I agree overall but I want to add that becoming dependent on non-EA donors could put you under pressure to do more non-EA things / less EA things -- either party could pull the other towards themselves.

Keep in mind that you're not coercing them to switch their donations, just persuading them. That means you can use the fact that they were persuaded as evidence that you were on the right side of the argument. You being too convinced of your own opinion isn't a problem unless other people are also somehow too convinced of it, and I don't see why they would be.

I think that EA donors are likely to be unusual in this respect -- you're pre-selecting for people who have signed up for a culture of doing what's best even when it wasn't what they thought it was before.

I guess also I think that my arguments for animal welfare charities are at their heart EA-style arguments, so I'm getting a big boost to my likelihood of persuading someone by knowing that they're the kind of person who appreciates EA-style arguments.

Similarly if you think animal charities are 10x global health charities in effectiveness, then you think these options are equally good:

• Move 10 EA donors from global health to animal welfare
• Add 9 new animal welfare donors who previously weren't donating at all

To me, the first of these sounds way easier.

Thanks! (I slightly object to "the normal markdown syntax", since based on my quick reading neither John Gruber's original markdown spec nor the latest CommonMark spec nor GitHub Flavoured Markdown have footnotes)

FWIW the link to your forum post draft tells me "Sorry, you don't have access to this draft"

The onboarding delay is relevant because in the 80k case it happens twice: the 80k person has an onboarding delay, and then the people they cause to get hired have onboarding delays too.

It feels like when I'm comparing the person who does object-level work to the person who does meta-level work that leads to 2 people (say) doing object-level work, the latter really does seem better all things equal, but the intuition that calls this model naive is driven by a sense that it's going to turn out to not "actually" be 2 additional people, that additionality is going to be lower than you think, that the costs of getting that result are higher than you think, etc. etc.

But this intuition is not as clear as I'd like on what the extra costs / reduced benefits are, and how big a deal they are. Here are the first ones I can think of:

• Perhaps the people that you recruit instead aren't as good at the job as you would have been.
• If your org's hiring bottlenecks are not finding great people, but instead having the management capacity to onboard them or the funding capacity to pay for them, doing management or fundraising, or work that supports the case for fundraising, might matter more.
  • but 80k surely also needs good managers, at least as a general matter
• I think when an org hires you, there's an initial period of your onboarding where you consume more staff time than you produce, especially if you weight by seniority. Different roles differ strongly on where their break-even point is. I've worked somewhere who thought their number was like 6-18 months (I forget what they said exactly, but in that range) and I can imagine cases where it's more like... day 2 of employment. Anyway, one way or another, if you cause object level work to happen by doing meta level work, you're introducing another onboarding delay before stuff actually happens. If the area you're hoping to impact is time-sensitive, this could be a big deal? But usually I'm a little skeptical of time-sensitivity arguments, since people seem to make them at all times.
• it's easy to inadvertently take credit for a person going to role that they would actually have gone to anyway, or not to notice when you guide someone into a role that's worse (or not better, or not so much better) than what they would have done otherwise (80k are clearly aware of this and try to measure it in various ways, but it's not something you can do perfectly)

I think this depends on what the specific role is. I think the one I'm going for is not easily replaceable, but I'm mostly aiming not to focus on the specific details of my career choice in this thread, instead trying to address the broader questions about meta work generally.

oh! uhh, how?