Hi Vasco, thanks for reading. And thanks for your dedication to animals :) I've seen a few of your posts on this topic.

If you think you'll be interested in economics PhD programs, I would encourage you to aim to apply for the next cycle (Dec '24/Jan '25). There's a lot of randomness in the process, and your grades will matter more than RA-experience, so I'd say go for it as soon as you can, given how long these programs are. If you don't get in anywhere, you can be applying for RA-ships in the meantime, and take one if that's your best option before trying again the following cycle. You should be able to determine within the next 10 months whether you're interested in the material enough to set off on the PhD, and I wouldn't waste any time applying if you decide you are.

However, I might recommend engaging with economics research directly, rather than Marginal Revolution courses. That will be a better flavor of what you'll do in a PhD. Even if don't understand everything in cutting edge research articles, you'll be able to get a sense for how problems are discussed and debated, which will be a clue as to whether or not its a field you're excited by. (Maybe start here, or here)

Good luck!

I love this post. So much so that I got up to do a set of pull-ups between reading it and writing this comment! 

I'm currently 95% bivalve vegan (occasional eat some cheese and other trace dairy products when I'm out of my house). I'm the closest thing to fully plant based that most of my friends and family know. My jam has been long-distance running rather than getting strong, but some fraction of my motivation has similarly been 'be fitter than almost every meat eater they know.' 

Unfortunately a running physique perpetuates the frail stereotype, so this is a good reminder to do some curls every once in a while for the animals :)

[Oh, and as an N=2 on the substance of this post: I am much healthier and fitter now than I was before going veg, but that's largely confounded by also getting more into running over the last 3 years. The increase in fitness over this period has been significant enough that I'd be surprised if eating meat would have resulted in an even greater increase.] 

At what time horizon? For anything over a year, I'd default to the quantity theory of money: inflation should roughly equal the rate of money supply growth (i.e., a central bank choice) minus real rates of economic growth. Increasing the money supply at 30% per year is easy, so if the Fed wanted to avoid deflation it seems like it could. The short-run during such a dramatic regime change could become whacky.

+1. I found it to be an extremely  thought provoking, informative, and high-quality post. Really well done. [FWIW: I had very weak priors over AGI timelines (I'm too confused to form a coherent inside view) and this seems like a much more reliable outside view than I was defaulting to]. 

My first impression is that this is a really exciting strategy to explore! Thanks for doing this, and please post updates :)

FWIW, I don't expect it to be that hard to find common ground with a cattle rancher about chicken welfare standards even with disagreement over the end goal, for all the great reasons you laid out in this post. (Though, it makes me wonder why ranchers wouldn't have already started this sort of lobbying without the nudge you're hoping to provide -- given how straightforward your points were, someone in the beef industry must have thought of this?)

I don't know nearly enough about headhunting to say anything definitive. But if we think they're misleading -- rather than informing -- maybe the argument should be 'EA orgs shouldn't use headhunters' for the reasons you laid out in these comments. It feels counter productive from the orgs side to trick someone into a job they wouldn't have taken with full information (*especially* for a community trying to operate with integrity). 

That seems like a distinct point from 'EA orgs shouldn't poach from one another' (which is what it seemed like the post was about). In general, my prior is that norms should be the same for hiring the EA-employed and the non-EA-employed, whether that's using headhunting services or not.

Hi! I have absolutely no expertise in this, but it seems long-term good to maximize the quality of matches between employers and employees. So, formally, I suppose I disagree with the statement:

Clearly, if a headhunter eases a bottleneck at a high-impact organization while creating a bottleneck at another equally high-impact organization, they are not having a positive effect.

If an employee takes a job at another org, presumably they expect it to be a better match for them going forward. I'd count that as a positive effect, assuming (on average) it increases their effectiveness, decreases their chances of burnout, etc. Even if its just for money or location, its hard to know what intra-household bargains have been made to do EA-work, etc.

There might also be positive general equilibrium effects: An expectation of a robust EA job market (with job-to-job transitions) increased my willingness to leave a non-EA job (academia) and enter this ecosystem. I would have been more hesitant had I felt there was a norm against hiring from other orgs. Though I'll flag that I'm not confident I accurately understand the term 'head-hunting' here, as opposed to recruiting, as opposed to hiring. In any case, a strong 'no head-hunting/recruiting' norm seems like it would weakly pressure orgs not to hire from other orgs (since they wouldn't want to be seen as recruiting from other orgs). 

I get that there are costs associated with re-hiring, re-training, and re-integrating that would be avoided if the original org just directly hires from the non-EA-employed camp. Maybe I'm underestimating these! My uninformed guess is that they are small relative to the benefits of increasing match quality. 

Curious about others thoughts on this though! Thanks for writing it.

+1. I'm super impressed by people who do this.