I’m an academic economist doing global priorities research. I work full time at Univ. of Texas Austin and am an affiliate of the Global Priorities Institute at Oxford. I work on macro-, welfare, and population economics.
Kevin Kuruc
Writing about my job: Economics Professor
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I don’t know nearly enough about headhunting to say anything definitive. But if we think they’re misleading—rather than informing—maybe the argument should be ‘EA orgs shouldn’t use headhunters’ for the reasons you laid out in these comments. It feels counter productive from the orgs side to trick someone into a job they wouldn’t have taken with full information (*especially* for a community trying to operate with integrity).
That seems like a distinct point from ‘EA orgs shouldn’t poach from one another’ (which is what it seemed like the post was about). In general, my prior is that norms should be the same for hiring the EA-employed and the non-EA-employed, whether that’s using headhunting services or not.
Thanks a lot for sharing a rejection story and for all of the effort you’ve put into making the world a better place! I would have really appreciated meeting you at EAG.
One thing I was surprised to read in the comments on Scott Alexander’s post is this description of EAG:
EA Global is designed for people who have a solid understanding of the main concepts of effective altruism, and who are making decisions and taking significant actions based on them.
I can second the vibe of Zach’s ‘Data point’ comment. I know/met a few (<5 but I suspect more were there based on my sampling) students at EAG SF who had only recently engaged with EA ideas and had not (yet) taken any ‘significant action’ based on them. This isn’t their fault, they’re young! I enjoyed meeting these people and remain glad they were there.
My sense was that the admissions committee wanted to connect bright, prospective EAs with direct work employers. That could be a reasonable goal, but it doesn’t track the above description which sounds like its about experience acting on EA principles.
- 25 Sep 2022 3:19 UTC; 4 points) 's comment on Open EA Global by (
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Something I did not see mentioned here as a potential critique: Open Phil’s work on macro policy seemed to be motivated by a (questionable?) assumption of differing values from those who promote tighter policy. Here is Holden Karnofsky with Ezra Klein [I think the last sentence got transcribed poorly, but the point is clear]:
And so, this is not about Holden going and learning all about macroeconomic policy and then going and explaining to the Federal Reserve that they’ve got it wrong. That’s not what happened. We funded groups that have their own expertise, that are part of the debate going on. There are experts on both sides. But we funded a particular set of values that says full employment is very important if you kind of value all people equally and you care a lot about how the working class is doing and what their bargaining power is.
And historically, the Federal Reserve has often had a bit of an obsession with controlling inflation that may be very related to their professional incentives. And so we do have a point of view on when there’s a debate among experts, which ones are taking the position they’re taking, because that’s what you would do if you were valuing everyone and trying to help everyone the most, versus which you’re taking position for some other reason.
This struck me as a bit odd, because I think if you asked individuals more hawk-ish than Open Phil if they cared impartially about all Americans, they would answer yes. I suspect Open Phil may have overestimated the degree to which genuine technocratic disagreement was in fact a difference of values.
Maybe OP is/was right, but it would take significant technical expertise to identify which side of the debate is substantively correct, so as to conclude one side must not be motivated by impartial welfare.
[Disclaimer: I work at the Population Wellbeing Initiative with Mike and Dean].
As quick responses to those bullets based on my own views of this issue:
It’s true that low fertility is recent, but so is wealth and the opportunities that come with that. The main crux I’m left with is that (1) [save for Israel] there is no economically developed country that has fertility high enough to replace itself and (2) there has never been sustained depopulation via low fertility. Something is going to have to give! My money is on a non-insignificant period of depopulation.
I disagree with this point about financial costs. The cross-section and time-series evidence that richer places and times have fewer children is too hard to square with that claim, in my opinion. I’d be interested to hear if you had a further thought about why that evidence is misleading. (The opportunity costs are high, but as long as we maintain a world with good work and life opportunities for parents, I don’t see obvious reasons why this will fall).
I’d guess what they say about ‘Heritability’ on pages 14-15 might be what you’re interested in (i.e., selection pressure for sub-groups that have direct desires for children). I count myself as worried if that’s the force we’re relying on though given the universality of low fertility. (Evolution through new genetic mutations is almost certainly going to be too slow; I think Table 1 indicates births will fall to very low levels in ~300 years with European levels of fertility).
Fair enough! I don’t really know what technologies are in our future with respect to childbearing and parenting. For what it’s worth though, even if there were a (costless) artificial womb so good that it was just a button that when pressed produced a baby, most people I know who don’t have kids wouldn’t press the button. Obviously, that’s not the only tech that could change the parenting experience. But it is the most common one that’s proposed and I’m just not convinced it would move the needle much on fertility. Robo-nannies or something that made a serious dent in the time parents felt they should spend with their kids seems like a more important margin to me.
Thanks for doing this! I liked the original paper but never did a deep dive on the robustness.
I’m glad you just coined ‘FIREA’! I was running a similar strategy down the road in Norman, OK (though I’ve since gotten an EA job in Austin, TX). Though, I was only in Norman because I was working at the University of Oklahoma; the relocation grant is specific to Tulsa.
I can second that the cost of living is an amazing perk. Aside from the low rent, energy and gas prices are low in OK, the lowest in the country according to this site. And compared to Northeast cities, the groceries are a bargain. I saved an impressive (to me!) fraction of my income the 2.5 years I was there. Would love to see a bunch of remote EAs take advantage of this and build a little Tulsa community.
I have nothing of substance to add, but I’m excited for people to attack the problem of replacing meat from a bunch of angles. I also very much agree with Aaron: if you are excited to work on meat-replacements, even if this exact idea doesn’t hit, the skills/connections/experience that you’ll acquire will be extremely valuable.
Hi Alene!
I like this! In accordance with some of the past discussions on the name ‘EA,’ I always felt a bit awkward leaning into the group name for most of the reasons you note above. I was also struck by a recent episode of Bad Takes (Laura McGann and Matt Yglesias’ new podcast) about SBF where she describes not wanting to like EA because of this ‘we—a bunch of nerds—have figured it out’ vibe. She was eventually positive after learning more, but it seems really bad to be screening out people like that.
Scale seems to be one of the most important drivers of things EAs care about (factory farming, malaria prevention, future generations). +1 for ‘Mass’ capturing that in an intuitive way. Though, to be fair, I haven’t spent any time exploring other name ideas.
Minor point: ‘Mass Good’ struck me as having a religious undertone (maybe just because of the word ‘mass’). I actually kind of liked it for that reason! As much as some want to avoid it, EA really does feel like a secular-religion to me—it’s a community with shared values, supporting one another in pursuit of living those values. What’s not to like?
I’m not confident this is the right rebranding, but a community shake-up might be the right time to be thinking seriously about one. So I’m glad you wrote this!
Thanks for working so hard on this! Great stuff.
+1. I found it to be an extremely thought provoking, informative, and high-quality post. Really well done. [FWIW: I had very weak priors over AGI timelines (I’m too confused to form a coherent inside view) and this seems like a much more reliable outside view than I was defaulting to].
Hi! I have absolutely no expertise in this, but it seems long-term good to maximize the quality of matches between employers and employees. So, formally, I suppose I disagree with the statement:
Clearly, if a headhunter eases a bottleneck at a high-impact organization while creating a bottleneck at another equally high-impact organization, they are not having a positive effect.
If an employee takes a job at another org, presumably they expect it to be a better match for them going forward. I’d count that as a positive effect, assuming (on average) it increases their effectiveness, decreases their chances of burnout, etc. Even if its just for money or location, its hard to know what intra-household bargains have been made to do EA-work, etc.
There might also be positive general equilibrium effects: An expectation of a robust EA job market (with job-to-job transitions) increased my willingness to leave a non-EA job (academia) and enter this ecosystem. I would have been more hesitant had I felt there was a norm against hiring from other orgs. Though I’ll flag that I’m not confident I accurately understand the term ‘head-hunting’ here, as opposed to recruiting, as opposed to hiring. In any case, a strong ‘no head-hunting/recruiting’ norm seems like it would weakly pressure orgs not to hire from other orgs (since they wouldn’t want to be seen as recruiting from other orgs).
I get that there are costs associated with re-hiring, re-training, and re-integrating that would be avoided if the original org just directly hires from the non-EA-employed camp. Maybe I’m underestimating these! My uninformed guess is that they are small relative to the benefits of increasing match quality.
Curious about others thoughts on this though! Thanks for writing it.
Thanks! Just used this for a few donations. It looks like they’ve increased the pool to $620K and there is still ~15K left.
Thanks for writing, sounds like a great career you’ve got going, congrats! Unsurprisingly, many of your experiences track closely what I jotted down about academic economics yesterday. However, one big benefit of yours—that I didn’t think to mention, but is relevant for anyone choosing between a university and a research institute—is the like-minded coworkers.
I’d be very surprised if >2 colleagues of mine knew about EA, and even more surprised if any aside from me had thought about longtermism, etc. This definitely makes it a bit solitary. I imagine I’d be happier and more productive in an environment with even just 1-2 people excited about Global Priorities Research.
On the other hand, I think its probably useful to have GPR work being done in the wild to mainstream it some, so it’s not all negative.
Great—glad you wrote that post up on intergenerational dynamics (and remarkably quickly!). I haven’t read through the details in a while, but I think the best paper I’ve seen trying to estimate heritability at the family-level is this one by Tom Vogl, which you might find interesting to dig into. I believe his headline finding is that in low fertility settings that this composition effect accounts for fertility rates being ~4% higher in this generation than it would otherwise be (but that’s just a refresher from my quick skim just now).
My skepticism about evolution is skepticism about the existing variance in biological preferences for children. Obviously that’s not something we can easily get at, since outcomes are the product of environment + constraints + culture + preferences, etc. But (1) this preference isn’t currently common enough to push some economically developed countries above replacement rate and (2) once social/economic conditions that generate low-fertility stabilize, this sort of mental-model would always predict increasing fertility rates (since every generations composition becomes more favorable to high-fertility). I’m not sure there’s even a single country with moderate to low fertility that’s seen an increase over the last 10-20 years, even though the demographic transition occurred in some countries a few generations ago. (And we only have a few more, ~7-10, generations worth of time until we’re at pretty low population levels).
Though I’m happy to admit that this is hard to generate convincing evidence on, so maybe in a few more generations it could start to show up in aggregate numbers. But until there’s a country or two with consistent increases in fertility, through policy or evolution or whatever, I will remain very concerned that the decline will not be self-correcting.
Don’t have much to add on the other points you made :)
I love this post. So much so that I got up to do a set of pull-ups between reading it and writing this comment!
I’m currently 95% bivalve vegan (occasional eat some cheese and other trace dairy products when I’m out of my house). I’m the closest thing to fully plant based that most of my friends and family know. My jam has been long-distance running rather than getting strong, but some fraction of my motivation has similarly been ‘be fitter than almost every meat eater they know.’
Unfortunately a running physique perpetuates the frail stereotype, so this is a good reminder to do some curls every once in a while for the animals :)
[Oh, and as an N=2 on the substance of this post: I am much healthier and fitter now than I was before going veg, but that’s largely confounded by also getting more into running over the last 3 years. The increase in fitness over this period has been significant enough that I’d be surprised if eating meat would have resulted in an even greater increase.]
I’m not sure I have much to add aside from things I saw in your post (e.g., morning working, and other Cal Newport-ish tricks). I’ve found these to be really great.
One thing I experimented with pre-pandemic, and am about to re-up, is canceling my WiFi. Obviously during the depth of the pandemic when I had to work full time from home I needed it, but I’m actually calling up my provider tomorrow to drop back off. I still had some data on my phone for a quick email and/or internet check , but this entirely eliminated useless scrolling, streaming, etc., at home that don’t bring me joy.
I think more people should try this -- maybe I’ll write a short post making the case for it.
EDIT: I did write that short post up, if anyone’s interested.
Thank you for taking the time—and having the courage—to write this. I appreciate learning about others’ experiences from personal accounts.