I’m not sure I have one that folks within EA would find palatable. The solution, in my mind, is for Effective Altruism to become a movement that mostly focuses and raising and allocating capital—one that uses markets to get things done downstream of that. I think EA should get out of the business of providing subsidized labor to the “most important causes”. Instead, allocate capital and use incentives and markets to get what you want. This would mean all movement building efforts focus on earning to give. If you want someone smart to found a charity, pay to incentivize that.
One response I anticipate from EAs is that ambitious projects often require teams that have high trust (or in EA parlance—value aligned) since impact can’t often be tracked purely through metrics and incentives. I’m not sure I buy this. It’s true that corporations, at the highest level, have something far more legible that the leadership team can optimize for. But at each lower level of hierarchy, corporations also face the same problems of Goodharting and incentives alignment. They don’t always make the best decisions but good companies do manage to do this well enough at most levels to get important thigns done. What makes me even more suspicious is that people don’t even want to try this.
I guess the solution that you’re more generally pointing at here is something like ensuring a split in the incentives of the people within the specific fields and EA itself as a movement. Almost a bit like making that part of EA only be global priorities research and something like market allocation?
I have this feeling that there might be other ways to go about doing this with like programs or incentives for making people be more open to taking any type of impactful job? Something like having reoccuring reflection periods or other types of workshops/programs?
I don’t think it’s great to tell most people to. keep switching fields based on updated impact calculations. There are advantages to building focussed careers—increasing returns to effort within the same domain. The exception would be founder-types and some generalist type talent. I’m not sure why we start with the premise that EA has to channel people into specific career paths based on impact calculations. It has a distortionary effect on the price of labor. Just as I’d prefer tax dollars being channeled into direct cash payments as welfare, i’d prefer if EAs made as much money as possible and donated it, so they can pay for whoever is best qualified to do what needs to be done.
I just did.
I’m not sure I have one that folks within EA would find palatable. The solution, in my mind, is for Effective Altruism to become a movement that mostly focuses and raising and allocating capital—one that uses markets to get things done downstream of that. I think EA should get out of the business of providing subsidized labor to the “most important causes”. Instead, allocate capital and use incentives and markets to get what you want. This would mean all movement building efforts focus on earning to give. If you want someone smart to found a charity, pay to incentivize that.
One response I anticipate from EAs is that ambitious projects often require teams that have high trust (or in EA parlance—value aligned) since impact can’t often be tracked purely through metrics and incentives. I’m not sure I buy this. It’s true that corporations, at the highest level, have something far more legible that the leadership team can optimize for. But at each lower level of hierarchy, corporations also face the same problems of Goodharting and incentives alignment. They don’t always make the best decisions but good companies do manage to do this well enough at most levels to get important thigns done. What makes me even more suspicious is that people don’t even want to try this.
I guess the solution that you’re more generally pointing at here is something like ensuring a split in the incentives of the people within the specific fields and EA itself as a movement. Almost a bit like making that part of EA only be global priorities research and something like market allocation?
I have this feeling that there might be other ways to go about doing this with like programs or incentives for making people be more open to taking any type of impactful job? Something like having reoccuring reflection periods or other types of workshops/programs?
I don’t think it’s great to tell most people to. keep switching fields based on updated impact calculations. There are advantages to building focussed careers—increasing returns to effort within the same domain. The exception would be founder-types and some generalist type talent. I’m not sure why we start with the premise that EA has to channel people into specific career paths based on impact calculations. It has a distortionary effect on the price of labor. Just as I’d prefer tax dollars being channeled into direct cash payments as welfare, i’d prefer if EAs made as much money as possible and donated it, so they can pay for whoever is best qualified to do what needs to be done.