I'm personally concerned that horoscopes weren't taken into account in devising this scheme, when there is literally thousands of years worth of work on this, all going back to classical civilisation and aristotle or something. Classic EAs overcomplicating things / reinventing the wheel.
The people who fall in between June 3rd and July 4th can become the expert career allocators themselves!
This might be the best intervention EAs could work on because it is making a lot of future economists extremely happy!
Thanks! Helped me a lot. AI safety it is! Can we do the same thing so I know what org to work at?
OpenPhil and the FTX Future Fund employ some of the very brightest people in EA to decide where to allocate their money. For human capital, the process is a lot messier: individuals just choose whatever they think is best. No expert decision makers. How unsystematic! And they each have to do their own research to come to their own conclusions. How inefficient!
Imagine if instead, expert career allocators could carefully deliberate and centrally decide exactly what fraction of EA's human capital budget should be devoted to what cause area. That is the goal of this project.
80,000 hours currently do something vaguely like this, but their process is incredibly imprecise and expensive. They need to talk to hundreds of individuals per year, many of whom may not follow their advice at all!
How else could the community decide which person should go down which career path?
I expect most cause areas to have similar overall needs: each will need quantitative experts, operations managers, leaders, and so on. Thus, to ensure this talent distribution gets evenly allocated across cause areas, a random allocation process would be ideal. I propose assignment by birth date.
To a first approximation, birth dates are fairly random: there is little reason to expect potentially talented operations managers to be disproportionately born in one part of the year. And they are unambiguous. Everyone already has a birth date and it's difficult to lie about or change.
Hence, I suggest creating a central dashboard where 80,000 hours publish their recommended career allocations as a function of birth date. Here's an example of what that might look like[1]:
Stella, who was born on the 2nd of March 2001, would know to go into AI safety. No need to research any thorny philosophical or empirical questions to make the decision, it's all been taken care of.
Of course, 80,000 hours might change their minds about the optimal allocation. In fact, big community-wide debates would be held over whether thresholds should be moved. A popular petition might advocate for moving the threshold date for AI safety to February 15th, thereby massively reducing the community's investment.
Yet, everyone would recognize the necessity to cooperate and play by the rules. EA orgs would generally refuse to accept candidates with the wrong birthdates.
I am eager for suggestions about what to do with people who have already started going down a career path, when threshold dates are changed. I tentatively think that the enormous benefits offered by this system would easily outweigh the career transition costs, but I'm open to other creative solutions.
To conclude, the time to make career markets more efficient is long overdue. We need to avoid accidentally overcrowding or neglecting any cause areas. Assigning careers by birthdates provides an easy and, in hindsight, obvious solution, allowing the community as a whole to make wiser decisions about its human capital.[2]
Due to the anchoring effect I have 100% confidence that the dates you laid out today will have longrun effects on the distribution of talent from now until the heat death of the universe.
In light of that, I'm sure that I speak for not just myself, but all others born April 17th when I say it is of the utmost importance that we are exceptionally clear about the impact of timezones on birthdate allocation.
In order to avoid timezone problems that may fragment the EA community, I propose everyone born on the last or first day of a cause boundary simply swap causes every six months when DST comes around.
Since searching for jobs every six months might be rather inconvenient for you Luke, I would advise using your leadership experience to found a startup that switches priorities biannually instead.