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80,000 Hours Podcast
Benjamin Todd on what the effective altruism community most needs (80k team chat #4)
Nov 12, 2020
01:25:21
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Quick takeaways
- Effective altruism movement evolution goes through stages of funding, talent, specific skills, and coordination.
- Specialized skills and profiles are crucial in overcoming bottlenecks in various issues.
- Highly skilled individuals can contribute significantly more than peers in problem resolution.
- Guidance and structured support are crucial to attract skilled individuals to work on critical issues.
- Future challenges may involve balancing funding and skill requirements, and addressing bottlenecks in coordination and skill development.
Deep dives
Evolution of Effective Altruism Movement
Ben discusses the evolution of the effective altruism movement, highlighting its shift through different stages focusing on bottlenecks like funding, talented individuals, and organizational capacity. As the movement progressed, the emphasis moved from financial constraints to skills required for addressing pressing issues, with considerations for career implications linked to each stage.
Talent Constraint in Problem-Solving
The discussion delves into the concept of talent constraints in problem-solving scenarios. It explores how specific skills and profiles of individuals are crucial in overcoming bottlenecks in various issues. Using examples like AI safety research, the conversation emphasizes the impact of having individuals with specialized skills to address specific challenges effectively.
Impact of Talent in Problem Resolution
The podcast explores the differential impact of highly skilled individuals in problem resolution, highlighting that the most skilled individuals in a field can significantly contribute more than their peers. It underscores the value of scarce skills and how compensating for limited salaries can be a challenge in harnessing the full potential of high-impact talent.
Talent Constraints and Movement Building
The discussion transitions towards the importance of addressing talent constraints in movement building, emphasizing the need for guidance, communities, and structured support to attract skilled individuals to work on critical issues. The focus shifts to balancing the dynamics between funding and skill requirements to maximize effectiveness in problem-solving.
Future Challenges and Coordination
The conversation concludes by speculating on future challenges faced by the effective altruism movement, such as the balance between funding needs and skill requirements based on shifting priorities. It discusses potential bottlenecks in coordination, information sharing, and skill development, highlighting the evolving nature of optimizing resources for generating meaningful impact.
Global Health Funding Constraints
An emphasis is placed on the funding limitations in global health initiatives, contrasting with the movement's other prioritized areas. The discussion underscores the scalability of impactful interventions in global health, pointing out the significant funding gaps in initiatives like malaria bed net distribution, highlighting the need for increased financial support to address pressing health challenges effectively.
Potential Career Paths in Global Development
One idea discussed is the notion that individuals could pursue various career paths beyond traditional earning to give, such as working in international aid departments, at foundations focusing on critical issues, or in think tanks working on development policies. While earning to give shows positive impact, there may be higher average impacts in other avenues like advocacy or direct involvement in policy.
Introduction to the Concept of Replaceability
The podcast delves into the concept of replaceability in career choices, emphasizing how some roles could be easily replaced by others while highlighting nuances in impact depending on skills, organizational capacity, and industry demand. It explores scenarios where individual impact might vary considerably, affecting the assessment of job replaceability and effectiveness.
Navigating Career Decisions and Skill Constraints
The episode provides insights into job search strategies considering replaceability dynamics and the balance between skills and funding constraints in impactful career choices. It encourages individuals to focus on developing relevant skills, being mindful of overconfidence and underconfidence in applications, and seeking backup options while considering the broader impact of their career decisions.
Addressing Capacity Building and Effective Altruism Community
The conversation extends to creating capacity within the effective altruism community and organizations, adapting job search approaches, and fostering opportunities in areas lacking community support. It underlines the significance of contributing to communal growth, career development, and innovative problem-solving despite challenges related to skill constraints and job replaceability.
In the last '80k team chat' with Ben Todd and Arden Koehler, we discussed what effective altruism is and isn't, and how to argue for it. In this episode we turn now to what the effective altruism community most needs.
• Links to learn more, summary and full transcript
• The 2020 Effective Altruism Survey just opened. If you're involved with the effective altruism community, or sympathetic to its ideas, it's would be wonderful if you could fill it out: https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/EAS80K2
According to Ben, we can think of the effective altruism movement as having gone through several stages, categorised by what kind of resource has been most able to unlock more progress on important issues (i.e. by what's the 'bottleneck'). Plausibly, these stages are common for other social movements as well.
• Needing money: In the first stage, when effective altruism was just getting going, more money (to do things like pay staff and put on events) was the main bottleneck to making progress.
• Needing talent: In the second stage, we especially needed more talented people being willing to work on whatever seemed most pressing.
• Needing specific skills and capacity: In the third stage, which Ben thinks we're in now, the main bottlenecks are organizational capacity, infrastructure, and management to help train people up, as well as specialist skills that people can put to work now.
What's next? Perhaps needing coordination -- the ability to make sure people keep working efficiently and effectively together as the community grows.
Ben and I also cover the career implications of those stages, as well as the ability to save money and the possibility that someone else would do your job in your absence.
If you’d like to learn more about these topics, you should check out a couple of articles on our site:
• Think twice before talking about ‘talent gaps’ – clarifying nine misconceptions
• How replaceable are the top candidates in large hiring rounds? Why the answer flips depending on the distribution of applicant ability
Get this episode by subscribing: type 80,000 Hours into your podcasting app. Or read the linked transcript.
Producer: Keiran Harris.
Audio mastering: Ben Cordell.
Transcriptions: Zakee Ulhaq.
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