A counterargument is that 80,000 Hours alienates a broader portion of the population that would be essential for movement building. That 80,000 Hours is geared towards only a certain well-educated portion of the population is a [known problem](https://80000hours.org/2020/04/which-programmes-within-ea/) that hopefully will be resolved soon.
Thanks for sharing those links. I’d like to check them out. Right now I have a lot of other work to do. My reply is therefore limited. I wanted to share my current line of thinking when I wrote, “I think this could be a fundamental flaw in thinking across the EA community and 80,000 Hours...”. Since you’ve read more on the topic, I’d agree that the intention to promote community building is indeed there.
maximumpeaches
One factor nobody has mentioned is the lack of communication between these organizations and software engineers. On Reddit I see posts all the time with titles like “are there any orgs where I can have a meaningful career?”, especially in the /r/cscareerquestions and /r/experienceddevs sub-forums. The people creating these posts have never heard of 80,000 hours or even the term “effective altruism”.
I agree with other comments about how jobs might not match with programmer’s desires for work that creates career capital (i.e. uses modern tech stack not wordpress), or low pay, or not being in their city. All of these are valid reasons, but I think they are only valid for the people considering the roles. There are a lot of people who are never considering these roles because they have no idea they exist. The other thing is that low pay, etc. is hard to fix, but getting the word out to more people about impactful jobs is easy.
I know in college I spent a lot of time searching job boards, trying to find a meaningful software engineering job. I never found one. Years later I stumble upon 80,000 hours (and a few other ways to find meaningful jobs) but the internet is a big place, and finding 80,000 hours is like finding a needle in a haystack in some ways.
(Another thing to consider is that 80,000 hours recently added the job board? I’m not sure what was there before the job board, but the website as a whole would’ve helped much less if it didn’t have a job board. Currently the 80,000 hours website is kinda like “you probably shouldn’t be a software engineer unless you went to a top 10 school and then here are some great AI safety roles...” but the job board does highlight opportunities for the non-1% of software engineers.)
I think overall there is a small proportion of software engineers who care about EA and the like, and so connecting them with the also small proportion of engineer jobs that enable EA is kind of statistically unlikely.Anyways there are probably ways to make the jobs at 80,000 hours easier to access. I have some personal plans on my small scope, and maybe 80,000 hours can do I dunno more SEO or something.
80,000 Hours talks a lot about moving to a city where you have more of an ability to have a bigger impact, and names the Bay Area specifically as one such place.
I’m trying to do the most good with my career, and considering moving to one of the cities mentioned above in order to do so.
Mostly just to get other perspectives and see if I’m missing anything from people trying to use reason to help people.
I’m confused. I read here that donating to individual politicians is more effective than donating to PACs, but this article seems to say that GAP is a PAC and has some contribution limit where mega donors can’t donate. The other article made it sound like PACs can be donated to by mega donors.
The article proposes that the two main ways to be engaged in EA are either a job or donating—but doesn’t mention community building. I think this could be a fundamental flaw in thinking across the EA community and 80,000 Hours (sorry if calling it a flaw hurts anyone’s feelings, but I get the impression people reading this will be okay thinking objectively about whether it’s a flaw). Community building can’t happen because of single individuals, it takes a lot of individuals working together, so I find it striking it’s not mentioned in the article since it’s very much in line with the topic.
It’s possible that EA is still in its infancy and the amount of people working in or donating to EA is minute compared to what we’ll see in 100 years, and that the most important thing for EA could be the growth of the community.
Think of the wild success (in terms of getting people to join and contribute) of something like Catholicism. What if Christ had never come back from Mount Tabor or the desert? What if he had never preached? I just bring up religion to point out how much, as a social movement, it benefited from attracting followers. If you look at Mormons, they have their members do a mandatory program where they go try and convert other people to the religion. What does EA do for community building?
After all, what is EA without the community?
PS I don’t really have evidence for whether community building is more impactful than working or donating. I could only speculate. But I don’t see it mentioned and I think there’s a bias in this EA community to not consider it (although yes it is mentioned here and there it just doesn’t seem to be a focus area from what I’ve read so far).
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The article proposes that the two main ways to be engaged in EA are either a job or donating—but doesn’t mention community building. I think this could be a fundamental flaw in thinking across the EA community and 80,000 Hours (sorry if calling it a flaw hurts anyone’s feelings, but I get the impression people reading this will be okay thinking objectively about whether it’s a flaw). Community building can’t happen because of single individuals, it takes a lot of individuals working together, so I find it striking it’s not mentioned in the article since it’s very much in line with the topic.
It’s possible that EA is still in its infancy and the amount of people working in or donating to EA is minute compared to what we’ll see in 100 years, and that the most important thing for EA could be the growth of the community.
Think of the wild success (in terms of getting people to join and contribute) of something like Catholicism. What if Christ had never come back from Mount Tabor or the desert? What if he had never preached? I just bring up religion to point out how much, as a social movement, it benefited from attracting followers. If you look at Mormons, they have their members do a mandatory program where they go try and convert other people to the religion. What does EA do for community building?
After all, what is EA without the community?
PS I don’t really have evidence for whether community building is more impactful than working or donating. I could only speculate. But I don’t see it mentioned and I think there’s a bias in this EA community to not consider it (although yes it is mentioned here and there it just doesn’t seem to be a focus area from what I’ve read so far).
edit: Some very anecdotal evidence for the importance of community building is I spent a lot of time researching how to find a more impactful career a couple years back. Mostly I was focused on computer science careers but easily could have been swayed by reading 80,000 Hours, if I had known it existed! Maybe it is my fault for not researching the right way, but I know there are tons of students out there who want to have impactful careers and only a sliver of them have heard of 80,000 Hours.