TLDR
When we look across all jobs globally, many of us in the EA community occupy positions that would rank in the 99.9th percentile or higher by our own preferences within jobs that we could plausibly get.[1] Whether you work at an EA-aligned organization, hold a high-impact role elsewhere, or have a well-compensated position which allows you to make significant high effectiveness donations, your job situation is likely extraordinarily fortunate and high impact by global standards. This career conversations week, it's worth reflecting on this and considering how we can make the most of these opportunities.
Intro
I think job choice is one of the great advantages of development. Before the industrial revolution, nearly everyone had to be a hunter-gatherer or a farmer, and they typically didn’t get a choice between those.
Now there is typically some choice in low income countries, and typically a lot of choice in high income countries. This already suggests that having a job in your preferred field puts you in a high percentile of job choice. But for many in the EA community, the situation is even more fortunate.
The Mathematics of Job Preference
If you work at an EA-aligned organization and that is your top preference, you occupy an extraordinarily rare position. There are perhaps a few thousand such positions globally, out of the world's several billion jobs. Simple division suggests this puts you in roughly the 99.9999th percentile of job preference.
Even if you don't work directly for an EA organization but have secured:
* A job allowing significant donations
* A position with direct positive impact aligned with your values
* Work that combines your skills, interests, and preferred location
You likely still occupy a position in the 99.9th percentile or higher of global job preference matching. Even without the impact perspective, if you are working in your preferred field and preferred country, that may put you in the 99.9th percentile of job preference
It would may be helpful to grow a cross-national/ethnic overarching identity around "wisdom and doing good". EA does this is a bit, but is heavily constrained to the technocratic. While that is it useful subcomponent of that broader identity, it can push away people who share or aspire the underlying ideals of (1) "Doing good as a core goal of existence" and (2) "Being wise about how one chooses to do good"—but who don't share the disposition or culture of most EA's. Even the name itself can be a turnoff—it sound intellectual and elitist.
Having a named identity which is broader than EA, but which contains it, could be incredibly helpful for connecting across neurodiverse divides in daily work, and could be incredibly valuable as a cross-cutting cleavage in national/ethnic/ etc. divides in conflict environments, if this can encompass a broad enough population over time.
I'm not sure what that name might be in English, or if it makes more sense to just expand meaning of EA, but it may be worth thinking about this, and consciously growing a movement around that with aligned movements that perhaps get at other "lenses of wisdom" that focus on best utilizing/growing resources for broad positive impact.
Assuming misaligned AI is a risk, is technical AI alignment enough, or do you need joint AI/Societal alignment?
My work has involved trying to support risk awareness and coordination similar to what has been suggested for AI alignment. For example, for mitigating harms around synthetic media / “deepfakes” (now rebranded to generative AI) and it worked for a few years with all the major orgs and most relevant research groups.
But then new orgs jumped in to fill the capability gap! (e.g. eleuther, stability, etc.)
Due to demand and for potentially good reasons: those capabilities which can harm people can also help people. The ultimate result is the proliferation/access/democratization of AI capabilities in the face of risks.
I’m currently skeptical that this sort of coordination is possible without some addressing deeper societal incentives (AKA reward functions; e.g. around profit/power/attention maximization, self-dealing, etc.) and related multi-principal-agent challenges. This joint/ai societal alignment or holistic alignment would seem to be a prerequisite to the actual implementation of technical alignment.[2]
This is assuming you can even get the major players on board, which isn't true for e.g. misaligned recommender systems that I've also worked on (on the societal side).
This would also be generally good for the world! E.g. to address externalities, political dysfunction, corruption, etc.