Just wanted to say I appreciate this post and I feel you. I had a very similar feeling when applying to receive coaching from 80K. I think they’ve improved their message since I applied, but at the time I didn’t fully realize the type of person they were taking was literally the going to Harvard, in the middle of a machine learning Phd type.
I also feel like generally there’s a huge under-utilization of talent in EA. I see so many cases of smart, motivated people who may not have literally the best resume ever, but could be extremely helpful *somewhere*. It’s strange considering the emphasis on talent constraints.
I don’t have an easy solution unfortunately and it does seem to be a really hard problem, but the Teach for America like funnel that I believe Nick Beckstead recommended and was brought up in a recent EA forum post seems really promising to me.
In a similar vein, I don’t mean to pick on 80K—of course they do great work—but I’m confused why they don’t just hire more career coaches. I realize they want to remain lean and have a really strong team, but I think they only have 2 coaches. That number is going to leave a lot of promising EAs wandering in the dark for a while.
p.s. I also know of an EA that applied to EA orgs for a long time and got rejected by all of them. They now work at one of the FAANG companies.
Counterpoint to “had one looked into SBF activities with due diligence in mind, questionable behavior would be obvious to see”:
Many high profile VC firms invested in FTX (e.g. Sequoia, SoftBank, BlackRock). They raised at astronomical valuations as recently as January of this year. It seems unlikely to me that any due diligence into the inner workings of the business by EA higher-ups would have come up with something that these VCs apparently did not.
OTOH, I’ve been following crypto closely for a little over a year now and I had heard rumblings along the lines of the top-level comment. It is my impression that most (maybe all) of the assumptions of bad behavior were based on speculation and circumstantial evidence rather than hard proof.
Perhaps that speculation and circumstantial evidence was enough to be careful with too closely associating with SBF/FTX, I don’t know, but it seems unlikely to me that due diligence before the last few days would have revealed obvious bad behavior.