I try to take my moral obligations seriously.
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Denise_Melchin
Karma: 4,148
My mistakes on the path to impact
Why I am probably not a longtermist
Doing good is as good as it ever was
I don’t really agree with your second and third point. Seeing this problem and responding by trying to create more ‘capital letter EA jobs’ strikes me as continuing to pursue a failing strategy.
What (in my opinion) the EA Community needs is to get away from this idea of channelling all committed people to a few organisations—the community is growing faster* than the organisations, and those numbers are unlikely to add up in the mid term.
Committing all our people to a few organisations seriously limits our impact in the long run. There are plenty of opportunities to have a large impact out there—we just need to appreciate them and pursue them. One thing I would like to see is stronger profession-specific networks in EA.
It’s catastrophic that new and long-term EAs now consider their main EA activity to be to apply for the same few jobs instead of trying to increase their donations or investing in non-‘capital letter EA’ promising careers.
But this is hardly surprising given past messaging. The only reason EA organisations can get away with having very expensive hiring rounds for the applicants is because there are a lot of strongly committed people out there willing to take on that cost. Organisations cannot get away with this in most of the for-profit sector.
*Though this might be slowing down somewhat, perhaps because of this ‘being an EA is applying unsuccessfully for the same few jobs’ phenomena.
(Funding manager of the EA Meta Fund here)
We have run an application round for our last distribution for the first time. I conducted the very initial investigation which I communicated to the committee. Previous grantees came all through our personal network.
Things we learnt during our application round:
i) We got significantly fewer applications than we expected and would have been able to spend more time vetting projects. This was not a bottleneck. After some investigation through personal outreach I have the impression there are not many projects being started in the Meta space (this is different for other funding spaces).
ii) We were able to fund a decent fraction of the applications we received (25%?). For about half of the applications I was reasonably confident that they did not meet the bar so I did not investigate further. The remaining quarter felt borderline to me, I often still investigated but the results confirmed my initial impression.
My current impression for the Meta space is that we are not vetting constrained, but more mentoring/pro-active outreach constrained. One thing we want to do in the future is to run a request for proposals process.
[Question] How high impact are UK policy career paths?
Thinking about this further, one concern I have with this post as well as Ollie’s comment is that I think people could unduly underrate the amount of good the average Westerner can actually do after reading it.
If you have a reasonably high salary or donate more than 10% (and assuming donations don’t become much less cost-effective) to AMF or similarly effective charities, you can save hundreds of lives over your lifetime. Saving one life via AMF is currently estimated to cost around only £2,500. If you only earn the average graduate salary forever and only donate 10%, you can still save dozens of lives.
For reference, Oskar Schindler saved 1200 lives and is now famous for it worldwide.
My words at someone’s funeral who saved dozens or even hundreds of lives would be a lot more laudatory than what was said about Dorothea.
We end up seeming more deferential and hero-worshipping than we really are.
I feel like this post is missing something. I would expect one of the strongest predictors of the aforementioned behaviors to be age. Are there any people in their thirties you know who are prone to hero-worshipping?
I don’t consider hero-worshipping an EA problem as such, but a young people problem. Of course EA is full of young people!
Make sure people incoming to the community, or at the periphery of the community, are inoculated against this bias, if you spot it. Point out that people usually have a mix of good and bad ideas. Have some go-to examples of respected people’s blind spots or mistakes, at least as they appear to you.
This seems like good advice to me, but I expect it to benefit from being aware that you need to talk about these things to a young person because they are young.
Brief book review 2020
The assumption I had is we defer a lot of power, both intellectual, social and financial, to a small group of broadly unaccountable, non-transparent people on the assumption they are uniquely good at making decisions, noticing risks to the EA enterprise and combatting them, and that this unique competence is what justifies the power structures we have in EA.
Is this actually true right now? People donating to EA Funds seem like an example of deferring financial decisions, but I don’t have data how EAs donate to the Funds vs. decide themselves where to donate. Or do you mean decisions like relying on GiveWell recommendations as an example of ‘deferring financial power’?
I am also not sure how the EA Community compares to other movements. Is your claim that EA is worse at this than comparable movements or that we should hold ourselves to a higher standard?
I have mixed feelings about your post overall. If people defer decision-making power to “the leadership” then it’s good to ask these questions. But mostly I see individuals making decisions for themselves. If others think the decisions are bad, they don’t have to admire “the leadership” for it.
Something I want to add here:
I am not sure whether my error was how much I was deferring in itself. But the decision to defer or not should be made on well defined questions and clearly defined ‘experts’ you might be deferring to. This is not what I was doing. I was deferring on a nebulous question (‘what should I be doing?‘) to an even more nebulous expert audience (a vague sense of what ‘the community’ wanted).
What I should have been doing instead first is to define the question better: Which roles should I be pursuing right now?
This can then be broken down further into subquestions on cause prioritisation, which roles are promising avenues within causes I might be interested in, which roles I might be well suited for, etc, whose information I need to aggregate in a sensible fashion to answer the question which roles I should be pursuing right now.
For each of these subquestions I need to make a separate judgement. For some it makes more sense to defer, for others, less so. Disappointingly, there is no independent expert panel investigating what kind of jobs I might excel at.
But then who to defer to, if I think this is a sensible choice for a particular subquestion, also needs to be clearly defined: for example, I might decide that it makes sense to take 80k at their word about which roles in a particular cause area are particularly promising right now, after reading what they actually say on their website on the subject, perhaps double-checking by asking them via email and polling another couple of people in the field.
‘The community’ is not a well defined expert panel, while the careful aggregation of individual opinions can be, who again, need to be asked well defined questions. Note that this can true even if I gave equal weight to every EA’s opinion: sometimes it can seem like ‘the community’ has an opinion that only few individual EAs hold if actually asked, if any. This is especially true if messaging is distorted and I am not actually asking a well defined question.
Thank you Lizka. You are making a good point and I have edited the comment above to no longer refer to a specific demographic group.
I would not want anyone to get the impression that Owen’s poor behaviour is merely a strong negative update on men. It is a strong negative update on the decency of everybody.
(Though I would expect women to show a lack of decency in slightly different ways than men.)
I still expect some decent people to exist. I just now think there are even more rare than I previously thought.
I really appreciate you writing this. You are not the first person to consider doing so and I applaud you for actually doing it.
I want to use the opportunity to point out that you can pledge more than 10%! This hasn’t always been in my conscious awareness as much as it possibly should have been.
I pledged 10% in 2013, but changed my pledge to 20% a few months ago. :-)
Strong upvoted. I think a post like this is extremely useful as a resource to clarify 80,000 hours role for the community. I appreciate 80,000 hours has previously been putting effort into communicating how they see their role in the community in comments on this Forum, but communicating this clearly in one place so people can easily point to it seems very valuable to me.
I certainly agree that it would be great if the debate was thoughtful on all sides. But I am reluctant to punish emotional responses in these contexts.
When I look at this thread, I see a lack of women participating. Exceptions: Khorton, and Julia clarifying a CEA position. There were also a couple of people whose gender I could not quickly identify.
There are various explanations for this. I am not sure the gender imbalance on this thread is actually worse than on other threads. It could be noise. But I know why I said nothing: I found writing a thoughtful, non-emotional response too hard. I expect to fail because the subject is too upsetting.
This systematically biases the debate in favour of people who bear no emotional cost in participating.
[Cause Exploration Prizes] Preventing stillbirths
And applying for jobs in EA orgs also doesn’t have to come at great personal expense
I want to push back against this point a bit. Although I completely agree that you shouldn’t treat working at non-EA orgs as a failure!
In my experience, applying for jobs in EA orgs has been very expensive compared to applying to other jobs, even completely ignoring any mental costs. There was a discussion about this topic here as well, and my view on the matter has not changed much—except I now have some experience applying to jobs outside EA orgs, backing up what I previously thought.
To get to the last stage of a process in the application processes I went through at EA orgs routinely took a dozen hours, and often dozens. This did not happen once when I applied to jobs outside of EA orgs. Application processes were just much shorter. I don’t think applying to EA jobs as I did in 2018 would have been compatible with having a full-time job, or only with great difficulty.
Something I also encountered only in EA org application processes were them taking several months or being very mismanaged—going back and forth on where someone was in the application process, or having an applicant invest dozens of hours only to inform them that the org was actually unable to provide visas.
Thank you so much for laying out this view. I completely agree, including every single subpoint (except the ones about the male perspective which I don’t have much of an opinion on). CEA has a pretty high bar for banning people. I’m in favour of lowering this bar as well as communicating more clearly that the bar is really high and therefore someone being part of the community certainly isn’t evidence they are safe.
Thank you in particular for point D. I’ve never been quite sure how to express the same point and I haven’t seen it written up elsewhere.
It’s a bit unfortunate that we don’t seem to have agreevote on shortforms.
Thank you for looking into the numbers! While I don’t have a strong view on how representative the EA Leaders forum is, taking the survey results about engagement at face value doesn’t seem right to me.
On the issue of long-termism, I would expect that people who don’t identify as long-termists to now report to be less engaged with the EA Community (especially with the ‘core’) and identify as EA less. Long-termism has become a dominant orientation in the EA Community which might put people off the EA Community, even if their personal views and actions related to doing good haven’t changed, e.g. their donations amounts and career plans. The same goes for looking at how long people have been involved with EA—people who aren’t compelled by long-termism might have dropped out of identifying as EA without actually changing their actions.