There has been a lot of discussion about the issue of underutilization or "bycatch" within Effective Altruism and AI safety in particular. This refers to the problem of a large number of people, many of them highly interested in a cause area, not being able to do effective work on the timescales that they hoped for. Among the most popular recent articles on the subject was "Don't Be Bycatch," though it seems to me that all the articles on the underutilization problem are a series of commentaries on "After one year of applying for EA jobs: It is really, really hard to get hired by an EA organisation." However, I'm not confident that there were no posts on this before then, and I'd be happy to see any suggestions of earlier ones if people can find them.
Some other articles that have informed my thinking on this issue, and which have been widely read within Effective Altruism, are:
- Have You Tried Hiring People?
- AI Safety’s Talent Pipeline is Over-optimised for Researchers
- What to do with people?
However, there is yet to be an organized series of posts examining and discussing the underutilization issue and what to do about it. In addition, existing discussions seem to understate a range of problems caused here. With the "On Underutilization" sequence, I aim to rectify this.
In my first few posts in this sequence, I will be going through these problems in turn, making the case that, although the underutilization problem is already recognized within EA, it is a far greater problem than people are willing to admit. In later posts, I will go through possible solutions to underutilization in turn, addressing their advantages and disadvantages as well as reasons they may be neglected or not.
I would like to finish up this announcement with a disclaimer. While this sequence will disproportionately cover AI safety, as that is the field on which I have done the most research, many conclusions seem like they would apply more broadly to Effective Altruism at large. However, of note is the fact that more non-longtermist projects are constrained by available funding than longtermist projects, and so the issues I intend to raise regarding the relative prestige of direct work and earning to give are even more relevant here.
Also, my thoughts on the underutilisation problem:
We need within EA strong, respected, talent pipelines into high-absorbency high-impact career paths that are doable by EAs. By my reckoning, that's:
We need these to stop being considered failures of EA, because on the counterfactual their impact is large.
We also need EA generalist talent pipelines that teach career and leadership skills to EAs that are useful in any field of work, such that we avoid the problem where a person does "skill/interest lock-in" as a result of their EA participation and then finds there is no role that matches their skills and interests that they can actually get, and feels the movement has betrayed them.
Oh, I'll also add as a high-absorbency high -impact career path:
I don't believe in EA's "volunteers are too much effort" paradigm. I think EAs are just sorely lacking in leadership/people management skills, as a whole. I've seen a bunch of super great stuff done by motivated volunteers.
On a related note, I happened to be thinking about this a little today as I took a quick look at what ~18 past LTFF who were given early career grants are doing now, and at least 14 of them are doing imo clearly relevant things for AIS/EA/GCR etc. I couldn't quickly work out what the other four were doing (though I could have just emailed them or spent more than 20 minutes total on this exercise).
For me, it was a moderate update against "bycatch" amongst LTFF grantees (an audience which, in principle, should be especially vulnerable to bycatch), though I don't think this should be much of an update for others, especially when thinking about the EA community more comprehensively.
Really? I think it would be the opposite: LTFF grantees are the most persistent and accomplished applicants and are therefore the least likely to end up as bycatch.
Would you consider relabelling this series as something other than "bycatch"? Or at least being mindful of the terminology you use within the posts when you refer to people within the EA movement.
I think that certain descriptions (such as "bycatch") contain within them inherent value judgments that are contributing to the problem at hand.
Specifically, I don't agree that describing an EA as "bycatch" is helpful to them - not to them as a person, and definitely not to their EA career prospects, which they presumably care about quite a bit. I think it's insulting, and I don't want to see the term becoming popularised within EA as a way to describe or classify people within the EA movement.
Thanks for the feedback! Will be renaming it as "underutilization." I had seen it used both in the original post and elsewhere.