tldr: A team and I prototyped an app for a hackathon to recommend EA projects based off skillsets.
I've noticed that there is quite a lot of people in EA interested in solving the problem of allocating people to effective projects. Whether that be jobs, independent research or other things. Now I know you can't just code an app that solves all your problems, but...
We coded an app that solves all your problems.
The proof of concept is that you put in your skills and past jobs, and the app attempts to find projects from the EA community that both need more people and you have the skills for to fit the talent gap. It's an idea that could be a step in the right direction for directing people towards impactful projects, even if that isn't a job. Currently the dataset it is a mock one. But I believe it represents an interesting proof of concept.
The project is meant to continue from ideas from the past such as:
- EA Colab project board
- A central directory of open research questions
- An inducement prize platform
- LessWrong's bounties for research projects
I believe that this application, or an application like it, could help improve the EA research pipeline, and supplement efforts that direct people in the EA community to important opportunities (such as 1-on-1 career counseling by 80,000 hours).
If you'd think this type of application valuable, I'd love to see if we could make it a reality.
Possible bug report: I tried to use the application but got 0% responses across the board after adding my experience and skills. I didn't see any kind of "submit" button.
On Firefox and Chrome, the search on past jobs did not work correctly for me (e.g. "research" produced no results even though "Research and Development Managers" was a job in the list), and I couldn't see a way to select any jobs. But I was glad to see ALLFED mentioned in your nice video!
This is currently just a prototype, with many many bugs. I've actually joined the team and EA CoLabs. Which is a proper application of the concepts here.
This looks awesome, that video is slick! I looked into getting into open source programming recently and people said a good thing is to check on GitHub for projects with certain tags i.e. "good first issue", and there were some websites dedicated to finding them i.e. here. That seems fairly similar to what you're thinking launching here.
As it's a prototype, you might not have it fully fleshed out, but how would people add projects to the app? Would it be accessible via a browser?
I think this could be an amazing resource for bringing EAs together on projects, especially ones who don't have to time available to start something themselves or trawl through various places looking for something to do to help :)
Thanks a lot!
If I was to flesh this out further, it would likely involve a way of proposing EA projects that we could then curate. The form would likely be accessible via the browser, but yes, it's currently just a very modest proof of concept.
I've been seeing you around and have loved some of your posts! The project is meant to try and find both highly skilled but also beginners in EA. I'm not sure what direction it needs to go in, as I kind of want to talk to the people that have proposed this idea in the past to try and get their thoughts on what it should look like. I should probably get in contact with them soon.