Peter Drotos 🔸
Bio
Participation7
Working in tech driven by a childhood passion and donating the majority of my income. Exploring working on compute governance in my free time.
Was seeking a community of people trying to optimize their impact and made the above decisions after engaging with EA core ideas.
Posts 3
Comments20
Is there a proposed/proven way of coordinating on the prioritization?
Without a good feedback loop I can imagine the majority of the people just jump on the same path which could then run into diminishing returns if there isn’t sufficient capacity.
It would be intersting to see at least the number of people at different career stages on a given path. I assume some data should be available from regular surveys. And maybe also some estimates on the capacity of different paths.
And I assume the career coaching services likely have an even more detailed picture including missing talent/skills/experience that they can utilize for more personalized advice.
I’d encourage you to consider separating your personal runway from your donations. Even if you are thinking of taking career breaks/pay cuts to invest in yourself for a higher overall impact you may even want to separate these from your personal safety-net bucket.
Otherwise I think you listed the main points. I’d only add that if you are happy to trust expert grantmakers you can donate now to normal funds (may not help with cause are prioritization though but I think you may find some expert opions on that also) or patient funds (e.g. Founders Pledge Patient Philanthropy Fund) as well and let them take care of the rest.
When I tried to look for advice on investing a few months earlier I only found a few relevant posts with detailed advice. Of those I found this one the most useful (check appendixes as well): https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/YjN6cGoXxPZeqCh4Z/eas-and-ea-orgs-should-move-cash-from-low-interest-to-high
You may also search for “impact investing” about minimizing bad / maximizing good of your investments. I personally felt that it does not worth the effort of going deep into this.
This is really encouraging, thanks for writing it!
I filled the form and am also planning to apply for CDTF but to be honest I'm pretty uncertain about what the next steps should be in my case. Having a pure tech background (I think I qualify for #1) I find it really hard to navigate the policy space. I'm struggling with questions like which opportunities to apply for, what skills to learn/improve. I think mentoring would also be crucial for transitions like this. Is there also a programe out there to help with that? (Relevant fellowships seem to be flooded with good applicants right now).
Thanks for sharing all these details!
I’d also be interested in CLR’s view on funding and talent constraints. The post says:
This budget would allow us to hire more researchers
At the same time currently it seems there is a large interest of good candidates for at least the entry level opportunities. E.g. the 2023 summer fellowship:
We were surprised by the high number of good applications this year, meaning that competition was particularly strong.
So is talent constraint a main bottleneck right now and what are the expectations for the coming years? Also if the following rough guidline on Earning to Give on the CRS Career advice page seems appropriate:
we would recommend earning to give if you have the potential to make a lot of money (donating $200,000 per year or more, as a rough guideline)
Yes, the wellbeing argument still applies even after the paycut if you’re still substantially above the regional minimum. But if you compare it to your original wage, given that you only committed to a barely noticable sacrifice, which the paycut itself likely even surpasses signifficantly, that additional 10% might just be too big of an ask.
However if one is also just fine with earning around the lower wage and even donating from that, then I think considering something like taking the further pledge may also be an interesting idea.
I think the usual path at the start is depicted accurately. Companies try to avoid investing in many people so labour with a given skill/experience is often scarse resource. In my industry, experienced people are approached with a new opportunity (many from well-known firms in the field) each week by headhunters without even asking for it. So when you get the message that work is needed in AI, the natural reaction is “just tell me where I should apply” and the answer usually is the 80k job board or similar. There is a gap there.
So I really like the Visualising your journey figures, I think these help a lot to set appropriate expectations. (I personally spent 5-15h/w on my transition in the last two years and still waiting for the first offer which meets the bar I’ve set for myself.)
So far, I mostly felt the lack of context limiting in the early days when I was actually trying to gain more context. The reason I think was similar (opportunities like 80k advising and EAGx also exected significant context). This makes sense, but I think there’s room for improvement by being more transparent saying things like “we expect this opportunity to be most useful for (and hence prioritizing) people with basic knowledge about EA e.g. after doing the intro course” Note that I think my background (hardware) puts me in the nieche bucket so context not coming up as a limiting factor in job applications aligns with the text.