It feels like when I'm comparing the person who does object-level work to the person who does meta-level work that leads to 2 people (say) doing object-level work, the latter really does seem better all things equal, but the intuition that calls this model naive is driven by a sense that it's going to turn out to not "actually" be 2 additional people, that additionality is going to be lower than you think, that the costs of getting that result are higher than you think, etc. etc.

But this intuition is not as clear as I'd like on what the extra costs / reduced benefits are, and how big a deal they are. Here are the first ones I can think of:

• Perhaps the people that you recruit instead aren't as good at the job as you would have been.
• If your org's hiring bottlenecks are not finding great people, but instead having the management capacity to onboard them or the funding capacity to pay for them, doing management or fundraising, or work that supports the case for fundraising, might matter more.
  • but 80k surely also needs good managers, at least as a general matter
• I think when an org hires you, there's an initial period of your onboarding where you consume more staff time than you produce, especially if you weight by seniority. Different roles differ strongly on where their break-even point is. I've worked somewhere who thought their number was like 6-18 months (I forget what they said exactly, but in that range) and I can imagine cases where it's more like... day 2 of employment. Anyway, one way or another, if you cause object level work to happen by doing meta level work, you're introducing another onboarding delay before stuff actually happens. If the area you're hoping to impact is time-sensitive, this could be a big deal? But usually I'm a little skeptical of time-sensitivity arguments, since people seem to make them at all times.
• it's easy to inadvertently take credit for a person going to role that they would actually have gone to anyway, or not to notice when you guide someone into a role that's worse (or not better, or not so much better) than what they would have done otherwise (80k are clearly aware of this and try to measure it in various ways, but it's not something you can do perfectly)

I think this depends on what the specific role is. I think the one I'm going for is not easily replaceable, but I'm mostly aiming not to focus on the specific details of my career choice in this thread, instead trying to address the broader questions about meta work generally.

oh! uhh, how?

sometimes I feel bone-headedly stuck on even apparently-simple things like "if nonprofit growth is easier than for-profit growth, does that mean that nonprofits should spend more effort on growth, or less?"

I'm currently facing a career choice between a role working on AI safety directly and a role at 80,000 Hours. I don't want to go into the details too much publicly, but one really key component is how to think about the basic leverage argument in favour of 80k. This is the claim that's like: well, in fact I heard about the AIS job from 80k. If I ensure even two (additional) people hear about AIS jobs by working at 80k, isn't it possible going to 80k could be even better for AIS than doing the job could be?

In that form, the argument is naive and implausible. But I don't think I know what the "sophisticated" argument that replaces it is. Here are some thoughts:

• Working in AIS also promotes growth of AIS. It would be a mistake to only consider the second-order effects of a job when you're forced to by the lack of first-order effects.
  • OK, but focusing on org growth fulltime seems surely better for org growth than having it be a side effect of the main thing you're doing.
• One way to think about this is to compare two strategies of improving talent at a target org, between "try to find people to move them into roles in the org, as part of cultivating a whole overall talent pipeline into the org and related orgs", and "put all of your fulltime effort into having a single person, i.e. you, do a job at the org". It seems pretty easy to imagine that the former would be a better strategy?
  • I think this is the same intuition that makes pyramid schemes seem appealing (something like: surely I can recruit at least 2 people into the scheme, and surely they can recruit more people, and surely the norm is actually that you recruit a tonne of people" and it's really only by looking at the mathematics of the population as a whole you can see that it can't possibly work, and that actually it's necessarily the case that most people in the scheme will recruit exactly zero people ever.
    • Maybe a pyramid scheme is the extreme of "what if literally everyone in EA worked at 80k", and serves as a reducto ad absurdum for always going into meta, but doesn't tell you precisely when to stop going meta. It could simultaneously be the case that pyramid schemes stop far too late, but everyone else stops significantly too early.
• OK, so perhaps the thing to do is try to figure out what the bottleneck is in recruitment, and try to figure out when it would flip from "not enough people are working on recruitment" to "there isn't more work to do in recruitment", e.g. because you've already reached most of the interested population, and the people you've already reached don't need more support, or in practice giving them more support doesn't improve outcomes.
• OK, so when recruiting stops working, stop doing it (hardly a shocking revelation). But even that seems much more recruiting-heavy in implication than the norm. Surely you don't only stop when recruiting is useless, but when it is not as useful as your alternative.
• In a lot of for-profit organisations, you need to stop recruiting because you need to start making money to pay the recruiters and the people they recruit. Even if it is worth more than it would cost to continue recruiting, you can't pay for it, so you have to do some object-level stuff, to prove to people that you deserve the confidence to continue to do the recruiting.
  • It's natural to think that if you could have arbitrary lines of credit, you'd want to do lots more recruitment up front, and this would eventually pay off. But there are people out there with money to lend, and they systematically don't want to lend it to you. Are they irrational, or are you over-optimistic?
  • It seems like the conclusion is forcing you to do object-level stuff is actually rational, because lots of people with optimistic projections of how much recruitment will help you are just wrong, and we need to find that out before burning too much money on recruiting. This discipline is enforced by the funding structure of for-profit firms.
  • The efficient market hypothesis as-applied here suggests that systematically demanding less or more object-level work from firms won't allow you to do better than the status quo, so the existing overall level of skepticism is correct-ish. But non-profit "recruiting" is wildly different in many ways, so I don't know how much we should feel tethered to what works in the for-profit world.
  • The overall principle that we need people doing object-level work in EA in order to believe that meta-level work is worth doing seems correct. In the for-profit world the balance is struck basically by your equity holders or creditors seeking assurance from you that your growth will lead to more revenue in the future. In the non-profit world I suppose your funders can provide the same accountability. In both cases the people with money are not wizards and are not magically better at finding the truth than you are, though at least in the for-profit world if they repeatedly make bad calls then they run out of money to make new bad calls with (while if they make good calls they get more money to make more / bigger calls with), so that acts as something of a filter. But being under budget discipline only makes it more important that you figure out whether to grow or execute; it doesn't really make you better at figuring it out.
• I suppose the complement to the naive thing I said before is "80k needs a compelling reason to recruit people to EA, and needs EA to be compelling to the people to recruit to it as well; by doing an excellent job at some object-level work, you can grow the value of 80k recruiting, both by making it easier to do and by making the outcome a more valuable outcome. Perhaps this might be even better for recruiting than doing recruiting."
  • This feels less intuitively compelling, but it's useful to notice that it exists at all.

This take is increasingly non-quick, so I think I'm going to post it and meditate on it somewhat and then think about whether to write more or edit this one.

I think there's a big difference between "more effective" and "most effective", and one of the most important and counterintuitive principles of EA is that trying to find the best option rather than just a good option can make a huge difference to how much good you do -- we have to prioritise between different goods, and this is painful to do (hence easy to avoid) but really important.

I tried to click "get notified" on this comment but I'm not sure if it did anything, so I will have to come up with something useful to contribute to make sure :P

I wish we had markdown syntax for footnotes, as well. As-is it often feels like the markdown editor is a second-class citizen.

FWIW I clicked on "What is the admissions bar for EA Global?" expecting it to be a post asking that question, rather than answering it. Maybe I'd simply call this "Admissions bar for EA Global" or something.

(Equally, don't overweight this just because I happened to comment about it, but maybe the agree / disagree votes will be useful)

I'm writing a comment and not an answer because I think this also doesn't meet your criteria (too long, I'd guess), but I thought I'd mention It Looks Like You’re Trying To Take Over The World, a short story written by Gwern that is on this theme.

This is a nice summary, and I agree with your theory about potential causes. I added the Impostor Syndrome tag to this post, which you might find useful to browse for more ideas other people have had.

(In case anyone else was wondering, the dictionaries I checked accept both impostor and imposter as variants of the same word. It looks like existing posts are split about evenly between the two :) )