When people enter the EA community, they find that there are two recommended ways to contribute in the long term: working directly on one of the most important cause areas or earning to give. The former definitely has a nicer ring to it. Trying to save the world yourself is a much more motivating story than giving someone else money to do it. In addition, 80k and other EA sources place much more emphasis on doing direct work nowadays. This implies that working directly is seen as more valuable and people should try to do this first and only consider earning to give if they are not able to secure a high impact job. Therefore, most people I met in the EA community want to dedicate their life to work on something important directly, rather than working just on whatever results in the largest amount of money.
However, being able to work on something important seems to be a bit harder than one would think. Especially if your life has some constraints, like not being able to move to another country or not having the opportunity to attend a top-tier university program. In addition, even if you attended a top university and can move around freely, you run into another problem: The number of high impact jobs with a direct connection to EA is limited. Many of those jobs are located in a small number of prestigious organizations and are often widely advertised through things like the 80k job board. This leads to a lot of people applying to those jobs and a highly competitive job market (see here for an example of a person applying to jobs in EA orgs and here for an example of how EA org recruitment works). Therefore, EA orgs can pick from a wide range of very successful, knowledgeable and hard working people. Obviously, this is a good thing. I want the best people to work on the hardest problems. However, everyone else, who does not get into EA orgs, is then left with a problem: How can I still contribute to EA in a meaningful way, even though I cannot get a job at those places which promise the biggest impact possible? Be it because of constraints or other factors.
In the light of this and my subjective empirical evidence, I think this might lead to some problems in the long run. If EA only has a convincing narrative for select few that get into EA orgs, everyone else will become more and more frustrated and might internally connect EA with failure and rejection, which in turn leads people to focus on other things than EA. What can we do about this?
One idea is to put a more positive spin on staying in the field you are already in and promoting EA ideas there. Many people in EA are currently students or doing a PhD. Often they have chosen the field they are working in, because it excites and motivates them. As there are not that many EAs overall, this places those persons in a unique spot. They have deep knowledge of a field and are driven by EA values. If they continue in their field or subfield, they might be the only person there operating under EA values. This means they could have high marginal value in steering the field in a more EA aligned direction, which is a difficult but potentially high value task, depending on the field. This might be especially valuable in academia, as it is often the birthplace for ideas that permeate society. For example, in a recent discussion I had about EA jobs a PhD student reported how he is trying to infuse lessons he learned from effective altruism into the academic discourse of his field. Contributions like this are currently completely overlooked in the EA job discourse, but they provide an opportunity for people not able or willing to get a job at an EA org to do some potentially high-impact work.
This also has some implications for local groups. Right now, it seems to me, their main goal is to recruit more high potentials into EA, to make it possible to get even better people to work on the hardest, most important problems. However, not even all high-potential people in EA are likely to find a high-impact job with a direct connection to EA. To keep these valuable people motivated and value aligned, we will have to invest in local groups to make them not only a short-term welcoming place but a long-term valuable addition to peoples lives. This is important, as value drift might lead a lot of people (empirical data on value drift) away from EA. The motivation and alignment will probably have to be maintained for decades, as people often create their most valuable contributions around their 40s (see for example Figure 4 in this paper) and lots of EAs today have yet to reach their 30s.
Therefore, we should consider adding a third option between earning to give and direkt work in the highest impact jobs with a direct connection to EA: Using local groups to keep people value aligned in the long term and allow them to change their own field in regard to EA values. To facilitate this, the second most important thing for local groups, after outreach to talented people, might simply be creating a nice and welcoming environment, where members want to come back to in regular intervals for years. The members of the local group can help each other to stay motivated and EA-aligned and also help to find creative ways they can have an impact in their specific fields. Well-run and well-coordinated local groups with deliberately curated activities and engaging events such as inspiring workshops and networking events would seem to be a great environment to accomplish this (one recent idea to implement something along these lines is the German Effective Altruism Network).
Cases in which my view on this could be wrong:
- I assume that it is good, when the EA movement grows and incorporates many people from different fields and backgrounds. However, it might also be the case that a small and elite movement, might be able to accomplish more, as it is able to keep itself aligned more easily.
- Most examples are from my personal experience. This might be flawed, as the people I know might be preselected in some ways, making them a bad sample of the EA community as a whole.
- It is next to impossible for one (or very few) person(s) to push their field into a direction that is more aligned with EA values.
- Maintaining local groups has a higher focus in EA than I think it has.
- Earning to give is more motivating for other people than I think it is.
Looking forward to learn how other people in the EA community view this.
Thanks to Nadia Mir-Montazeri, Alexander Herwix and Tom Voltz for critical feedback on earlier drafts of this post.
Thanks for this post - I agree with your main point that there are many ways to contribute without working at organisations that explicitly identify with the effective altruism community, as would the rest of 80,000 Hours (where I work). In fact, I might go further in emphasising this.
The overwhelming majority of high impact roles in the world lie outside those organisations – with governments, foundations, intergovernmental agencies, large companies and, as you point out, academia. The majority of people interested in effective altruism should be taking roles in places like these, not EA orgs. Unfortunately, when we highlight specific roles there’s a bias towards opportunities we know about due to our involvement in the community, but where we’ve managed to correct for that (such as in the AI strategy and governance problem area of our job board) it’s clear that there are lots of valuable roles focusing on our top problems at a wide range of organisations.
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I agree that when considering their future career path, people should think about what skills and expertise they already have(link, link.)That might mean - if you’re enjoying and succeeding in your current path - staying there and using that position to influence your field / company in a positive direction. Though it also might also mean thinking about how your skills might translate to other effective careers. For example, governments tend to be keen to hire people with science PhDs or tech skills, as shown by things like the AAAS fellowship and Tech Congress in the US. These don’t tend to feel like a natural step from a PhD, but being a scientific adviser in government seems plausibly pretty high leverage.
Since you mentioned academia, I thought readers might be interested in a few resources that might be useful for them if they’re looking to influence their academic field. There’s a Facebook group for EA academics to share what they’re working on and help each other. Luke Muehlhauser wrote an excellent report on cases where people successfully and unsuccessfully tried to deliberately build new fields. One case study that's particularly interestingly is that of neoliberal economics (written up compellingly by Kerry Vaughan), which is often held up as a great example of what can be achieved through careful work both within academia and with the people who disseminate ideas – journalists, authors, think tanks etc. Finally, there’s our career review.