The brand new episode with Kyle Fish from Anthropic (released since you wrote this comment) discusses some reasons why AI Safety and AI welfare efforts might conflict or be mutually beneficial, if you're interested!

Make your high-impact career pivot: online bootcamp (apply by Sept 14)

Many accomplished professionals want to make a bigger difference with their career, but don’t always know how to turn their skills into real-world impact.

We (the Centre for Effective Altruism) have just launched a new, free, 4-day online career bootcamp designed to help with that.

How it works:

• Runs Sept 20–21 & 27–28 (weekends) or Oct 6–9 (weekdays)
• Online, 6–8 hours/day for 4 days
• For accomplished professionals (most participants mid-career, 5+ years’ experience, but not a hard requirement)

What you’ll get:

• Evaluate your options: identify high-impact career paths that match your skills and challenge blind spots
• Build your network: meet other experienced professionals pivoting into impact-focused roles
• Feedback on CVs: draft, get feedback, and iterate on applications
• Make real progress: send applications, make introductions, or scope projects during the bootcamp itself

“It’s short, intense, and gives you a focused burst of momentum. You’ll come away with practical tools to clarify your next steps and job search direction.” — Cibeles, pilot participant

Applications take ~30 mins and close Sept 14.

If you’re interested yourself, please do apply! And if anyone comes to mind — colleagues, university friends, or others who’ve built strong skills and might be open to higher-impact work — we’d be grateful if you shared this with them.

Thanks Karen! Interested if you have specific things in mind for implications of the economic angle? I can certainly see it playing into some of the "Predict how AI will change things, and try to make that go well for animals" predictions, or leading to more of an emphasis on "Shift towards all-inclusive AI safety".

Cool post!

Misc thought that this seems analogous to some of the points/ideas/arguments in https://www.forethought.org/research/ai-tools-for-existential-security (albeit for different tech and to primarily address different problems)

I think this is a great explanation of an important dynamic and opportunity. I feel confident that doing the sorts of things explained in this post has benefited my career a lot. 

Appreciated the footnote about informal hiring having tradeoffs; it's not clearly good that hiring  often operates this way. But the good news is that "just start really trying to do useful/impactful things" is not only helpful for the world, but helpful for people's high-impact job search. A win-win!

This is cool! Cost-effectiveness estimates would be great, but given that they're likely quite cheap per individual, my guess is that they work out as pretty cost-effective as long as we think that there is a real (average) long-term reduction in animal product consumption, and we don't see the small animal replacement problem rear it's head?

(E.g. IIRC one problem is just that we often have to rely on self-report and it's hard to rigorously assess what changes people really make, if any.)

On that note, I'd be interested if you have an impression of the quality of the studies, and whether you indeed expect this kind of effect?

(Also, could you explain what you mean by "retention rate"? Seems pretty important.)

Exciting! Great if you can connect and support impact-focused freelancers to achieve their goals.

As someone who may be looking for freelance support in the next few weeks/months, I'm wondering what I gain by posting or using the directory here, rather than other (not-altruism-focused) platforms like Fiverr, Upwork, etc?

Productive conference meetup format for 5-15 people in 30-60 minutes

I ran an impromptu meetup at a conference this weekend, where 2 of the ~8 attendees told me that they found this an unusually useful/productive format and encouraged me to share it as an EA Forum shortform. So here I am, obliging them:

• Intros… but actually useful
  • Name
  • Brief background or interest in the topic
  • 1 thing you could possibly help others in this group with
  • 1 thing you hope others in this group could help you with
  • NOTE: I will ask you to act on these imminently so you need to pay attention, take notes etc
  • [Facilitator starts and demonstrates by example]
• Round of any quick wins: anything you heard where someone asked for some help and you think you can help quickly, e.g. a resource, idea, offer? Say so now!
• Round of quick requests: Anything where anyone would like to arrange a 1:1 later with someone else here, or request anything else?
• If 15+ minutes remaining:
  • Brainstorm whole-group discussion topics for the remaining time. Quickly gather in 1-5 topic ideas in less than 5 minutes.
  • Show of hands voting for each of the proposed topics.
  • Discuss most popular topics for 8-15 minutes each. (It might just be one topic)
• If less than 15 minutes remaining:
  • Quickly pick one topic for group discussion yourself.
  • Or just finish early? People can stay and chat if they like.

Note: the facilitator needs to actually facilitate, including cutting off lengthy intros or any discussions that get started during the ‘quick wins’ and ‘quick requests’ rounds. If you have a group over 10 you might need to divide into subgroups for the discussion part.

I think we had around 3 quick wins, 3 quick requests, and briefly discussed 2 topics in our 45 minute session.

Good news if true! Thanks for sharing.

Some other guesses/hypotheses of things that may contribute to positive mental health:

• "For people who feel pulled by all the important problems out there", EA's focus on tractability, cost-effectiveness, and actually doing things that make a difference, may mean that for some people it's a much more hopeful, optimistic, solutions-oriented take than what they're used to. I remember speaking to a Leaf alum (i.e. a teenager) who found Leaf inspiring/motivating in contrast to the climate change doom and gloom that they were usually surrounded by.
• There are a bunch of mental health and wellbeing services out there specifically for EAs. Maybe this is just another opportunity to engage with that sort of support that someone might otherwise have skipped or never had access to. (Although my sense is that these services have developed/spread/grown since the 2022 survey.)
• More generally, plausible mental health / wellbeing discussion and consideration may be more part of the environment, culture, and social norms than they have had in other contexts. A different topic, but I had a similar thing for productivity when I first became more involved with EA -- I was around 21 and had graduated from a top university, but still I'd never really encountered people discussing ways to become more productive and efficient generally. I can imagine a similar thing happening for mental health. (I can also imagine people encounter 'wellness' programs in e.g. corporate environments where they are based on vibes rather than evidence, or otherwise clearly seem to be shallow, hollow, or ineffective, and then the more evidence-based approach within EA makes it resonate more. I think something a little bit like this did happen to me.)
• This is hinted at with "wanting to be impactful", but all the standard stuff in the 80k career guide about fulfilling careers etc.

(Here I'm just assuming the premise is true. I do feel a bit sceptical due to the survey response bias thing. But I don't have counterevidence beyond anecdotes and intuition.)

(Ironically, I suppose the title -- "We don't have evidence that the best charities are over 1000x more cost effective than the average" -- is also an overly confident claim, where a question might have been better, unless the original poster had carried out an exhaustive search for relevant evidence)