We should all try to maximise our impact and there’s a good argument for specialisation.

However, I’m concerned by a few things:

• Its not obvious to me that spending more money on yourself will make you better at your job
• There’s a danger of arrogance clouding our judgment, e.g. I don’t think 99% of people in EA should be flying business class
• Donating has value for many people due to the “skin in the game” effect

I appreciate this comment

Highly engaged EAs were much more likely to select research (25.0% vs 15.1%) and much less likely to select earning to give (5.7% vs 15.7%)

are you sure this isn’t just a function of the definition of highly engaged?

Yes! A rather important typo! I’ve now fixed

The Parable of the Good Samaritan seems to lean towards impartiality. Although the injured man was laying in front of the Samaritan (geographic proximity), the Samaritan was considered a foreigner / enemy (no proximity of relationship).

Did the EV US Board consider running an open recruitment process and inviting applications from people outside of their immediate circle? If so, why did it decide against?

Thanks, Ben. This is a really thoughtful post.

I wondered if you had any update on the blurring between EA and longtermism. I‘ve seen a lot of criticism of EA that is really just low quality criticism of longtermism because the conclusions can be weird.

Sorry if I wasn’t clear. My claim was not “Every organisation has a COO); it was “If an organisation has a COO, the department they manage is typically front-office rather than back-office and often the largest department”.

For Apple, they do indeed manage front-office operations:  “Jeff Williams is Apple’s chief operating officer reporting to CEO Tim Cook. He oversees Apple’s entire worldwide operations, as well as customer service and support. He leads Apple’s renowned design team and the software and hardware engineering for Apple Watch. Jeff also drives the company’s health initiatives, pioneering new technologies and advancing medical research to empower people to better understand and manage their health and fitness.”

For Amazon, I couldn’t find a COO of the entire company though it looks like they exist for the business units.

I also found these charts a little confusing. A single value for each or a clustered column chart might be clearer

Two quick points:

1. Yes, legal control is the first consideration, but governance requires skill not just value-alignment
2. I think in 2023 the skills you want largely exist within the community; it’s just that (a) people can’t find them easily (hence I founded the EA Good Governance Project) and (b) people need to be willing to appoint outside their clique