Oh, I'll also add as a high-absorbency high -impact career path:

• Working an easy job and volunteering for EA stuff in your hobby time.

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.

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:

• Earning to give (i.e. generation of EA money)
• Working in government (i.e. use of non-EA money and EA prioritisation skills to effectively tackle challenges faced by higher-income countries)

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.

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.

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.

Yup: attract on altruism, upskill on effectiveness. However I have sometimes noticed that altruist-first groups tend to have social ingroup/outgroup judgment criteria on how long one has been an altruist (see e.g. the vegan society's positions of power being occupied by people with long-time "vegan credentials") rather than focusing on the now and the future. They also can place additional value on ineffectively-altruist actions primarily as social signals (e.g. promoting veganism over lacto-vegetarianism really hard for animal welfare reasons despite the fact that all your lifetime dairy consumption equates to roughly one cow.) It's all part of group-bonding against a sort of "enemy". And it can be super off-putting to those who are effective but "upskilling on altruism", and possibly drive them away. It's a social dynamic you've gotta find a way through as an EA group organiser.

We might see each other sometime! My postdoc sometimes takes me to Bristol, and I'm keen to get you lot vaguely joined up with NTR-Net that hangs out at your uni. Chris Clay is starting at Bristol doing Maths this year - was up with me at EA in the Lakes, is keen.

I agree with pretty much everything you've said, with the caveat that EA should be about an intro course offer (alongside social events, you're bang on about social events). I just don't think we have the right course offer.

Rather than trying to persuade people about cause areas you gotta run teaching which upskills people's effectiveness and their altruism. Then you just kinda set them free to do whatever, and some of them will figure the whole cause thing out for themselves - and these are the kinds of people you want as "highly-engaged EAs", not the kinds of people who yield to cause area marketing pressure.

This might look something like discussions on:

• Importance, Tractability, Neglectedness as an evaluation framework
• Marginals, counterfactuals and absorbency
• How to take risks, reflect and learn from experiences, and get community support
• How to avoid being taken in by marketing, digital content, the outrage machine in your pocket, etc.
• Navigating and resisting reputation, prestige, and power dynamics in life decisions
• Leadership and social skills development
• Balancing relational altruism with an effectiveness mindset

• Practical community skill-building in plant-based cooking and first-aid

  You also need a very heavy focus on the people who are EAing, including (accurately) portraying them as flawed humans struggling with life decisions just like you.

  Another note: Most EAs started altruistic and became more effective, so it's worth structuring your pipeline around this direction. But the ones who went the other way are disproportionately doing the hardest jobs around the place, so don't discount them.

I really hope this is the sort of thing that can be enabled by the (relatively recent) shift to principles-first EA as a community outreach organising mode.

Previously, EA was a union of three(ish) cause areas sharing the same infrastructure, and getting someone "into EA" was basically about persuading them on one or more of the cause areas. I think this is a mistake.

I really think we have the opportunity to make EA more of an educational program on how to evaluate impact and optimise for effectiveness given the resources you have, as well as the provision of such resources insofar as they are copyable without marginal cost. And that means that this kind of stuff is included in the movement.

Strong upvote for use of EA worker time in this kind of thing - it could very well be a funding-neutral project that would inherently improve international food resilience.

Thanks, Lorenzo!

I agree, there is a spark of true EA in the place, which is a significant amount of why I have been attracted there. Although they could do with some access-related building updates! (Which are on the cards - I have gotten in at just the right time, I think.)

I'm also organising at Pardshaw for other communities - I am turning the place into a low-cost community LARP site, working with a bunch of local LGBTQ+ community organisers about mental health nature retreats, and I'm shortly hoping to start a midweek refugees and asylum seekers holidays programme supported by other Quakers. EA is one part of a wider portfolio here. I'd like it to be a stronger part, at least to the extent where it's maximally useful.

I think that sounds like a great post! I'm looking forward to it :)