AI Use Note: Main body text entirely human written. Claude (Opus 4.8) helped develop models of animal life histories in the appendix.
Cross-posted from Good Structures.
Executive Summary
* Animal advocates sometimes make claims like “there are X of this animal...
Summary
Back in November 2023 I posted here to launch Spiro and raise our first $198k. Two and a half years later this is an update and a fundraiser for the next step.
The short version: we've now reached over-5,900 people with TB preventive medicine, including over 3,000 children under five years old. Our early results have held up well an...
Adapted from my Substack, Funding Anthropalypse.
Short version: if you want a share of the coming Anthropic and OpenAI windfall - the $37bn+ that could be in play next year - the way in is to become 'legibly excellent', so the evaluators and donors that frontier lab staff already trust point them to yo...
Lots of EA orgs say they struggle to hire for ops, marketing and comms. But when they post listings for these roles the salaries are often much lower than what they offer for research and engineering, which they generally find easier to fill. My guess is that orgs are just benchmarking against normal market rates for these roles. But the EA labour market is very different to the normal labour market, if these roles are undersupplied inside EA, I think orgs should be willing to pay more for them.
I'm surprised to read that lots of EA orgs find it easier to hire research roles than ops roles, and it doesn't match what I heard, or the state of 80k's job board at the moment, with ~1.8x more research roles than ops roles
Edit to clarify: my sense is that many orgs struggle to hire both for ops and for research
very low confidence, but I think 1) orgs tend to advertise research roles more widely than ops roles, 2) with longer decision times, and 3) research roles outnumber ops roles by something like 2:1 or even 4:1, so I wouldn't read too much into raw numbers of job postings
I would interpret all three as signals that orgs find it harder to fill research roles, right?
Given how many people apply for these roles, I don't understand the struggle. I just attended EAG, which was packed to the rafters with people who have done the bootcamps/courses/programs looking for a way in to a high-impact org; many of them with serious experience in things like journalism, business operations, and academic publishing. EA appears well-manned enough to treat such valuable talent as volunteers/metrics for their career programs; I don't believe that there is an under-supply issue. I think there aren't enough jobs.
@Oscar Sykes Can I check for a source/reference to hire for lots of EA orgs saying they struggle to hire for ops, marketing and comms roles? As @SiobhanBall said, lots of people apply for these roles. Is it that the candidates aren't good enough or have higher salary expectations? That there are lots of applicants to some EA org but not others? That some orgs are willing to pay higher salaries than others? Geographical differences, e.g. higher pay in the US compared to for example the UK?
One example
My impression is often they have a high bar and usually would like both having past experience in those fields and having a lot of context on EA/AI Safety + mission driven