I think that EA donors are likely to be unusual in this respectâyouâre pre-selecting for people who have signed up for a culture of doing whatâs best even when it wasnât what they thought it was before.
I guess also I think that my arguments for animal welfare charities are at their heart EA-style arguments, so Iâm getting a big boost to my likelihood of persuading someone by knowing that theyâre the kind of person who appreciates EA-style arguments.
Similarly if you think animal charities are 10x global health charities in effectiveness, then you think these options are equally good:
Move 10 EA donors from global health to animal welfare
Add 9 new animal welfare donors who previously werenât donating at all
To me, the first of these sounds way easier.
Thanks! (I slightly object to âthe normal markdown syntaxâ, since based on my quick reading neither John Gruberâs original markdown spec nor the latest CommonMark spec nor GitHub Flavoured Markdown have footnotes)
FWIW the link to your forum post draft tells me âSorry, you donât have access to this draftâ
The onboarding delay is relevant because in the 80k case it happens twice: the 80k person has an onboarding delay, and then the people they cause to get hired have onboarding delays too.
It feels like when Iâm comparing the person who does object-level work to the person who does meta-level work that leads to 2 people (say) doing object-level work, the latter really does seem better all things equal, but the intuition that calls this model naive is driven by a sense that itâs going to turn out to not âactuallyâ be 2 additional people, that additionality is going to be lower than you think, that the costs of getting that result are higher than you think, etc. etc.
But this intuition is not as clear as Iâd like on what the extra costs /â reduced benefits are, and how big a deal they are. Here are the first ones I can think of:
Perhaps the people that you recruit instead arenât as good at the job as you would have been.
If your orgâs hiring bottlenecks are not finding great people, but instead having the management capacity to onboard them or the funding capacity to pay for them, doing management or fundraising, or work that supports the case for fundraising, might matter more.
but 80k surely also needs good managers, at least as a general matter
I think when an org hires you, thereâs an initial period of your onboarding where you consume more staff time than you produce, especially if you weight by seniority. Different roles differ strongly on where their break-even point is. Iâve worked somewhere who thought their number was like 6-18 months (I forget what they said exactly, but in that range) and I can imagine cases where itâs more like⌠day 2 of employment. Anyway, one way or another, if you cause object level work to happen by doing meta level work, youâre introducing another onboarding delay before stuff actually happens. If the area youâre hoping to impact is time-sensitive, this could be a big deal? But usually Iâm a little skeptical of time-sensitivity arguments, since people seem to make them at all times.
itâs easy to inadvertently take credit for a person going to role that they would actually have gone to anyway, or not to notice when you guide someone into a role thatâs worse (or not better, or not so much better) than what they would have done otherwise (80k are clearly aware of this and try to measure it in various ways, but itâs not something you can do perfectly)
I think this depends on what the specific role is. I think the one Iâm going for is not easily replaceable, but Iâm mostly aiming not to focus on the specific details of my career choice in this thread, instead trying to address the broader questions about meta work generally.
oh! uhh, how?
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
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.
I think thereâs a big difference between âmore effectiveâ and âmost effectiveâ, and one of the most important and counterintuitive principles of EA is that trying to find the best option rather than just a good option can make a huge difference to how much good you doâwe have to prioritise between different goods, and this is painful to do (hence easy to avoid) but really important.
I tried to click âget notifiedâ on this comment but Iâm not sure if it did anything, so I will have to come up with something useful to contribute to make sure :P
I wish we had markdown syntax for footnotes, as well. As-is it often feels like the markdown editor is a second-class citizen.
FWIW I clicked on âWhat is the admissions bar for EA Global?â expecting it to be a post asking that question, rather than answering it. Maybe Iâd simply call this âAdmissions bar for EA Globalâ or something.
(Equally, donât overweight this just because I happened to comment about it, but maybe the agree /â disagree votes will be useful)
Iâm writing a comment and not an answer because I think this also doesnât meet your criteria (too long, Iâd guess), but I thought Iâd mention It Looks Like Youâre Trying To Take Over The World, a short story written by Gwern that is on this theme.
This is a nice summary, and I agree with your theory about potential causes. I added the Impostor Syndrome tag to this post, which you might find useful to browse for more ideas other people have had.
(In case anyone else was wondering, the dictionaries I checked accept both impostor and imposter as variants of the same word. It looks like existing posts are split about evenly between the two :) )
I downvoted this post because I think itâs really hard for a list of 12 somewhat-related questions, and particularly for the comment threads answering them, to be useful to a broader audience than just the original author. I also feel like these questions really could do more to explain what your thinking is on them, because as it is I feel like youâre asking for people to put in work you havenât put in yourself.
If I had these questions, I think the main avenues Iâd consider to getting them answered would be:
post each one in its own Quick Take (= shortform), which would help separate the comment threads without dominating the frontpage with 12 posts at once,
pick one (or more, if theyâre obviously related), and expand a little more on what motivates the question and what thoughts you already have, and make that a post on its own,
consider other venues with smaller audiences (in-person or online social meetups, etc.)
You said:
I wanted to have them all in one place, as many of them seem related to each other
3 and 4 are obviously related, and 8 and 9. I donât see the relations between the others; I think if youâre really making the pitch that this post is one topic, I need more explanation of what that topic is.
I agree with the comments that this post is better-informed than many EA critiques. Lots of the factual content is at least roughly correct (although lots of the judgement calls I donât agree with, e.g. how intertwined EA and rationality are in practice).
As a piece of criticism, though, I donât feel moved by it. (edit: to be clear this is not a criticism of making a linkpost here! I think itâs good to be aware of this stuff. I just want to be frank about my take on it.)
The article includes a whole series of things that sound superficially (to my imagined EA-unaware reader) significant, but it just drops them in and shows seemingly no interest in following up on them:
wait, is it really a cult or what? what would the implications of that be?
those rationality workshops sound expensive, is that a scam or something?
one of its promoters did a multi-billion dollar fraud? weâre just going to move on from that with no further comment?
wait why do they have two castles
sex redistribution for incels??
is it bad that they tried to fire Sam Altman?
why are we talking about toilet paper and none of these things
Overall it feels like they had a checklist of points to hit but donât really have much to say about them, instead preferring to remain in a purely abstract critique about the foundation of what it is to be good to another person, which a lot of the other content⌠doesnât really seem relevant to. At the end it seems decidedly confused about whether contributing to effective altruism is good or bad:
We should celebrate this work, and if more is to come, celebrate it too. But the rationalists err in seeing this all as a useful occasion to atone for our cognitive sins. And the effective altruists fail in urging us to see this as the whole story, or even the main act.
ok, but like, what is the import of that failure? the work is to be celebrated but it doesnât matter that much actually? should we, the virtuous, who consider our fellow person, donate to bednets or what?
A duckduckgo search[1] for my name turns up the EA Forum as a second[2] result, so I think itâs pretty easy for future employers to find what I write here and take it into consideration, even if they donât think the venue is important in itself.
[1]: Google search would be more relevant but I expect that to be more distorted by Googleâs knowledge of what I typically search for, whereas I guess duckduckgo will show me something more similar to what it would show other people
[2]: weirdly also the third and fourth
credit to AGB for (in this comment) reminding me where to find the Scott Alexander remarks that pushed me a lot in this direction:
Second, if we never get AI, I expect the future to be short and grim. Most likely we kill ourselves with synthetic biology. If not, some combination of technological and economic stagnation, rising totalitarianism + illiberalism + mobocracy, fertility collapse and dysgenics will impoverish the world and accelerate its decaying institutional quality. I donât spend much time worrying about any of these, because I think theyâll take a few generations to reach crisis level, and I expect technology to flip the gameboard well before then. But if we ban all gameboard-flipping technologies (the only other one I know is genetic enhancement, which is even more bannable), then we do end up with bioweapon catastrophe or social collapse. Iâve said before I think thereâs a ~20% chance of AI destroying the world. But if we donât get AI, I think thereâs a 50%+ chance in the next 100 years we end up dead or careening towards Venezuela. That doesnât mean I have to support AI accelerationism because 20% is smaller than 50%. Short, carefully-tailored pauses could improve the chance of AI going well by a lot, without increasing the risk of social collapse too much. But itâs something on my mind.
(emphasis mine)
My original shortform tried to be measured /â neutral, but I want to also say I found this passage very alarming when I first read it, and itâs wildly more pessimistic than I am by default. I think if this is true, itâs really important to know, but I made my shortform because if itâs false, thatâs really important to know too. I hope we can look into it in a way that moves the needle on our best understanding.
Keep in mind that youâre not coercing them to switch their donations, just persuading them. That means you can use the fact that they were persuaded as evidence that you were on the right side of the argument. You being too convinced of your own opinion isnât a problem unless other people are also somehow too convinced of it, and I donât see why they would be.