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This is: What to do with people?, published by Jan_Kulveit> on the effective altruism forum.
I would like to offer one possible answer to the ongoing discussion in the effective altruism community, centered around the question about scaleable use of the people (“Task Y”).
The following part of the 80000h podcast with Nick Beckstead is a succinct introduction of the problem (as emphasized by alxjrl)
Nick Beckstead: (. ) I guess, the way I see it right now is this community doesn’t have currently a scalable use of a lot of people. There’s some groups that have found efficient scalable uses of a lot of people, and they’re using them in different ways.
For example, if you look at something like Teach for America, they identified an area where, “Man, we could really use tons and tons of talented people. We’ll train them up in a specific problem, improving the US education system. Then, we’ll get tons of them to do that. Various of them will keep working on that. Some of them will understand the problems the US education system faces, and fix some of its policy aspects.” That’s very much a scalable use of people. It’s a very clear instruction, and a way that there’s an obvious role for everyone.
I think, the Effective Altruist Community doesn’t have a scalable use of a lot of its highest value . There’s not really a scalable way to accomplish a lot of these highest valued objectives that’s standardised like that. The closest thing we have to that right now is you can earn to give and you can donate to any of the causes that are most favored by the Effective Altruist Community. I would feel like the mass movement version of it would be more compelling if we’d have in mind a really efficient and valuable scalable use of people, which I think is something we’ve figured out less.
I guess what I would say is right now, I think we should figure out how to productively use all of the people who are interested in doing as much good as they can, and focus on filling a lot of higher value roles that we can think of that aren’t always so standardised or something. We don’t need 2000 people to be working on AI strategy, or should be working on technical AI safety exactly. I would focus more on figuring out how we can best use the people that we have right now.
Relevant posts and discussions on the topic are under several posts on the forum:
Can the EA community copy Teach for America? (Looking for Task Y)
After one year of applying for EA jobs: It is really, really hard to get hired by an EA organisation
Hierarchical networked structure
The answer I’d like to offer is abstract, but general and scalable. The answer is: “build a hierarchical networked structure”, for lack of better name. It is best understood as a mild shift of attitude. A concept on a similar level of generality as “prioritization” or “crucial considerations”.
The hierarchical structure can be in physical space, functional space or research space.
An example of a hierarchy in physical space could be the structure of local effective altruism groups: it is hard to coordinate an unstructured group of 10 thousands people. It is less hard, but still difficult to coordinate a structure of 200 “local groups” with widely different sizes, cultures and memberships. The optimal solution likely is to coordinate something like 5-25 “regional” coordinators/ hub leaders, who then coordinate with the local groups. The underlying theoretical reasons for such a structure are simple considerations like “network distance” or “bandwidth constraints”.
A hierarchy in functional space could be for example a hierarchy of organizations and projects providing people career advice. It is difficult to give personalized career advice to tens of thousands of people as a small and lean organization. Scalable hierarchical version of career advice may look like...
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