I agree and argued in a similar direction in a comment last year.

As an employer, I would not want to rely on an employee taking a below-market salary. Otherwise, I might be incentivised to keep someone on the team even if they are underperforming, undermining the work of other team members. I would want to hire for talent first and leave salary discussion for the last step, to avoid bias.

That being said, there might be good cases for early-stage orgs that might otherwise not be able to hire, or for positions that might open because of the low salary requirements. At Successif, we recommend that job-seekers use informational interviews with potential employers to explore these kinds of new roles. 

My short Claude prompt was only intended as a conversation starter, so I'm happy this worked. I'm not considering investing, but if potential investors would like to carry this on and share here, this might be useful.

I agree and would encourage potential investors to take into consideration base rates of startups reaching €1M+ on profits yearly when comparing this to other forms of investments. I spent 5 min prompting Claude to come up with a BOTEC based on this post, which I haven't checked but could be an entry point to additional research.

The board members of EA Germany are elected by the members (over 100) of the organization. The board is responsible for hiring the director.

What you write aligns with the challenges we see from our advisees, and based on your profile, you may be a good fit for our career advising program if you are open to working on AI Risk reduction.

For people we have helped in our program, we typically see transition timelines of 6-18 months, but just today I talked with someone for whom it took two years. My colleague Moneer wrote about his experiences in getting into a position, which included taking 170 actions (like applications, 1-1s, projects). This can seem like a lot, but it comes down to 3 per week on average over a year.

You don't have to have an academic background to succeed (I never went to university myself), but regardless of your qualifications, be prepared for it to take time to find a position. In our advising, we emphasize the importance of building networks, conducting informational interviews, and getting more information on how to position oneself as a promising candidate.

That being said, you might be able to have a higher counterfactual impact if you find a position that is not in one of the well-known orgs - I would keep that in mind.

Talent pipelines. There’s no fellowship to train people to go directly into advocacy for AIS, compared to over 10 such efforts aimed at research. We’re training AIS researchers by the 100s, and leaving advocates to figure it out for themselves.

I'm not sure if this is different from what you meant, but we ran the first iteration of our AI Safety Advocacy Fellowship this year with promising results.

It seems 1- 1s are done remotely, which means this could also be done by an international organization. I assume this would allow it to be more cost-effective as you would only need one organization, director, CRM, and training for several people who could do 1-1s for several regions.

Thank you for asking this question! I have the feeling that for some national groups, we might be upholding them based on path dependence, not because they have intentionally selected the right target group. I wrote a recent comment about this, based on my experience at EA Germany.

I'm most excited about national organisations that can reach specific, narrow target groups, as many of the scalable programs would seem more efficient to do on a larger scale.

That being said, a larger organization operating at the continental or international level could still hire contractors to experiment with smaller interventions. This would mean having only one organization with one director, potentially increasing cost-effectiveness while allowing for experimentation with different target groups and markets.

A director of EA Europe could hire a team to organize a conference in the North of the UK, for example, while having an Italian-speaking contractor doing 1- 1s for Italy and organizing group calls for European CBs. As a UK CB, you take away these possibilities as you artificially narrow the focus without much reason.

I would be excited for EA UK to think more broadly in scope, connect with other European national groups, and expand the parameters within which the director would be allowed to operate.

So exciting to see that you are doing the first EAGx in South America (if I’m not mistaken)!