TL;DR: The EA movement has yet to fully incorporate ideas, skills, people, and knowledge from existing fields (e.g. monitoring and evaluation). You could potentially have a lot of impact just through stealing these and adapting them to our contexts.
Epistemic status: Quick informal post on something I've been thinking about.
I’m currently basing a large portion of my career (and more importantly, my impact) on stealing ideas, best practices, and people from existing sectors and applying them in new contexts:
Effective altruism is still relatively nascent. We also tend to attract people (like myself) who are young and don’t have much experience with best practices from other spaces. As a result, many of our projects run with a deficit of existing knowledge. This is a problem because:
So we should steal more.
This can look like hiring people with existing skillsets. But it can also look like current EAs upskilling. In my experience, even a relatively novice understanding of a relevant field or skill can quickly outpace current norms. I’ll put my advice for how to upskill in this way in a comment below.
I could imagine the main downsides here being forms of credentialism or a stifling of innovation. These are worth watching, but I suspect that we are currently (at least in my EA circles) under-indexing on existing knowledge. As a result, a moderate swing in that direction would likely be net-beneficial.
We might also worry that encouraging EAs to upskill in order to resolve these gaps invites a bastardised version of external expertise. I do think this has happened to some extent with M&E, where it has been conflated with existing EA concepts like cost-effectiveness projections. That said, I generally think that even half-informed learning is better than none. In my experience, EAs who push into these new areas often end up creating more space for existing professionals as well.
Some areas where I suspect there’s a lot more to be learned for EA and animal spaces:
- Financial modelling
- Science communication
- Project management
- Ethnography
- User experience
But I’m sure there’s much more. I’d be interested to see other people’s ideas in the comments.
I've seen so many scenarios in which EA folks reinvent wheels that are already very well-established in the broader professional world, or in which people rely on networks of EAs for advice rather than asking a subject matter expert. I've mostly seen this in relation to hiring because that is an area that I've seen internal processes for a few different EA organizations.
More broadly and more informally I've seen people failed to train new managers and fail to adopt project management practices (or to even be aware that they exist). One person mentioned to me that the Project Management Institute sounded fake. I have the vague impression that a lot of people understand project management to be something like "putting tasks in a list and then ticking them off," and simply aren't aware of earned value management, risk management, quality control, and other major areas.
This is vague and handwavy, but it does seem to resonate with a general tendency toward insularity: rather than ask a consultant with many years of experience who is an expert in an area, EAs seem to be happy to ask a friend who has two years of work experience and who did a thing once fairly well.
Strong agree.
And I understand why this is a problem. It can be hard to independently create contacts in these spaces from scratch, and there is an aspect of not knowing what you don't know at play. I'm almost certain I am committing the same mistake in multiple places in my work.
Would be interested to think about solutions here. Like perhaps a group such as Consultants For Impact could take on a role of knowledge dispersal, doing things like getting project management experts to give a talks at EAGs?