It seems to me that in many cases the specific skills that are needed are both extremely rare and not well captured by the standard categories.
For instance, Paul Christiano seems to me to be an enormous asset to solving the core problems of AI safety. If “we didn’t have a Paul” I would be willing to trade huge amounts of EA resources to have him working on AI safety, and I would similarly trade huge resources to get another Paul-equivalent working on the problem.
But it doesn’t seem like Paul’s skillset is one that I can easily select for. He’s knowledgeable about ML, but there are many people with ML knowledge (about 100 new ML PhDs each year). That isn’t the thing that distinguishes him.
Nevertheless, Paul has some qualities, above and beyond his technical familiarity, that allow him to do original and insightful thinking about AI safety. I don’t understand what those qualities are, or know how to assess them, but they seem to me to be much more critical than having object level knowledge.
I have close to no idea how to recruit more people that can do the sort of work that Paul can do. (I wish I did. As I said, I would give up way more than my left arm to get more Pauls).
But, I’m afraid there’s a tendency here to goodhart on the easily measurable virtues, like technical skill or credentials.
I’m not sure how much having a “watered down” version of EA ideas in the zeitgeist helps because, I don’t have a clear sense of how effective most charities are.
If the difference between the median charity and the most impactful charity is 4 orders of magnitude ($1 to the most impactful charities does as much good as $1000 to the the median charity), then even a 100x improvement from the median charity is not very impactful. It’s still only 1% as good a donating to the best charity. If that were the case, it’s probably more efficient to just aim to get more people to adopt the whole EA mindset.
On the other hand, if the variation is much smaller, it might be the case that a 100x improvement get’s you to about half of the impact per dollar of the best charities.
Which world we’re living in matters a lot for whether we should invest in this strategy.
That said, promotion of EA principles, like cost effectiveness and EV estimates, separate from the EA brand, seem almost universally good, and extend far beyond people’s choice of charities.