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I used AI to fix transcription errors, rerrarange the ideas, and suggest tweaks to the title and some sentences.
Three of the most exciting projects to come out of EA in recent years are, in a vague sense, CEA spinouts:
* Kairos is directly a spinout of CEA and now handles most support for university AI safety groups. Basically everyone I've found who knows them is really excited about what they do
* NEST is an opinionated ideas-fi...
This post presents the executive summary from Giving What We Can’s impact evaluation for 2025. At the end of this post we share links to more information, including the full report and...
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I think location constraints (either visa or personal) should be an important factor for career choice. 80k recommends moving to a hub in general, but I think the importance varies across career paths. As a starting point, I'd try to factor such constraints into my exploration priority list. I.e., if I'm roughly equally excited about two paths overall and one fits my location constraints much better, then explore that path first.
I would definitely advise against doing a medical degree, just to then become an engineer in the US. I think it's not realistic to keep your motivation level sufficiently high.
Frontier companies are highly competitive; they can afford not to bother with remote working. For EA/AIS, I think most entry roles are similarly highly competitive, and for some roles, it's simply mandatory to be close to Tech/Policy hubs. But there are also some remote-first organizations, mostly ones that require scarce experienced profiles.
I think it's important to distinguish between the following two theories of change categories:
For #1, if the nature of the work itself does not require in-person presence, and there are no remote options, then maybe the current supply/demand gap is not as big as you originally thought, so the expected counterfactual impact might also be much lower. For #2, there is no such gap by definition, and filtering applicants for in-person presence is very likely.
Thanks for your answeing. I think there's another category for your theory of change: 3.Doing important work that not enough people "can" do it well. And that's more similar to 1. Another way to put it, how much $ do you think would it be worth for me to pay for a USA green card, if it can be bought?
On immigration, I think the EA orgs are terrible entry examples for counterfactual impact. There is already large interest to enter them despite the small size of the field so you'd probably replace a similarly good candidate who already had US work permit.
For AI companies, you could argue that you'd likely replace someone who has potentially never thought about safety before. But the AI entry roles are also incredibly competitive so it's not that you directly replace someone, it's more like you change the candidate distribution from 1000:10 to 1000:11 (non-safety vs safety focused).
I think it's worth considering upskilling outside these bubles and then transfer as your profile becomes more scarse.
I considered "doing work better" to be included in "doing work differently," but probably better to name these explicitly, thanks! Either the direction could be different (different goals) or the productivity (difference in effort/fit/etc).