D_M_x
Posts 27
Comments304
It will depend on what your alternatives are. If you could become a charity entrepreneur, I would expect this option dominates over your proposed path. Perhaps you are pursuing some other direct work options that you can compare to your option once you have received an offer.
But if there are no compelling direct work options (and for most people, there won't be), earning and donating as much as you can is a great path! Donating $10k a year is a great start.
First I apologize for my late response!
I completely agree with you that being in a limbo state is the least effective place you can be! Exploring is valuable, but at some point you have to act what you have learnt. Even if what you learnt was really not what you were hoping to learn...
My perspective is that I can still have a major impact via donations. The more I earn, the more I can donate. The more frugal I live, the more I can donate too. Unfortunately the EA Community is no longer as supportive of people who see their primary way to impact via donations as it once was. I don't think I would have come to my current perspective if I had joined the EA Community in recent years. But Giving What We Can is ramping up again and holding some events if this is a path you might be interested in.
I am still working in the UK Civil Service and have worked here for 3.5 years by now. I do consider the direct impact of my work in the Civil Service to be trivial compared to the donations I can make thanks to my earnings. I have increased my pay by ~135% compared to when I started (not inflation-adjusted). How much this has increased my donations is a bit harder to say as my finances and donations are mingled with my husband's.
I do not consider myself settled as I expect my earnings to tap out now. My original plan was to switch to the private sector this year, but this has been tricky as tech is having a downturn. All my Civil Service roles have been data/tech roles. I also considered some other direct work options this year, but there were very few I was interested in (both due to poor fit as well as doubts over their actual impact) and none of them panned out.
Hope this helps and feel free to reach out anytime. I am sorry you are in this position.
I appreciate that you are putting out numbers and explain the current research landscape, but I am missing clear actions.
The closest you are coming to proposing them is here:
We need a concerted effort that matches the gravity of the challenge. The best ML researchers in the world should be working on this! There should be billion-dollar, large-scale efforts with the scale and ambition of Operation Warp Speed or the moon landing or even OpenAI’s GPT-4 team itself working on this problem.[17] Right now, there’s too much fretting, too much idle talk, and way too little “let’s roll up our sleeves and actually solve this problem.”
But that still isn't an action plan. Say you convince me, most of the EA Forum and half of all university educated professionals in your city that this is a big deal. What, concretely, should we do now?
We have a regular EtG meetup in London. You might be interested in setting up something similar where you live, perhaps branching off a preexisting Effective Giving/Giving What We Can group?