Joey 's Quick takes

I find it a bit surprising that your point is so well-taken and has met no disagreement so far, though I am inclined to agree with it.

Another way of framing "orgs that bring talent into the EA/impact-focused charity world" is orgs whose hiring is less focused on value alignment, insofar as involvement in the movement corresponds with EA value alignment. One might be concerned that a less aligned hire might do well on metrics that can be easily ascertained or credited by one's immediate employer, but ignore other opportunities or considerations regarding impact because he/she is narrowly concerned about legible job performance and personal career capital. They could go on, in this view, to use the career capital developed and displace more aligned individuals. If funding is the larger constraint for impactful work than labor willing to work for pay, "re-using" people in the community may make sense because the impact premium from value-alignment is worth the marginal delta from a seemingly superior resume.

Of course, another view is that hiring someone into an EA org can create buy-in and "convert" someone into the community, or allow them to discover a community they already agree with.

Something that just gives me pause regarding giving too much credit for bringing in additional talent is that -regarding lots of kinds of talent- there is a lot of EA talent chasing limited paid opportunities. Expanding the labor pool for some areas is probably much less important because funding is more the limiting factor. 

 I think it would be cool if someone scraped linkedin and made some sort of diagram of talent flows like this. I imagine it could be done in a weekend and might yield interesting results.

That’s an interesting point, and it does seem impactful when organisations succeed in introducing new talent to the EA/impact space, especially when it leads to long-term contributions. Isn’t this a key focus for most community building organisations, though? Or is there a nuance in the approach you’re describing that perhaps I’m missing?

Eh, I'm with Aristotle on this one: it's better to start early with moral education. If anything, I think EA leaves it too late. We should be thinking about how to encourage the virtues of scope-sensitive beneficentrism (obviously not using those terms!) starting in early childhood.

(Or, rather, since most actual EAs aren't qualified to do this, we should hope to win over some early childhood educators who would be competent to do this!)

I think you raise some good points. Two potential countervailing considerations:

19 year olds are legally adults - they can (varying a bit by country) vote, drink, buy firearms, join the army, get married, raise children.

It's also common for other ideological movements to target much younger people. For example, both environmentalism and feminism are taught in elementary schools.

Do you think there's a difference between developmentally and otherwise appropriate engagement focused on younger people and problematic targeting? Your statement that the cringe-inducing activities would basically include "most early-stage college targeting" along with "any" targeting at the high school level implies that there may be some difference at the young adult level in your mind, but maybe not at the not-quite-adult level.

My usual approach on these sorts of questions is to broaden the question to include what kinds of stuff I would think appropriate for analogous altruistic/charitable movements, and then decide whether EA has any special features that justify a deviation from that baseline. If I deploy that approach, my baseline would be (e.g.) that there are certainly things that are inappropriate for under-20s but that one could easily extend a norm too broadly. Obviously, the younger the age in question, the less that would be appropriate -- but I don't think I'm left with a categorical bar for engagement directed at under-18s.

(Whether investing resources in under-20s is a strategically wise use of resources is a different question to me, but does not bring up feelings of cringe for me.)

Do you think there's a way to tell the former group apart from people who are closer to your experience (hearing earlier would be beneficial)?