This is a special post for quick takes by Joey 🔸. Only they can create top-level comments. Comments here also appear on the Quick Takes page and All Posts page.
A thing that seems valuable but is not talked about much is organizations that bring talent into the EA/impact-focused charity world, vs. re-using people already in the movement, vs. turning people off the movement. The difference in these effects seems both significant and pretty consistent within an organization. I think Founders Pledge is a good example of an organization that, I think, net brings talent into the effective charities world. I often see their hires, post-leaving FP, go on to pretty impactful other roles that it’s not clear they would have done absent their experience working for FP. I wish more organizations did this vs. re-using/turning people off.
I find it a bit surprising that your point is so well-taken and has met no disagreement so far, though I am inclined to agree with it.
Another way of framing "orgs that bring talent into the EA/impact-focused charity world" is orgs whose hiring is less focused on value alignment, insofar as involvement in the movement corresponds with EA value alignment. One might be concerned that a less aligned hire might do well on metrics that can be easily ascertained or credited by one's immediate employer, but ignore other opportunities or considerations regarding impact because he/she is narrowly concerned about legible job performance and personal career capital. They could go on, in this view, to use the career capital developed and displace more aligned individuals. If funding is the larger constraint for impactful work than labor willing to work for pay, "re-using" people in the community may make sense because the impact premium from value-alignment is worth the marginal delta from a seemingly superior resume.
Of course, another view is that hiring someone into an EA org can create buy-in and "convert" someone into the community, or allow them to discover a community they already agree with.
Something that just gives me pause regarding giving too much credit for bringing in additional talent is that -regarding lots of kinds of talent- there is a lot of EA talent chasing limited paid opportunities. Expanding the labor pool for some areas is probably much less important because funding is more the limiting factor.
I think it would be cool if someone scraped linkedin and made some sort of diagram of talent flows like this. I imagine it could be done in a weekend and might yield interesting results.
Nice! My guess is that the most immediate way this data could be useful is that organizations who get funding on the basis of a "meta" theory of change (e.g. funding by OP, EAIF, MCF) get more/less funding because it turns out they are doing more/less to bring people in than expected. So maybe I would start with organizations funded by those groups, along with some other class of organizations to use as a control.
If you're looking for the meta organisations Ben is talking about, you can see all of the city and national groups funded by the Centre for Effective Altruism's Community Building Grants programme under the 'Groups' tab on this page. This is probably one of the bigger groupings of meta organisations (in terms of longterm stable funding). You also check Marieke's mindmap for a bunch of other meta organisations.
That’s an interesting point, and it does seem impactful when organisations succeed in introducing new talent to the EA/impact space, especially when it leads to long-term contributions. Isn’t this a key focus for most community building organisations, though? Or is there a nuance in the approach you’re describing that perhaps I’m missing?
I think that EA outreach can be net positive in a lot of circumstances, but there is one version of it that always makes me cringe. That version is the targeting of really young people (for this quicktake, I will say anyone under 20). This would basically include any high school targeting and most early-stage college targeting. I think I do not like it for two reasons: 1) it feels a bit like targeting the young/naive in a way I wish we would not have to do, given the quality of our ideas, and 2) these folks are typically far from making a real impact, and there is lots of time for them to lose interest or get lost along the way.
Interestingly, this stands in contrast to my personal experience—I found EA when I was in my early 20s and would have benefited significantly from hearing about it in my teenage years.
Eh, I'm with Aristotle on this one: it's better to start early with moral education. If anything, I think EA leaves it too late. We should be thinking about how to encourage the virtues of scope-sensitive beneficentrism (obviously not using those terms!) starting in early childhood.
(Or, rather, since most actual EAs aren't qualified to do this, we should hope to win over some early childhood educators who would be competent to do this!)
Are you imagining this being taught to children in a philosophy class along topics like virtue ethics etc, or do you think that “scope-sensitive beneficententrism” should be taught just as students are taught the golden rule and not to bully one another?
I think there could be ways of doing both. But yeah, I think the core idea of "it's good to actively help people, and helping more is better than helping less" should be a core component of civic virtue that's taught as plain commonsense wisdom alongside "racism is bad", etc.
I think you raise some good points. Two potential countervailing considerations:
19 year olds are legally adults - they can (varying a bit by country) vote, drink, buy firearms, join the army, get married, raise children.
It's also common for other ideological movements to target much younger people. For example, both environmentalism and feminism are taught in elementary schools.
Do you think there's a difference between developmentally and otherwise appropriate engagement focused on younger people and problematic targeting? Your statement that the cringe-inducing activities would basically include "most early-stage college targeting" along with "any" targeting at the high school level implies that there may be some difference at the young adult level in your mind, but maybe not at the not-quite-adult level.
My usual approach on these sorts of questions is to broaden the question to include what kinds of stuff I would think appropriate for analogous altruistic/charitable movements, and then decide whether EA has any special features that justify a deviation from that baseline. If I deploy that approach, my baseline would be (e.g.) that there are certainly things that are inappropriate for under-20s but that one could easily extend a norm too broadly. Obviously, the younger the age in question, the less that would be appropriate -- but I don't think I'm left with a categorical bar for engagement directed at under-18s.
(Whether investing resources in under-20s is a strategically wise use of resources is a different question to me, but does not bring up feelings of cringe for me.)
I think a semi-decent amount of broadly targeted adult-based outreach would have resulted in me finding out about EA (e.g., I watched a lot of TED Talks and likely would have found out about EA if it had TED Talks at that point). I also think mediums that are not focused on a given age but also do not penalize someone for it would have been effective. For example, when I was young, I took part in a lot of forums in part because they didn't care about or know my age.
A thing that seems valuable but is not talked about much is organizations that bring talent into the EA/impact-focused charity world, vs. re-using people already in the movement, vs. turning people off the movement. The difference in these effects seems both significant and pretty consistent within an organization. I think Founders Pledge is a good example of an organization that, I think, net brings talent into the effective charities world. I often see their hires, post-leaving FP, go on to pretty impactful other roles that it’s not clear they would have done absent their experience working for FP. I wish more organizations did this vs. re-using/turning people off.
I find it a bit surprising that your point is so well-taken and has met no disagreement so far, though I am inclined to agree with it.
Another way of framing "orgs that bring talent into the EA/impact-focused charity world" is orgs whose hiring is less focused on value alignment, insofar as involvement in the movement corresponds with EA value alignment. One might be concerned that a less aligned hire might do well on metrics that can be easily ascertained or credited by one's immediate employer, but ignore other opportunities or considerations regarding impact because he/she is narrowly concerned about legible job performance and personal career capital. They could go on, in this view, to use the career capital developed and displace more aligned individuals. If funding is the larger constraint for impactful work than labor willing to work for pay, "re-using" people in the community may make sense because the impact premium from value-alignment is worth the marginal delta from a seemingly superior resume.
Of course, another view is that hiring someone into an EA org can create buy-in and "convert" someone into the community, or allow them to discover a community they already agree with.
Something that just gives me pause regarding giving too much credit for bringing in additional talent is that -regarding lots of kinds of talent- there is a lot of EA talent chasing limited paid opportunities. Expanding the labor pool for some areas is probably much less important because funding is more the limiting factor.
I think it would be cool if someone scraped linkedin and made some sort of diagram of talent flows like this. I imagine it could be done in a weekend and might yield interesting results.
LinkedIn has made automated scraping against their ToS, so anyone attempting this should be aware that their account may get banned
I might do this. What organizations would you be most interested in seeing this for?
Nice! My guess is that the most immediate way this data could be useful is that organizations who get funding on the basis of a "meta" theory of change (e.g. funding by OP, EAIF, MCF) get more/less funding because it turns out they are doing more/less to bring people in than expected. So maybe I would start with organizations funded by those groups, along with some other class of organizations to use as a control.
Sorry for demanding the spoon-feeding, but where do I find a list of such organizations?
I found the overview in this post useful: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/xGqpQKf2FpjvwJe6q/ea-meta-funding-landscape-report
If you're looking for the meta organisations Ben is talking about, you can see all of the city and national groups funded by the Centre for Effective Altruism's Community Building Grants programme under the 'Groups' tab on this page. This is probably one of the bigger groupings of meta organisations (in terms of longterm stable funding). You also check Marieke's mindmap for a bunch of other meta organisations.
That’s an interesting point, and it does seem impactful when organisations succeed in introducing new talent to the EA/impact space, especially when it leads to long-term contributions. Isn’t this a key focus for most community building organisations, though? Or is there a nuance in the approach you’re describing that perhaps I’m missing?
This take was more aimed at hiring/staffing instead of direct outreach/EA chapters
I think that EA outreach can be net positive in a lot of circumstances, but there is one version of it that always makes me cringe. That version is the targeting of really young people (for this quicktake, I will say anyone under 20). This would basically include any high school targeting and most early-stage college targeting. I think I do not like it for two reasons: 1) it feels a bit like targeting the young/naive in a way I wish we would not have to do, given the quality of our ideas, and 2) these folks are typically far from making a real impact, and there is lots of time for them to lose interest or get lost along the way.
Interestingly, this stands in contrast to my personal experience—I found EA when I was in my early 20s and would have benefited significantly from hearing about it in my teenage years.
Eh, I'm with Aristotle on this one: it's better to start early with moral education. If anything, I think EA leaves it too late. We should be thinking about how to encourage the virtues of scope-sensitive beneficentrism (obviously not using those terms!) starting in early childhood.
(Or, rather, since most actual EAs aren't qualified to do this, we should hope to win over some early childhood educators who would be competent to do this!)
Are you imagining this being taught to children in a philosophy class along topics like virtue ethics etc, or do you think that “scope-sensitive beneficententrism” should be taught just as students are taught the golden rule and not to bully one another?
I think there could be ways of doing both. But yeah, I think the core idea of "it's good to actively help people, and helping more is better than helping less" should be a core component of civic virtue that's taught as plain commonsense wisdom alongside "racism is bad", etc.
I think you raise some good points. Two potential countervailing considerations:
19 year olds are legally adults - they can (varying a bit by country) vote, drink, buy firearms, join the army, get married, raise children.
It's also common for other ideological movements to target much younger people. For example, both environmentalism and feminism are taught in elementary schools.
Do you think there's a difference between developmentally and otherwise appropriate engagement focused on younger people and problematic targeting? Your statement that the cringe-inducing activities would basically include "most early-stage college targeting" along with "any" targeting at the high school level implies that there may be some difference at the young adult level in your mind, but maybe not at the not-quite-adult level.
My usual approach on these sorts of questions is to broaden the question to include what kinds of stuff I would think appropriate for analogous altruistic/charitable movements, and then decide whether EA has any special features that justify a deviation from that baseline. If I deploy that approach, my baseline would be (e.g.) that there are certainly things that are inappropriate for under-20s but that one could easily extend a norm too broadly. Obviously, the younger the age in question, the less that would be appropriate -- but I don't think I'm left with a categorical bar for engagement directed at under-18s.
(Whether investing resources in under-20s is a strategically wise use of resources is a different question to me, but does not bring up feelings of cringe for me.)
Do you think there's a way to tell the former group apart from people who are closer to your experience (hearing earlier would be beneficial)?
I think a semi-decent amount of broadly targeted adult-based outreach would have resulted in me finding out about EA (e.g., I watched a lot of TED Talks and likely would have found out about EA if it had TED Talks at that point). I also think mediums that are not focused on a given age but also do not penalize someone for it would have been effective. For example, when I was young, I took part in a lot of forums in part because they didn't care about or know my age.