Cross-posted to my blog.
Counterfactuals matter. When you’re taking a job, you should care about who would take the job if you didn’t, and how much worse a job than you they’d do.
This matters from the other side too: employers should consider counterfactuals when deciding who to hire. Suppose you’re an employer and considering hiring a promising employee. What would a prospective employee do if you didn’t hire them? How good is it compared to working for you?
If a particular candidate cares a lot about improving the lives of sentient beings, they’d probably do something valuable even if they didn’t get hired, and this should count as a consideration against hiring them.
This comes into play for organizations that hire many altruistically-minded people but also hire people who might not focus on doing good if they took a different job. For example, GiveWell hires some analysts who might otherwise go into consulting, and MIRI hires researchers who might otherwise go into academia and work on relatively unimportant math problems. These employees end up doing way more good than they would otherwise. But GiveWell and MIRI also hire many people who care a lot about improving the world and would do a lot of good even if they worked somewhere else. The only benefit of hiring these people comes from the differential between the good they do there versus the good they do elsewhere1.
Now, this is not to say you should never hire EAs or other altruists. There are two big reasons why hiring altruists still makes sense in many cases:
- You don’t have any alternative candidates worth hiring, or finding such a candidate would require a large investment.
- A particular altruistic candidate looks sufficiently better than the alternative candidate that the difference between candidates exceeds the difference between the altruistic candidate’s value at your organization and their value elsewhere.
That second reason may be a bit confusing so let’s delve into it further. When a candidate chooses to work for you instead of somewhere else, presumably that’s because they will do more good working for you. The amount of good you do by hiring them is determined by how much good they do directly minus how much good they would have done if you hadn’t hired them. Let’s say they would do X good working for you and Y good working elsewhere, so you add Z = X - Y value to the world by hiring them. If your alternative non-altruistic candidate would do less than Z good by working for you, it’s still worth it to hire the more altruistic applicant.
How much does this consideration matter in practice? It probably depends on each organization’s particular circumstances. I would expect that this wouldn’t change your decision about who to hire in the overwhelming majority of cases, but it may make a difference sometimes.
Notes
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This doesn’t just apply to people within the EA community; I’m certainly not claiming that only EAs do things that are effective. It applies to anyone who would do valuable things otherwise. ↩
Organizations become dysfunctional when employees have reasons to act in a way that's incompatible with the goals of the organization. See the principal-agent problem. Aligning the incentives of employees with the goals of the organization is nontrivial. You can see this play out in the business world:
One reason Silicon Valley wins is because companies in Silicon Valley offer meaningful equity to their employees. Peter Thiel recommends against compensating startup CEOs with lots of cash or using consultants.
Y Combinator companies are most interested in hiring programmers motivated by building a great product. If you're building an app for skiers, it may be wise to skip the programming genius in favor of a solid developer who's passionate about skiing.
For a non-Silicon Valley example, Koch Industries has grown 2000x since 1967. Rather than using breakthrough technology, connections, or cheap capital, Charles Koch credits his success to the culture he built based on "crazy ideas drawing from my interest in the philosophy of science, the scientific method, and my studies of how people can best live and work together." On the topic of hiring, he says: "most [companies] hire first on talent and then they hope that the values are compatible with their culture... We hire first on values."
The principal-agent problem is especially relevant in large organizations. An employee's incentives are set up by their boss, so each additional layer of hierarchy is an opportunity for incentive problems to compound. (Real-life example from my last job: boss says I need to work on project x, even though we both know it's not very important for the company, because finishing it makes our department look good.) This is the stuff out of which Dilbert comics are made.
But incentives are still super important in small organizations. You'd think that a company's CEO, of all people, would be immune, but Thiel observed that high CEO salaries predict startup failure because it makes the company's culture not "equity-focused".
There are also benefits associated with having a team that's unified culturally.
Using non-EA employees seems fine when incentives are easy to set up and the work is not core to the organization's mission, e.g. ditch-digging type work.
I agree with this. Organisational culture matters a lot. I would suggest that a good strategy is hiring a mix, where there are enough people motivated by the right thing to set and maintain the culture, and those new to the culture will, for the most part, adopt it (provided the culture is based around sound principles, as EA is). This provides the benefit of (a) allowing the flexibility to hire in people with specialist skills outside current EA (b) encouraging the development of more EAs (c) providing outside perspectives that can, where appropriate, be used to improve implementation of EA principles (or refinement of principles).
(Note that what you're most likely to be looking at in many of these cases (new people) is not "people who are opposed to EA" but more likely "people who haven't previously encountered, thought deeply about, or had a lot of exposure to the best thinking/arguments around EA".
(This is obviously relevant to generic culture-building, not necessarily EA-specific)
Excellent point, that's an important reason to hire value-aligned people that I hadn't really considered. I expect it wouldn't matter much in some cases; for example, my understanding is that most GiveWell employees wouldn't be doing anything particularly altruistic if they worked elsewhere, and GiveWell doesn't seem to have substantial principal-agent problems. But I would expect you'd want to hire value-aligned employees in most cases.
Edit: Alternatively, you can benefit from hiring value-aligned people who probably wouldn't do something similarly effective otherwise. For example, I'd expect that effective animal organizations hire some people who care about animals but otherwise would have worked at a shelter or something similarly small-scale.
Grantmaking seems to me like an area where it's especially important to hire value-aligned people. Handing out large amounts of money = conflict of interest opportunities galore.
It's also hard to observe how good a job a GiveWell analyst is doing. It seems easy for poorly-aligned analysts to do suboptimal work (mainly through subtle omissions) in a way that more motivated people may not. e.g. a non-altruistic employee may not choose to highlight a crucial consideration that renders 3 months of their work irrelevant.