Different EA organizations seem to value dedication differently, although almost all of them would put some weight on this being a positive factor. However, I think overall the importance of dedication is underrated by the EA movement.
Why Dedication is Important
There has been some writing about talent gaps and talent distribution and how this impacts the world. For instance, a talented person might make more and thus donate more money or do higher quality research. Likewise, dedication affects these same numbers. For example, a dedicated person might donate 50% compared to a less dedicated person who donates 10%. To stick with donations as an easy to measure example, it seems that the EA movement says to generally focus on increasing your earnings as that will be easier than reducing your spending. However, a harder look at the numbers makes me skeptical of this. If a person was making a $100,000 salary and they donated 10% they would have to compare the ease of increasing their salary to $200k and sticking at that 10% to donating 20% of their original $100,000 salary. For most people it seems far easier to do the latter than the former. Of course, in theory a person could increase their salary to $120,000 and donate 50% of the increase, also ending up at the same endline, but in practice this does not seem to happen. Generally the EA’s spending goes up proportionally with their increase earnings unless they have taken a specific pledge or made a specific plan of how much to donate (and the most common pledge by far in the EA movement is the 10% one).
Importantly, I think dedication is an even bigger factor in direct EA jobs. Again, the weak version of this premise most would agree with. Someone who cares about animal rights will likely do a better job working at an animal rights organization than someone who has no interest in animals. But I think that even outside of the baseline caring or not about the cause, dedicated employees vs undedicated ones end up doing very different sorts of work. Much like talent, dedication can affect:
- What topics that are researched in an organization. Does it lean more towards what the researchers find fun or towards what will help the most people?
- Management choices. Does one hire/fund someone they are friends with or do they hire/fund the strongest applicant chosen by more objective criteria?
- Strategic direction. Does the person point their organization in a direction that might be higher impact but less personally or organizationally prestigious?
In many, if not most, of the highly talent sensitive jobs, a person's odds of making good decisions is greatly affected by their dedication as well as talent. This is particularly important if you think the person, due to talent, IQ or whatever other traits, has an extremely high expected value because these multipliers will be influencing a much higher level of output.
Of note, much like talent, dedication is a spectrum. All EA employees are "dedicated" in some sense, but there are degrees with some people being more dedicated than others, just like some people are more talented than others. Factors like these combine together to result in someone’s potential to do impact.
Our Current Level of Focus on Dedication
Currently the movement has shied away from its more dedication-focused aspects of which there are many examples:
- The Giving What We Can pledge now focuses on the main pledge (10%) and the Try Giving pledge where the previously more intense pledges (Bolder Giving or the GWWC Further Pledge) have been less frequently talked about and featured on websites.
- Excited altruism has become a more predominant force in EA which implies a lower level of self-sacrifice.
- The term self-sacrifice itself is currently seen quite negatively in EA relative to how it was 5 years ago.
- Salaries at EA orgs have gone up significantly over time as well as more frequent retreats and other staff benefits.
- As mentioned before, there have been multiple posts written on the EA movement becoming broader and more accepting towards low levels of motivation with a decrease of writing about more dedication-requiring actions.
There are alternative factors that also affect each of these (we live in a complex world and rarely is one factor the single explanation for anything), but I feel the average trend is pretty clear over the last 5 years (with perhaps a slightly higher focus on dedication in the last six months).
Concerns With Under or Over-Focusing on Dedication
I am not suggesting we limit the EA movement to only dedicated people, but I am suggesting that dedication should be broadly encouraged, not discouraged. I have talked to quite a few people in the dedicated group who felt judged, disconnected or almost treated with hostility for taking a more committed approach to EA. Of course there are worries about dispiriting low dedication folks as well, but I think there are also worries about demoralizing people with higher levels of dedication. There has been far more discussion of the former than the latter. It also worth noting that you end up having to deal with similar concerns talking about talent, IQ or any other characteristic that is not uniformly distributed in the EA population.
Social motivation and anchoring are strong drivers of many human actions. If our movement treats a 50% donor the exact same as a 10% donor, fewer people will donate 50% than if it's activity celebrated and talked about. The effect is much worse if people are a bit negative towards them, suggesting they should be aware of burnout and be very careful about making others feel bad. The same rules apply for 10% vs 1% donations as well. Every ethical decision will have some people who accept it minorly, majorly and not at all, and we want to be careful not to anchor our movement’s baseline dedication level too heavily off the first pledge that got popular in it.
Another concern people might have is closing the door to new, less involved members, but again I think this concern can be reversed as well. I know folks from other movements who have trouble treating EA seriously when senior members or most members of the EA movement see EA as a very minor part of their lives. These are the sort of people who, if they joined, would have very high levels of involvement and potentially endline impact. It's worth noting that a 50% donor donates as much as fifty 1% donors (assuming they have the same average income), so even if there are lower numbers of people in this category, they are still worth considering seriously from an impact perspective. I think one could argue the differences are even more extreme in direct work. Some people might say that this is the opposite of their concern, and that high talent people will be scared away by some members being very devoted. However, if we’re getting high talent people with low commitment, we have all of the problems listed above, magnified by the fact that they are higher output.
A frequent worry people have is that those less invested in the movement will feel bad if there are people doing far more than them. However, this equally applies to all levels of involvement. We would not want to stop promoting giving 10% because it makes the people who give less feel bad. Of course we don’t want to bludgeon people with guilt, but unfortunately, doing more than the norm ethically will inevitably lead to some people feeling guilty or insecure. We should try to speak about things sensitively while still encouraging people to do the most impactful thing given their context. Which brings me to the final consideration - not everybody can be very committed.
If somebody mentions something they are doing that is above the average, people are quick to note that not everybody can accomplish said feats. This is definitely true. However, as above, it applies to every level of involvement in the movement. Not everybody can afford to donate 10% or do high impact volunteering. That does not mean that we should not promote those actions. We just need to try and communicate it sensitively and recognize that each person has different life circumstances. However, if you are fortunate enough to have life circumstances that allow for higher levels of dedication, don’t hold back just because others cannot. We should all give what we can, whether it be money or talent.
In summary, dedication is an important factor predicting impact. It either leads to people giving more per income or making decisions with impact as the more dominant consideration. We should encourage people making impact a larger part of their lives rather than discouraging it or being indifferent.
I’m curious what kind of experiences people in the dedicated group actually had that put them off if you could elaborate on that.
I share the impression that dedication is less encouraged in EA these days than five years ago. I’m also personally very disappointed by that since high dedication felt like a major asset I could bring to EA. Now I feel more like it doesn’t matter which is discouraging.
My guess is that this is because high dedication is a trait of youth movements and the age of the median and perhaps more importantly the most influential EAs has gone up in the mean time. EA has lost its youth movement-y vibe.
I’m also interested whether the other movements you’re comparing EA to are youth movements?
Another factor leading to dedication being emphasized less might be that people are less motivated to be dedicated these days. The growth of the movement and the funding available have resulted in an individual’s EA contributions mattering far less than they used to.
The increased concern about downside risk has also made it much harder to ‘use up’ your dedication. A few years ago you could at least always do some outreach - now it’s commonly considered far less clear the sign on that is positive.
Thanks for articulating that - it was a undefined sense of ill-ease, that I now have words for. When I joined EA initially I naively thought everything I did (donating, outreach) was certainly net positive, and I could boldly dedicate away! The uncertainty I now feel about everything makes motivation harder and deprives me of the satisfaction I used to get (especially as my brain prefers to fixate on the possible negatives, rather than the expected value).
A possible solution to this problem is to 'use up' your dedication in systematic research working to resolve important uncertainties.
As I stated in this comment, it's far from a consensus actions like donating or outreach are of an ambiguous sign.
It's my impression it's a handful of coordinator organizations in EA who think it's not clear the sign of outreach is positive. It's my impression from most individual effective altruists I talk to, and I expect this would extend to their opinion as a bloc, the sign of outreach, even after taking into account the possibility of rogue/unilateral actors, is moderately positive.
But should we not expect coordinator organizations to be the ones best placed to have considered the issue?
My impression is that they have developed their view over a fairly long time period after a lot of thought and experience.
Yes, but I think the current process isn't inclusive of input from as many EA organizations as it could or should be. It appears it might be as simple as the CEA having offices in Berkeley and Oxford meaning they receive a disproportionate amount of input on EA from those organizations, as opposed to EA organizations whose staff are geographically distributed and/or don't have an office presence near the CEA. I think the CEA should still be at the centre of making these decisions, and after recent feedback from Max Dalton from the CEA on the EA Handbook 2.0, I expect they will make a more inclusive process for feedback on outreach materials.
I'm not quite sure what argument you are trying to make with this comment.
I interpreted your original comment as arguing for something like: "Although most of the relevant employees at central coordinator organisations are not sure about the sign of outreach, most EAs think it is likely to be positive, thus it is likely to in fact be positive".
Where I agree with first two points but not the conclusion, as I think we should consider the staff at the 'coordinator organizations' to be the relevant expert class and mostly defer to their judgement.
Its possible you were instead arguing "The increased concern about downside risk has also made it much harder to ‘use up’ your dedication" is not in fact a concern faced by most EAs, since they still think outreach is clearly positive, so this is not a discouraging factor.
I somewhat agree with this point, but based on your response to cafelow I do not think it is very likely to be the point you were trying to make.
Not sure i agree with this. Certainly there is less focus on donating hug sums of money, but that may also be explained by the shift to EA Orgs now often recommending direct work. But i think the EA community as a hole now focusses less on attracting huge ammounts of people and more on keeping the existing members engaged and dedicated and influencing their career choice (if i remember correctly the strategic write-ups from both CEA and EAF seem to reflect this).
For instance, the recent strategy write-up by CEA mentions dedication as an important factor:
But i agree that there is a lot of focus on 'talent' and dedication seems to take a second role behind it. This may be defensable but i think that we could probably stress dedication a bit more, because talking about 'dedication' may turn less people of than talk about 'talent'. To me talent seems more like something you have while dedication seems like something that 'merely' requires willpower. I would generaly be more worried about 'lacking talent' than 'lacking dedication', but I don't really know how many people share that intuition.
"I’m also personally very disappointed by that since high dedication felt like a major asset I could bring to EA. Now I feel more like it doesn’t matter which is discouraging." It’s still very helpful to other dedicated people to know people like you :)
The main movement I am comparing EA to is its younger self, but I think the AR movement also came to mind a lot while writing this post.
I agree that age seems to play a pretty noticeable role, with older movements being wiser but less energetic. I think there might just be some biological mechanism at play, but I also think that in many movements people do "what they can get away with". If I can work 30 hours and my organization is still successful, it’s less motivating to work 60 than if that 30 extra hours will be the make more break. Wisdom gives me more ability to slack on energeticness.
See this comment I made about why an increase in the median age of effective altruists might not play as much a role as one would expect at first glance.
I think an increase in median age would have less to do with the shift than emphasizing dedication less. One of the primary drivers of growth for EA is outreach to undergraduate students at universities around the world, and constantly bringing in 18-22 year-olds into the movement should exert a statistical pressure that would keep the median age down. On the other hand, if messaging was emphasizing less the importance of dedication to EA, I'd naively expect the younger and fresher individuals movement organizations are bringing into the movement are being less selected for dedication than a few years ago.