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To keep it short: your articles on community-building (especially the social dynamics that come into play) have been highly valuable for me.
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Note: This post was crossposted from the Coefficient Giving Farm Animal Welfare Research Newsletter by the Forum team, with the author's permission. The author may not see or respond to comments on this post.
Subtitle: On vegan advocacy, effective altruism, and FIFA
I turn 40 today. Here are some hot takes.
On factory farming
1. Our biggest challenge is salience. If factory farming led the evening news, it wouldn’t last lo...
Impressions from the 21st Annual U.S. Cluster Headache Patient Conference, organized by Clusterbusters.
On the morning of the last day of the conference, E. was hanging out with other “clusterheads” outside the conference hotel when he started having a cluster headache attack. Before he could go back to his hotel room, J. offered E. his DMT v...
When speaking to candidates who are considering working with us at 80,000 Hours, I often hear people worry about replaceability.
The familiar version of the worry is about whether the organisation will hire someone else in your place. If it will, then the difference you make by taking the job is only the difference between you and them.
There are a couple of well-known answers to that. The person hired in your place probably cares about the world too, and would go on to do somethi...
Recent opportunities to take action
I would love to see some '40,000 hours' materials for mid-career people pivoting into EA work.
Our skills, needs, constraints, and opportunities are quite different from 20-somethings. For example, if one has financial commitments (child support, mortgage, debts, alimony), it's not realistic to go back to grad school or an unpaid internship to re-train. We also have geographical constraints -- partners, kids in school, dependent parents, established friendships, community commitments. And in mid-life, our 'crystallized intelligence' (stock of knowledge) is much higher than a 20-something's, but our 'fluid intelligence' (ability to solve abstract new problems quickly) is somewhat lower -- so it's easier to learn things that relate to our existing expertise, but harder to learn coding, data science, or finance from scratch.
On the upside, a '40k project' would allow EA to bring in a huge amount of talent -- people with credentials, domain knowledge, social experience, leadership skills, professional networks, prestige, and name recognition. Plus, incomes that would allow substantially larger donations than 20-something can manage.
Hi Geoffrey, we agree this would be very valuable. Our materials are already heading in that direction, but I think it will be at least a year or two before we do a major research push to produce that guide due to other competing priorities.