Mediocre EAs: career paths and how do they engage with EA?

I think there's a ton of obvious things that people neglect because they're not glamorous enough:

1. Unofficially beta-test new EA stuff e.g. if someone announces something new, use it and give helpful feedback regularly
2. Volunteer to do boring stuff for impactful organisations e.g. admin
3. Deeply fact-check popular EA forum posts
4. Be a good friend to people doing things you think are awesome
5. Investigate EA aligned charities on the ground, check that they are being honest in their reporting
6. Openly criticise grifters who people fear to speak out against for fear of reprisal 
7.  Stay up-to-date on the needs of different people and orgs, and connect people who need connecting

In generally, looking for the most anxiety provoking, boring, and lowest social status work is a good way of finding impactful opportunities. 

My quick take: I think most people should think of EA as little more than a hobby. 

For example, I like bouldering, so I often:

• Practice
• Do it with friends 
• Consume content to learn more about it
• Talk about it with friends (if they like it, I talk about it in detail; if they aren't really interested, I might just respond to a 'How are you?' with 'Good thanks! Got a new PB at the bouldering gym yesterday so spirits are high!')

So it's important to me and I get a lot from it, but it'll only ever be a small part of my life. 

I don't care if I'll never be a professional athlete, or even if I never win a local competition. I'm happy to simply do it, to hang out with others who like doing it, and to share the highlights with people who are interested in what I'm up to.

I think EA should be the same for most people. If they like the idea of helping others as effectively as possible, they could consider:

• Practicing (e.g., donate some money and apply to the odd job if it looks like it'll be a good fit)
• Doing it with friends (e.g., volunteer together, run a group together, start a side project together)
• Consuming content to learn more (e.g., browse the forum occasionally, listen to the odd podcast, read the odd report)
• Talking about it with friends (e.g., 'Hey I was reading about this cool charity LEEP and I think you'd really like em! They...' etc etc)

But that's it. It's not a big deal if you don't end up 'getting an EA job' or donating €€€€€€€€.

I’ve been thinking about this quite a bit recently. It’s not that I see myself as a “mediocre” EA, and in fact I work with EAs, so I am engaging with the community through my work. But I feel like a lot of the attitudes around career planning in EA sort of assume that you are formidable within a particular, rather narrow mould. You talk about mediocre EAs, but I’d also extend this to people who have strong skills and expertise that’s not obviously convertable into ‘working in the main EA cause areas’.

And the thing is, this kind of makes sense: like, if you’re a hardcore EA, it makes sense to give lots of attention and resources to people who can be super successful in the main EA cause areas, and comparatively neglect people who can’t. Inasmuch as the community’s primary aim is to do more good according to a specific set of assumptions and values, and not to be a fuzzy warm inclusive space, it makes sense that there aren’t a lot of resources for people who are less able to have an impact. But it's kind of annoying if you're one of those people! 

Or like: most EA jobs are crazy competitive nowadays. And from the point of view of "EA" (as an ideology), that's fine; impactful jobs should have large hiring pools of talented committed people. But from the point of view of people in the hiring pool, who are constantly applying to and getting rejected from EA jobs - or competitive non-EA jobs - because they've been persuaded these are the only jobs worth having, it kinda sucks.

There’s this well-known post ‘don’t be bycatch’; I currently suspect that EA structurally generates bycatch. By ‘structurally’ I mean ‘the behaviour of powerful actors in EA is kinda reasonable, but also it predictably creates situations where lots of altruistic, committed people get drawn into the community but can’t succeed within the paradigms the community has defined as success’. 

I am an older "mediocre EA".

I learnt about EA in 2013. I never felt that 80k was talking to me, simply because my talent set is ... well, mediocre (plus some cultural things). Also, at 23, my CV was already unimpressive enough that it would be hard to catch up. The best thing I can do for the world, is to be born with a different brain.

I have a normal job as software tester and I call it "earning to give". I have been in normal jobs for 10 years. I never interned or worked at an organization aiming for direct impact, and barely even volunteered. I am very satisfied with my involvement in the community and the way I try to do good in the world.

Some other things I do:

• being very excited about effective giving. I love to consume content about charities, charity evaluations, etc.
• keep working fulltime so I have a decent donation budget. I live in an area where working part time is common even among some healthy non-parents. Working fulltime is already a challenge because I get distracted and overwhelmed easily. My job requires me to reliably get things done. I can be very reliable as long as I am not stressed out.
• attend EAGx (no EAG please) and local retreats, chat with others about effective giving and earning to give. Sometimes these are people earlier in their career, or newer in the community, or have reasons to not dedicate themselves too much. I can make time for anyone. One might call it "mentoring". (data point: I never got rejected for any event)
• aim for small, very small, steps towards career progress. Aiming for big steps has failed.
• be frugal. Keep track of my budget. Frugality matters. I don't overdo it.
• engage with the local community at in person events. People are much less intimidating in real life than on the internet. I rarely have the feeling that I am the least smart person in the room (partially, because I don't care).

It's been lost a bit in all the noise, but I think people should still be very excited and satisfied about "earning to give" and donating.

Anyone who can donate $5000 via GiveWell can save a life.

Possibly you can do even better than that per dollar if you're okay accepting some premises around nonhuman animal welfare / sentience or risks from emerging technologies.

I think this is all very cool.

Moreover, while a $5000 donation is a big commitment, it is also achievable by a rather wide array of people. Many people are wealthy enough to do this donation, but do not do it, or donate far less effectively. You could have the same philanthropic power as a multi-millionaire philanthropist by allocating better.

If you earn a median income of ~$40K USD/yr^[1] and spend $32,400^[2], that gives you $7600 left over to donate each year, which could potentially save three lives every two years.

I currently do direct work - my organization CEARCH researches cost-effective ideas in GHD/longtermism/meta, and works to direct resources in support of particular promising ideas (e.g. via grantmaking, donor advisory, working with Charity Entreneurship and other talent orgs).

However, for most of my career, I was doing a non-EA job (policy work in government and as a consultant), and I engaged with EA simply by giving money to GiveWell. I've been a GWWC pledger since 2014, and that to me is classic EA, and the furthest thing from being less engaged or less EA (than someone who does direct work but doesn't donate).

Edit: And beyond having impact via your donations, you can always attend events (particularly EAGxs) - I think it's super valuable for younger EAs to get advice from older folks who primarily live and work in non-EA environments, since younger EAs can get stuck in a social and professional environment that is unadulterated EA, the end result of which is adopting a bunch of norms and behaviours that may leave them less effective at achieving impact (e.g. unprofessional workplace or organizational norms, since they literally haven't worked in a non-EA organization before; or not being used to persuading and engaging non-EA folks, including in government or in corporate environments etc).

Thanks for posting this! I’m one of the 80,000 Hours advisors, but the following opinions are my own.  

I had a few thoughts while reading your post and some of the answers: 

• I think one assumption to avoid is that you can only have an impactful career if you work for an “EA organization”.  
  • I don’t think this is true. There are so many problems that need to be resolved, and EA organizations only work on a select number. More importantly, EA organizations are usually not the only organizations tackling the “most pressing problems”. There are so many different careers you can pursue to do good and if you approach your career strategically/in a scope-sensitive way, I think it is likely that you’ll be able to have a bigger impact than you would with your default career path. 
  • I’d go so far as to say that the vast majority of impactful jobs in the world are at organizations unconnected to the effective altruism community. 
• If you get rejected now, that doesn’t mean you’ll never get a job at a high-impact organization. 
  • If you apply for competitive high-impact jobs, the chances of getting rejected are very high. Getting rejected doesn’t necessarily mean that you are not qualified for the job. Or maybe it means that you are not qualified yet, but would be with another year or two of relevant work experience. 
  • Also, people may apply for positions they don’t really have much relevant experience for. 
    • I think a good example is the post you linked to: the person clearly has a stellar CV and would easily get jobs in medicine and academia. I’m not very surprised that they weren’t hired for operations positions – maybe the organization just preferred to hire someone with operations experience? 
• “Many are not even able to get 1-1 in 80.000h”
  • I understand your frustration, and I have heard from several people who have felt this way, too. However, it is important to keep in mind that a rejection doesn’t mean that we think the person doesn’t have the potential to have an impactful career. Our capacity is limited, so we unfortunately don’t get to speak with everyone! 
• Furthermore, I think it is important to be aware that not everyone has the same opportunities:
  • Most of the “EA jobs” are in the UK or US, and if you’re a citizen of these countries, you have a significant advantage.
  • There’s often less job security in high-impact positions, and not everyone is able to take the same risks (e.g. if they have families or a lack of financial runway). 
  • I don’t think starting from a disadvantaged position makes people “mediocre”. 

The people who initially set up Givewell, did the research and conivnced Dustin to donate his money did a truly amazing jop.  AFAICT the people who currently run Givewell are doing a good job. A large fraction of the good EA has done, in total, is largely do to their work.

But I don't think its a good idea to frame things as their a bunch of elite EAs and the quality of their work is superb. The EA leadership has fucked up a bunch of stuff. Many 'elite EAs' were not part of the parts of EA that went well. Many were involved in the parts of Ea that went quite poorly. 

If you are a true altruist you should really reconsider whether you even want to trust the leadership and work under their direction. Maybe you should work at a different sort of charity or get funding from 'someone who doesn't ultimately get their money from Givewell'. Unless you really fit in well with the 'elite Eas' doing that is likely to be more fun.

'Think for yourself about how to make the world better and then do it (assuming its not insane)' is probably both going to be better for you and better for the world.

One possible path is to find a good leader that can scalably use labour and follow him?

This kind of thing gets asked every now and then, eg EA for dumb people?

I seem to be having some impact simply emailing politicians and having meetings with them to discuss the potentially catastrophic risks from AI.

I consider myself pretty mediocre (based on school/uni results).

This is something anyone with enough context (i.e. in a particular cause area) could do. It just takes initiative.

Keeping Absolutes in Mind - I think donating money is still somewhat underrated in discussions like this, though I was happy to see it brought up in several comments.

Consider taking the GWWC pledge or TLYCS pledge (easier / more flexible) or some other pledge if you feel like that would help with keeping motivation up. 

You could also organize or contribute to a local group. Regular local group attendance could also keep motivation up (and would be a lot less costly for your budget).

Even a small donor can make a real impact for individuals directly, or help get small or new projects off the ground.

 

I think there's 2 different questions at play here:

1. Whether you're competitive for EA roles - As others have mentioned, EA roles are competitive. To be honest, it really is just a matter of why you want an EA role.

If it's purely a matter of impact allocation, I think it's good to just ... try hard as you want and let hirers decide? Whenever I'm in an EA hiring round, I genuinely just want the most suitable person to get the job, and the EA hirers I've come across have been pretty good at figuring out what candidate they want. I have declined several role on this basis (it wasn't unilateral, I explained, had a conversation with the hirers and recommended someone I thought was better-suited). The EA community is small and nice, so I'm really rooting for people to find the best role for them.

If it's a sense of community, for me I've been lucky to find friends in EA who will still stick around even if I Don't Have An EA Job. I think you can definitely find close friends in EA without getting a fulltime role, and our national chapter only has like a dozen regulars.

For me, I just try my best, have low expectations and vaguely tell myself it'll work out. I also argue more people should look to start orgs, but that's a separate issue.

2.  Whether you feel imposter syndrome because EAs are generally high-achieving - Objectively, EAs are on average, abnormally high-achieving. IIRC, like 20% of EAs have attended to Top 25 university and 40% have attended a Top 100 university. Which is an absolutely bonkers percentage. I do think this kind of comparison is inherent in any social setting.

For me, I just talk to a lot of EAs, and realise they're just nice nerds who like talking about ideas. The power distance feels a lot lower the more I work with them. If someone works at A Big Well-funded AI Lab and went to A Top 5 PhD Program, then yeah you're gonna feel intimidated. But like, after a year I just started doing more research which involves pinging people dumb practical questions like "what settings on AWS do I use for a training run" or funny what-ifs like "do you think we can make Deep Learning into Deep Unlearning" (an actual thing btw). Then they're always really nice and helpful, and I just kinda forget about the imposter syndrome.

There's also the stoic approach, which is to accept imposter syndrome as motivation to do better without letting it demotivate you. Which is prolly good if you want to improve, but easier said than done.

I came across this from the forum digest email and was going to comment but after reading everyone else’s comments now feel too mediocre to admit how mediocre I am! Anyway, looks like I’m commenting nonetheless.

Yes, since starting a family my engagement with EA has reduced as I feel having a young family is such an important part of my life I want to dedicate as much time to it as I feel necessary.

In terms of answering your last question I work in arable crop research which is flexible and easy and suits me at the moment. After my maternity leave I plan to search for something in the same area but more impactful (I have been searching for years but not found anything yet…)

mikbp: good question. 

Finding meaningful roles for ordinary folks ('mediocrities') is a big challenge for almost every human organization, movement, and subculture. It's not unique to EA -- although EA does tend to be quite elitist (which is reasonable, given that many of its core insights and values require a very high level of intelligence and openness to understand.) 

The usual strategy for finding roles for ordinary people in organizations is to create hierarchical structures in which the ordinary people are bossed around/influenced/deployed by more capable leaders. This requires a willingness to accept hierarchies as ethically and pragmatically legitimate -- which tends to be more of a politically conservative thing, and might conflict with EA's tendency to attract anti-hierarchical liberals.

Of course, such hierarchies don't need to involve full-time paid employment. Every social club, parent-teacher association, neighborhood association, amateur sports team, activist group, etc involves hierarchies of part-time volunteers.  They don't expect full-time commitments. So they're often pretty good at including people who are average both in terms of their traits and abilities, and in terms of the time they have available for doing stuff, beyond their paid jobs, child care, and other duties.

This is a brilliant and necessary post - as is the link you share to the 2019 post. Thank you! 

When I first because interested in EA, the message I saw everywhere was "pivot! devote your career to being impactful!"

The implication was that EA is massively talent-limited. I now know that this was not the case. 

There are a lot of people who would like to do impactful work

But it's not just typical EA work. The same holds true for wanting to work on climate-change - an area which includes many people who have never heard of EA. Or animal-welfare. Or whatever. I am on a Slack containing 29,000 people, many highly qualified and motivated, who want to work on climate. 

I suppose we should not be surprised - indeed we should be encouraged - to find that impactful careers are much in demand. It's a sign that there are many people out in this world who are not as cynical and self-centred as some politicians would have us believe. 

An economist might look at it in this way: the satisfaction of knowing that you are doing good is a form of payment, which makes the job more appealing and/or enables the job to be filled at lower salary and/or with tougher requirements. If you have a very impactful position for a role that would normally command $100K / year on the normal job-market, you can probably offer $60K and get lots of great candidates, and you could even insist that they come to the office every day by 8.00 a.m. (please don't!)

Impactful roles are resource-limited, not talent-limited

Looked at from a broader perspective, we can all see that impactful roles are resource limited. If we compare the number of people working on climate-change, or alternative protein, or AI governance, to the number of people who should be working in these areas in a world in which resources were distributed according to the value of the work being done, there might be 100x as many EA roles as there are today. 

If there were a carbon-market which reflected the true cost of carbon, then work to reduce or eliminate CO2 emissions, or to capture carbon, would be highly lucrative, and many more roles would be funded. If governments truly understood the dangers of AI (or if public-opinion forced them to understand it), it's likely that much more funding would be put into work in this field. And so on. 

But it's not happening right now. And so the majority of EA's who would like to work in impactful roles just don't have that opportunity. So what should we do? 

What should we do? 

One option is to give up. Very few EA's will do that. Because EA comes from caring about the world's problems, you can't just decide to stop caring. 

Two very practical options are earning-to-give and/or volunteering. Both of these involve "separating" your career-path from your EA role, but still using your career to enable you to help EA by freeing up your time or your money. [A good analogy here is how many people who dream of being writers, actors, musicians, etc. find much more happiness and freedom when they decide that this need not be their primary source of income. They sometimes end up writing better books and making better music too.] 

But, in parallel with this, there are areas where commitment and grit are far more critical than brilliance, and maybe (perhaps while earning in a normal job), these are areas where we all could focus. 

Policy / Political Agitation / Grassroots work

Maybe the most promising area (IMHO) for us mediocre EA's to focus is in policy and even politics. This can be done in parallel to a "real" job. It can be about joining local groups (EA or not) and pushing for policy changes. It can be about writing to our local politicians and attending their meetings. It can be about getting involved at grass-roots level. None of these things require not being mediocre. 

For example, any sensible analysis tells me that we should be investing huge resources into artificial protein. For so many reasons. But not only is this not happening, but there are places where the agriculture lobby is pushing for alternative protein-based foods to be banned, or to be forced to have off-putting labels. And they are winning. It's absurd. Maybe 1000 mediocre EA's, even without tractors, could protest in Brussels or London or Washington to fight this short-sighted type of policy-making. But maybe one or two passionate mediocre EA's could start a movement, or join a political party and start something within that party. If 5 mediocre EA's who are struggling to find roles within EA were to decide to form a group in their local country, to get some advice from groups like GFI who work in the area, and to just agitate for policy change with more support and fewer misguided restrictions for alternative protein, it could be hugely impactful. 

I'm sure there are plenty of other examples. But my point is: success in this area is probably much more related to commitment and grit than it is to brilliance.

Counterfactuals

Before concluding that anything that isn't a direct EA-job is somehow less impactful, it's important to consider counterfactual value add. 

Maybe in the current situation, with so many brilliant people wanting to work in EA, the counterfactual value I might add by working in an "EA job" could even be negative, if the person who might have taken that job instead might have been better than me in that role. 

On the other hand, the counterfactual value of taking the GWWC pledge and earning to give while doing valuable work (even if not super-impactful by EA standards) is definitely very positive. And the counterfactual value of doing the unglamourous work of pushing your local politicians towards voting for better policies on vital issues like alternative protein might be huge - even if nobody (not even you) will ever realise or recognise how much value you've added. 

Add to this that in many roles (teaching, health-care, public-service, ...) there is a great capacity for doing good, for being impactful. And even in roles which are seen as the most mundane (think a "middle-manager" in a soap-company), there can be huge potential to help individuals, to improve sustainability, to coach young employees to be better members of society, to promote more inclusive policies, or whatever. There is so much potential to do good and have an impact if we choose to.

Apologies 

1. I've been thinking about this a lot, so the above is a rather incoherent attempt to put together some thoughts after midnight, and it's ended up longer than I intended. 
2. I've used the word "mediocre" as it was used in the title. I think both the post-author and I fully realise that nobody is mediocre. I appreciated the use of a provocative term to make us think more deeply about it! So at least in my usage, I was being intentionally ironic (in case that wasn't obvious). And even among people who are not mediocre, because none of us are, people who choose to devote their careers to EA are even less mediocre than others, in a sense that is illogical but still kind of says what I mean to say. Whether they have the specific, narrow skill-set for a specific role, whether they happen to be in the right place at the right time to get that role, etc., are just details. 

An obvious answer that I rarely see is to seek roles in public service (civil service).

Basically anyone who is wasting away in private industry can 2x their positive impact by going into public service and fighting for efficiency and effectiveness. Although most government roles don't relate to a specific "EA cause area", the budgets that Governments deal with are mind boggling; as a graduate working in public service, I developed the investment framework for an education infrastructure program with $200 million in recurring funding. That is more money than any grantmaker will touch in the course of their career. $10 million in Government is a rounding error.

EA is hard, and so most want to take the easy path by applying for cool/fun jobs that have direct impact and then calling it a day. But the reality is that there are already many public institutions doing work that benefits the broader good, and that those institutions are filled with bureaucrats who couldn't give a stuff about impact. You can make the world a better place purely through the fact that you give a shit.

However, public service is a grind; it requires fortitude, pragmatism and social skills, so it isn't for everyone (and certainly not for me).