I’ve just ran into this, so excuse a bit of grave digging. As someone who has entered the EA community with prior career experience I disagree with your premise
“It’s very awkward to go from “manager of a small team” to “intern,” but that can be necessary if you want to learn a new domain, for instance.”
To me this kind of situation just shouldn’t happen. It’s not a question of status, it’s a question of inefficiency. If I have managerial experience and the organization I’d be joining can only offer me the exact same job they’d be offering to a fresh grad, then they are simply wasting my potential. I’d be better off at a place which can appreciate what I bring and the organization would be better off with someone who has a fresher mind and less tempting alternatives.
IMO the problem is not with the fact that people are unwilling to take a step down. The problem is with EA orgs unwilling or unable to leverage the transferrable skills of experienced professionals, forcing them into entry-level positions instead.
This doesn’t make any sense to me at all. There’s a ton of hidden assumptions there that are glossed over, e.g.
This implicitly assumes that whatever resources we have will (a) help the same percentage of global population, no matter which animals we select and (b) reduce their suffering by the same percentage.
> Higher-frequency information is valuable, but a quarterly survey is 4x more expensive than an annual survey, and its information is probably not 4x more valuable. So the cost advantage of less frequent surveys is more important, and thus we should fund the survey annually rather than quarterly.
This assumes that the value of the information from the survey is only slightly higher than its cost. Let’s imagine that the cost to conduct the survey is $10k and the information gained is worth $1M. In that case doing the survey quarterly (+$30k) would only need to increase the value of the information gained by 3% to break even