I work as head of the one on one team for 80,000 Hours. Previously I worked at the Global Priorities Institute, ran Giving What We Can and was a Fund Manager at the Effective Altruism Infrastructure Fund.
Comments here are my own views only, not my present or past employers’, unless otherwise specified.
Thank you for posting this. It very much speaks to how I’m feeling right now. I’m grateful you’ve expressed and explained it.
One thing I often see on the forum is a conflation of ‘direct work’ and ‘working at EA orgs’. These strike me as two pretty different things, where I see ‘working at EA orgs’ as meaning ‘working at an organisation that explicitly identifies itself as EA’ and ‘direct work’ as being work that directly aims to improve lives as opposed to aiming to eg make money to donate. My view is that the vast majority of EAs should be doing direct work but not at EA orgs—working in government, at the think tanks, in foundations and in influential companies. Conflating these two concepts seems really bad because it encourages people to focus on a very narrow subset of ‘direct impact’ jobs—those that are at the very few, small organisations which explicitly identify with the EA movement.
A trap I think a lot of us fall into at some time or other is thinking that in order to be a ‘good EA’ you have to do ALL THE THINGS: have a directly impactful job, donate money to a charity you deeply researched, live frugally, eat vegan etc. When, inevitably, you don’t live up to a bunch of these standards, it’s easy to assume others will judge you. That has usually turned out to be wrong in my experience. People greatly differ in how much of a sacrifice specific things are to them, and how comfortable they are with different levels of sacrifice. I felt very guilty about eating meat for years, without succeeding in really changing my eating habits at all, until a colleague (who was vegan) donated to ACE on my behalf as an off-set and told me to quit spending emotional energy on my diet and get back to work. Another colleague, on joining the organisation, was worried people would be judging her ring for being a waste of money (which was an artificial diamond, and so cheaper than it appeared), but not a single person had noticed it except to think how pretty it was. In my experience, people we meet in this community are all trying hard to help others, and while doing that they’re appreciating the great work of those around them doing the same, regardless of what form that takes. 10 years into Giving What We Can’s life, it still blows me away that there are so many people willing to give away 10% of their incomes to make the world a better place. It’s great that we’re all pushing ourselves to do more, but I hope people feel appreciated rather than judged by the larger community.
Brenton Mayer runs internal systems at 80k. That basically means operations and impact evaluation, ie the parts that don’t really get visibility or interact with the outside world. He’s been doing that extremely competently for years. Him and his team make it feel easier to work to a high standard (eg through making sure we get more of a sense of how we’re impacting users and setting an ambitious but sustainable culture), keep the lights on (figuratively by fundraising and literally) and make 80k a lovely place to work.