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This is: The career and the community, published by richard_ngo on the AI Alignment Forum.
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tl;dr: for the first few years of their careers, and potentially longer, most effective altruists should focus on building career capital (which isn’t just 'skills’!) rather than doing good or working at EA organisations. However, there are social dynamics which push new grads towards working at EA orgs, which we should identify and counteract. Note that there are a lot of unsubstantiated claims in this post, and so I’d be grateful for pushback on anything I’m incorrect about (throughout the post I’ve highlighted assumptions which do a lot of work but which I haven’t thoroughly justified). This post and this post point at similar ideas less lengthily.
Contents: 1. Advantages of working at EA organisations. 2. Advantages of external career pathways. 3. Social dynamics and implicit recommendations. 4. Building a community around moonshots. 5. Long-term and short-term constraints.
What are the most important bottlenecks limiting the amount of good the effective altruism movement can do? The original message (or at least, the one which was received by the many people who went into earning to give) was that we were primarily funding-constrained. The next message was that direct work was the most valuable career pathway, and was talent-constrained. This turned out to be a very misleading phrase, and led a bunch of talented people, particularly recent graduates who hadn’t yet built up on-the-job skills, to be unable to find EA jobs and become disillusioned with the movement. And so 80,000 Hours recently published a blog post which tries to correct that misconception by arguing that instead of being bottlenecked on general talent, EA lacks people with specific skills which can help with our favoured cause areas, for example the skill of doing great AI safety research.
I have both a specific and a general disagreement with this line of thinking; I’ll discuss the specific one first. I worry that ‘skills-constrained’ is open to misinterpretation in a similar way as ‘talent-constrained’ was. It’s true that there are a lot of skills which are very important for EA cause areas. However, often people are able to be influential not primarily because of their skills, but because of their career capital more broadly. (Let me flag this more explicitly as assumption 1.) For example, I’m excited about CSET largely because I think that Jason Matheny and his team have excellent networks and credentials, specific familiarity with how US politics works, and generally high competence. These things seem just as important to me as their ‘skills’.
Similarly, I think a large part of the value of getting into YCombinator or Harvard or the Thiel Fellowship comes from signalling + access to networks + access to money. But the more we rely on explicit arguments about what it takes to do the most good, the more likely we are to underrate these comparatively nebulous advantages. And while 80,000 Hours does talk about general career capital being valuable, we’ve already seen that the specific headline phrases they use can have a disproportionate impact. It seems plausible to me that EAs who hear about the ‘skill gap’ will prioritise developing skills over other forms of career capital, and thereby harm their long-term ability to do good compared with their default trajectory (especially since people are generally are able to make the biggest difference later in their careers).
I don’t want to be too strong on this point. Credentials are often overrated, and many people fall into the trap of continually creating career capital without ever using it to pursue their true goals. In addition, becoming as skilled as possible is often the best way to both amass career capital and do good in the long term. However, ...
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