I teach AI at emlyon business school, a private top business schools in France
I have worked as an researcher in the domain of Cognitive Neuroscience/Human Decision Making for about 10 years
Vincent Schoots
Karma: 10
I would add to the list:
corporate leadership/strategy experience.
According to the Meta Coordination Forum (2024) these kinds of skills will be the most valuable to recruit for across the EA movement. So if you do have some work experience in this area, you could potentially make a very big impact by working for good.
In this 80k podcast episode from 2020 Bejamin Todd was already nuancing the claim that EA is “talent constrained”.
TL;DR : EA had moved in 2020 from funding-constrained to talent-constrained to specific skills-constrained. Meaning that it is no longer hard to find generally talented, motivated people, what’s hard is to find people with concrete experience/talent/career capital in the niche you are hiring for.
This also follows from logic (but correct me if I’m wrong): given that EA works on the most neglected issues, there are few positions in a given cause area because the world is not spending enough money solving it. Now, through the efforts of 80k, CEA and others (e.g. this one that I took part in), many people are now applying. So if we continue to hear that EA is “talent-constrained”, this must mean that it is constrained for the specific talents it needs. (Talent, should then not be taken as “workers” as we have come to understand it in current use of English. It means actual talent at some concrete thing).
So, if I put it abrasively: most of us are not “talented” enough at what is needed. Again this is not too surprising, given the widely accepted claim that talent follows a pareto distribution, with a small number of workers being 10x more productive than the average, as well as the survey results mentioned above. However this should not be discouraging: upskilling is possible. In fact, if I continue my logic, it should be a priority of the community to do this: if we have many “generally talented” enthusiastic people, then we need to turn these into people with the specific skills needed.
On an individual level, this means we should aim to increase our demonstrable skills in the areas mentioned above. Notably, leadership seems to be a bottleneck. One way that was suggested to me is to do skilled volunteering (useful post here). If the volunteering is just outside your current capabilities, it can help you grow wile providing value. Arguably though, this is harder to do with ‘leadership’ than with other skills as it needs more consistent effort.
On a community level, maybe this means we should invest in upskilling. There are many incubators by now, though those are mostly geared towards founding.
Which brings me to the third “lesson”: there should be more people founding startups and the like, in order to turn more funding into more positions. Given all those incubators, this is indeed already happening. But, as a mid-career working parent, I know very well that grants and start-ups are not for everyone. So maybe there should be additional effort to turn mid-career people into the talent that is needed, while providing at least a little bit of income stability. It seems like a hard puzzle to me. Income stability is very costly… but maybe worth it if indeed the community needs specific skills so badly. I would love to hear if there is work in this direction.
I am reading this article 6 years down the line. The EAF website states that it is no longer active as of 2025 (current year). Is there any insight into how the budget is currently spent? It would be extremely interesting to see the actual effect of the effort (even in a very superficial form).
I would not give to the most effective charities and I would not be attempting to shift to a high-impact career.
Helen Keller Europe, Mieux Donner, Against Malaria