth more than it would cost to continue recruiting, you canât pay for it, so you have to do some object-level stuff, to prove to people that you deserve the confidence to continue to do the recruiting.
Itâs natural to think that if you could have arbitrary lines of credit, youâd want to do lots more recruitment up front, and this would eventually pay off. But there are people out there with money to lend, and they systematically donât want to lend it to you. Are they irrational, or are you over-optimistic?
It seems like the conclusion is forcing you to do object-level stuff is actually rational, because lots of people with optimistic projections of how much recruitment will help you are just wrong, and we need to find that out before burning too much money on recruiting. This discipline is enforced by the funding structure of for-profit firms.
The efficient market hypothesis as-applied here suggests that systematically demanding less or more object-level work from firms wonât allow you to do better than the status quo, so the existing overall level of skepticism is correct-ish. But non-profit ârecruitingâ is wildly different in many ways, so I donât know how much we should feel tethered to what works in the for-profit world.
The overall principle that we need people doing object-level work in EA in order to believe that meta-level work is worth doing seems correct. In the for-profit world the balance is struck basically by your equity holders or creditors seeking assurance from you that your growth will lead to more revenue in the future. In the non-profit world I suppose your funders can provide the same accountability. In both cases the people with money are not wizards and are not magically better at finding the truth than you are, though at least in the for-profit world if they repeatedly make bad calls then they run out of money to make new bad calls with (while if they make good calls they get more money to make more /â bigger calls with), so that acts as something of a filter. But being under budget discipline only makes it more important that you figure out whether to grow or execute; it doesnât really make you better at figuring it out.
I suppose the complement to the naive thing I said before is â80k needs a compelling reason to recruit people to EA, and needs EA to be compelling to the people to recruit to it as well; by doing an excellent job at some object-level work, you can grow the value of 80k recruiting, both by making it easier to do and by making the outcome a more valuable outcome. Perhaps this might be even better for recruiting than doing recruiting.â
This feels less intuitively compelling, but itâs useful to notice that it exists at all.
This take is increasingly non-quick, so I think Iâm going to post it and meditate on it somewhat and then think about whether to write more or edit this one.
sometimes I feel bone-headedly stuck on even apparently-simple things like âif nonprofit growth is easier than for-profit growth, does that mean that nonprofits should spend more effort on growth, or less?â