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This is a crosspost from the new Animal Welfare Alignment Newsletter by Anima International. You can subscribe on Substack if you are interested in following these efforts. Audio reading also available on Substack.
The goals of this post are to:
1. Raise a question I see as crucially important to the goal of aligning AI to animal welfare...
Hey JP, thanks for your question, here are some questions that may be useful in your search, and may help people other provide you more advice:
1. Do you have any criteria for what you consider a "job within EA"? There are many types of job which could be considered EA related, from jobs within EA organisations, to jobs which have a large potential impact but are not directly for EA orgs (for example working in certain government departments or private companies). It might be worth reframing how you think about this as "how can I find a job that has the biggest impact", rather than "how can I get an EA job".
2. Do you have a particular cause area that you care a lot about? That may help to focus your search, and help your CV stand out to any potential employers.
3. What would you consider to be your comparative advantage? Since you have worked as an economist and data scientist do you consider these technical skills to be your main strengths? Are you looking for a hands on technical job? Technical skills such as software engineering and data science are always in demand so this is worth bearing in mind.
I would add to this that it's obviously worth checking out 80,000 hours careers advice if you haven't already, they spend a lot more time thinking about this than me!
I wish you the best of luck in your job search!
All this advice seems realy good, and I want to particularly echo this bit:
Thanks for the advice!
Yes, I agree. Looking for a job that has the biggest impact is a better goal. There are a lot of helpful questions here for me to go away and think about.
Seems quite a daunting process so far, many jobs I have applied for have come back with responses of "700 people applied for these 5 positions" etc.
Can either of you point me in the direction of useful job boards apart from 80k hours?
There's the EA jobs facebook group, and I'll pm you a discord link.
It's worth noting that 80k has a lot of useful advice on how to think about career impact, and also the option to apply for advising, as well as the jobs board. There's also Probably Good (search for their forum post) and Animal Advocacy careers.