Former and, hopefully, future software developer.
(My organizing is not a professional role; I just wanted it to show up in the directory view.)
Kevin Ulug
Karma: 378
A very half-baked thought: I wonder if we should encourage orgs to depend less on networking instead of encouraging applicants to network more? Networking seems to depend, at least partially, on a bias towards people you know and therefore like more. I suppose it may also increase trust in the applicant if mutual contacts can vouch for them and I don’t know where the balance of benefits / drawbacks lands.
I appreciate the initiative and helpful presentation of results! A lot of people want to work for an EA org, I think on the basis that this action seems extremely EA-approved and charting your own impactful career path seems very nebulous and daunting. I fairly frequently repeat something like “okay but I want you to pay attention to the mountain of rejected EA resumes over here”, so I appreciate this resource and novel reporting about how people actually felt about the process.
Her alternative pathways to impact are volunteering for the EA DC group, donating to effective charities, and parenting two children who may someday have impactful careers.
I’m not sure whether ‘alternative’ was meant to be diminutive but, just in case, I want to say that donating effectively and organizing (and, possibly, other approaches) are fine and good and not merely a fallback approach. Not everyone in the EA movement is going to end up working for the EA movement.
Unfortunately I’m sick and bowing out, but the meetup is still on!
To help you find the group, at least one person should be wearing a shirt with the heart-in-lightbulb logo of effective altruism, and there should be a decent turnout (~8-10 people?) based on RSVPs from the various platforms we advertise the event. The group may be in the upstairs portion of the venue.
Beginner Friendly Social
I agree that if you’re already bought in to moral consideration for 10^umpteen future people, that’s longtermism.
Yes. I think your list of commonsense priorities are even more beneficial in the view of longtermism. Factors like “would this have happened anyway, just a bit later” may still apply and reduce the impact of any given intervention. Then again, notions like “we can reach more of the universe the sooner we start expanding” could be an argument for sooner being better for economic growth.
The topics of working for an EA org and altruist careers are discussed occasionally in our local group.
I wanted to share my rough thoughts and some relevant forum posts that I’ve compiled in this google doc. The main thesis is that it’s really difficult to get a job at an EA org, as far as I know, and most people will have messier career paths.
Some of the posts I link in the doc, specifically around alternate career paths:
The career and the community
Consider a wider range of jobs, paths and problems if you want to improve the long-term future
My current impressions on career choice for longtermists
One takeaway, I think, is that these things which already seem good under common sense are much more important in the longtermist view. For example, I think a longtermist would want extinction risk to be much lower than what you’d want from a commonsense view.
I believe that was discussed in the episode with Spencer. Search for ‘threatened’ in the transcript linked here.
00:22:30 Spencer Greenberg
And then the other thing that some people have claimed is that when Alameda had that original split up early on, where some people in the fact about trans community fled, that you had somehow threatened one of the people that had left. What? What was that all about?
00:22:47 Will MacAskill
Yeah. I mean, so yeah, it felt pretty.
00:22:50 Will MacAskill
This last when I read that because, yeah, certainly didn’t have a memory of threatening anyone. And so yeah, I reached out to the person who it was about because it wasn’t the person saying that they’d been friend. It was someone else saying that that person had been friend. So yeah, I reached out to them. So there was a conversation between me and that.
00:23:07 Will MacAskill
Person that was like kind of heated like.
00:23:09 Will MacAskill
But yeah, they don’t think I was like intending to intimidate them or anything like that. And then it was also like in my memory, not about the Alameda blow up. It was like a.
00:23:18 Will MacAskill
Different issue.
April Meetup
This kind of thing gets asked every now and then, eg EA for dumb people?
Keeping Absolutes in Mind—I think donating money is still somewhat underrated in discussions like this, though I was happy to see it brought up in several comments.
Consider taking the GWWC pledge or TLYCS pledge (easier / more flexible) or some other pledge if you feel like that would help with keeping motivation up.
You could also organize or contribute to a local group. Regular local group attendance could also keep motivation up (and would be a lot less costly for your budget).Even a small donor can make a real impact for individuals directly, or help get small or new projects off the ground.
It’s also the case that the 10 Percent pledge is not the best course of action for everyone in the EA movement.
Putting an emoji by your name is just a really blunt tool and I’m not sure it’s the right tool to encourage people already interested in or part of EA to donate more.
Especially in the absence of other badges my gut is worried about this leading to unhelpful social pressure (though I’m not sure what percentage of users have the emoji etc).
This also makes the EA forum and online social spaces slightly more cult-like via increased social pressure.