I was just reading this post, How to become a better applicant in one week, from 80,000 Hours, and was struck by this paragraph:

Here’s what my previous hiring round was like:

Just under 800 people applied. I split the pile with a colleague, which gave me 400 resumes and 1200 short-answer questions to read.¹

To get this done within the week, while also doing the rest of my job, I had to spend less than five minutes per person. And we only had time to grade a few dozen work tests, so we had to cut over 90% of the applicants. These numbers aren’t unusual for an open hiring round.

I just cannot believe that this is right. IMHO we delude ourselves that we're being fair and effective, while in reality we're putting a lot of energy, hard-work and resources into applying for jobs (800 people did this for one job !!! - think about how many hours that is - and they all had to answer 3 short-answer questions with enough care and attention. For many of them, that application process was probably at least half a day of work. So, 1-2 years of "EA work" went into just applying for this one role. Surely there were more valuable ways the EA movement could have used all this energy and creativity ??? 

There is something wonderful about this conversation, and about what it says about effective altruism and our aim to do the most good possible. 

Cash-transfers as done by Give Directly are a phenomenal initiative. So obvious in retrospect, but only when you remove your preconceived bias about poor people being partly responsible for their own predicament. 

So it would be great, and laudable, for any organisation to look for ways to scale and expand programs like this. (And by supporting Give Directly, we can all help to enable this). 

But the effective altruists (in this case, GiveWell) go a step further. How can we make this even better? 

[I've spend many years working in one of the best corporate R&D organisations in the world, and this was a big part of what made us successful - to be always asking "how could we make this even better?"]

Once you start asking this, the ideas arrive: who are the most effective people to give the money to? when is the most effective time to give money? how to coordinate cash-transfers with other initiatives to maximise impact? Etc. 

Of course there's still a lot of research needed to answer these. But the value of asking these questions is enormous, and unfortunately I get the impression that this is where many charities fail - they find a model that's good enough, and stick to it - doing a lot of good, but also not helping as many people as they might, as much as they might. 

I realise this entire comment falls under what Basil Fawlty would describe as "the bleedin' obvious" for this EA audience - but to me it is a beautiful example we can use to explain how and why EA's can always create more impact. I will write about this in the Effective Giving Ireland journal and maybe convince one or two extra donors to support effective charities ... 


 

I love to see this. Based on the Horizon experience in the EU, these kinds of problems are often best tackled by a mixed consortium - maybe a university, a start-up and a multinational - which bring different aspects and questions. 

These technical questions are very tractable but very complex. There are universities and industry groups who work on them in other contexts. For example there is a field called tribology which studies the texture of foods in the mouth, and texture is critical to our view of "meatiness" - and very difficult to copy. If it were just taste, we could must mix amino-acids a paste and flavour them, but consumers want not just the taste, but also the mouthfeel, the aroma, the feeling you get when you bite into a steak, and how that changes as you chew it and as it interacts with your saliva. It is hard, but if you get it wrong, people won't say "well, it was a good effort," they'll just say "sorry, but it's not meat!"

Artificial meat/fish/eggs might be the single greatest opportunity for the world. It can prevent so much animal suffering in factory farms. It can prevent so many emissions. It and reduce the land-use and water-use needed to feed us. And it can ultimately give us a low-cost, plentiful, nutritious food supply with no need for antibiotics, which can feed the world. 

It's great to see the focus on this. 

Thanks Emily, this is a very valuable post. 

I think many people who work in EA orgs do not understand how difficult it is to find a job in an EA org. Once you're in, perhaps it seems obvious how to get in. Perhaps they lucked out or knew someone or got hired on their first application. 

And so they sincerely encourage others, believing that it's just a matter of time. Because, based on the subset of applicants they know (the people they work with), there is a 100% success rate! 

However, most people report applying for jobs and seeing literally hundreds of applicants for each position, and many just give up. 

I wrote here previously (I think, it was a while ago) about the amount of effort people put into looking for work in the EA field is actually highly ineffective use of motivated people's energy and skills. 

I also know that EA organisations, more than other companies, put huge effort into giving fair consideration to all applicants, and so many of their hours are spent on recruitment, which is not directly advancing the projects their organisation works on. But I question whether being fair to candidates in this way is consistent with being truly effective in advancing the goals of EA. 

And I also wonder if even the candidates themselves would prefer a quicker, less work-intensive process, even if it were less fair. 

I would love it if some organisations could do a meta-analysis of the impact of eliminating 90% of the effort of recruiting. How:

1. Very clear criteria in the job description. If you don't meet these, don't waste your time and our time applying. (as in: do not put the usual "please apply even if you don't think you're a good fit with the criteria" - let people apply to fewer jobs, but with a higher chance of success for each). 
2. Very short application forms - like 5-10 minutes maximum for the initial application. 
3. Option to submit automatic AI application based on your CV / linked-in, and to be evaluated by AI, which would eliminate most candidates and select only the top few % for in-depth analysis. (Also option to not be evaluated by AI if you think it will unfairly disadvantage you). 
4. Hire someone "reasonably good" on a 3-month trial rather than spending 3 months working on recruiting. Take a risk. If they don't work out, hire someone else. Most applicants who look reasonable good will be reasonably good. 

The key points here: 

• The goal of effective altruism is to do the most good possible.
• Being fair to job-applicants (ensuring the best applicant gets the job) is NOT a primary goal of EA. We all have such an inherent sense of fairness, we want to reward the best applicant and find the best candidate - but IMHO for most roles, EA as a whole would be better off with a much less time-consuming process, even if sometimes we didn't get the best people.
  • When you need a plumbing job done at home, you look for a competent plumber and usually they work out. You don't spend months searching for the best plumber and interviewing them. How many EA roles just need someone who is committed and competent?
• Ensuring that we get the very best hire for every role should NOT be a critical goal except where there is a demonstrated and strong correlation with achieving the best results. Maybe for a visionary leadership role yes.
  • I believe people who work in EA orgs are mostly wonderful and brilliant (truly), but so are many of the job-applicants that are rejected.
• Having applicants and people new to EA spend huge amounts of effort just to get hired is not effective use of their energy, and it can be very demotivating.
• in general (not just in EA) the accuracy of recruitment is greatly overrated. How strong is the evidence that we even get better people after all the work we put in.
• I keep reading of EA orgs which are "bottlenecked" not by funding but by lack of people in specific roles. Given the millions of people looking for EA-related work, this suggests a flawed recruitment process. 

Kind of sad that it's probably needed, but if this is a way to get more people thinking more empathically, we need to start sharing this idea. 

Wow! Possibly the single best, most important post I've seen on here. 

EA's ideas are often extremely good, to the extent that if we could get people to listen to our arguments for a few hours, most of them would probably agree with us. 

But too often the only people we actually convince are the small minority who are willing to come to EA forums and other blogs and read long arguments in very dense prose. 

And that's why so many of our great ideas remain in the minority, or, at best, weakly but not passionately supported by a majority. 

You have perfectly identified the two groups of people who know how to change this - the advertisers and communication experts who know how to influence public opinion, and the lobbyists who know how to influence political decisions and policies. 

Have you considered applying for funding specifically for what you outline here? I mean literally going to Coefficient Giving or someone and saying "I would like to design a program and run some trials / focus groups / whatever to find out what works. Could you give me $1m? In 6 months I will come back with a plan for how to spend $100m."

(anyone who works in the corporate world knows that this is how things are done there. And these sums of money, if they can have the impact needed, are relative peanuts.)

 

Love this post. So many posts about careers are aimed at new graduates. Finally one aimed at mid-career people (at least partly)! Definitely going to look into this in more depth! 

This is a fantastic program. I haven't been directly involved, but I know people who have, and I've been receiving their updates and messages. Rutger Bregman is an inspiring leader, and what is so great about him, and about this program, is that it is so results-oriented. No grand gestures, big statements or whatever. This is about getting the right people working on the core of the problem. It's about getting the best lawyers (and not just volunteers) challenging nasty companies in court based on high-quality research. 

A lot of great EA ideas move slowly because we live in a world where there is so much intertia, intentionally created by people who like the status quo. It is sometimes difficult for young, energetic, well-meaning people to figure out how to change things. This program looks at finding people with the skill-sets needed to really change the systems - from inside if possible.

Probably a lot of the people who would be ideal for this don't have time to read the EA Forum - maybe they're not even EA's. But surely many of us know people - good people who would love to work on vitally important questions, but who have kind of accepted that that's not likely to happen, and that they're going to be in their well-paying but ultimately meaningless corporate jobs until they retire. Maybe relations, parents, friends ... 

Don't hesitate to mention this program to them. Maybe they could join the fellowship - or maybe just reading about it will enable them to find ways to make a greater impact even without switching careers. 

Never underestimate the extent to which what we all consider as self-evident EA thinking may not actually have percolated out to most people outside the EA bubble!

Thanks Alex,

This is a nice update. 

I would really be wonderful if we could see the urgency the world needs applied to this topic. GFI is doing amazing work, but how can we turn this from what appears still to be a niche area, into what it should be: a massive international effort to solve one of the greatest challenges of our time. 

As EA's we're very aware of the multiple challenges the world faces. Alternative protein is unique in that it can bring huge improvements in at least three areas: 

• Reduce the suffering of farmed animals.
• Reduce the massive impact of the meat industry on climate change.
• Enable everyone on earth to have cheap and easy access to a full and healthy diet. (This one is maybe more long-term, but people 100 years from now will see this as normal - we just need to get there faster)

What should EA's be doing to push for more political support, more funding, more investment? Imagine what the industry could achieve with 1% of the crazy investments going into AI ...

Keep up the great work!

I love this. 

Sometimes it feels like we in EA are "too honest" to market ourselves. The reality is that so many people haven't heard of EA, haven't heard of impactful careers or effective giving or whatever. And when we don't reach them, we are depriving them of the chance to improve their own and other people's lives. 

I may contact you to find out some more details to help with the (smaller) campaign we're planning to run with Effective Giving Ireland. 

Keep up the amazing work! I've been on the receiving end of some material from Consultants for Impact (and I am in your target audience), and it has been really engaging.