welcome to the nonlinear library, where we use text-to-speech software to convert the best writing from the rationalist and ea communities into audio. this is: Thoughts on doing good through non-standard EA career pathways, published by Buck on the effective altruism forum. (Thanks to Beth Barnes, Asya Bergal, and especially Joshua Teperowski-Monrad for comments. A lot of the ideas in this post originated in friends of mine who didn’t want to write them up; they deserve most of the credit for good ideas, I just organized the ideas and wrote it up.) 80000 Hours writes (under the heading “Apply an unusual strength to a needed niche”): If there’s any option in which you might excel, it’s usually worth considering, both for the potential impact and especially for the career capital; excellence in one field can often give you opportunities in others. This is even more likely if you’re part of a community that’s coordinating or working in a small field. Communities tend to need a small number of experts covering each of their main bases. For instance, anthropology isn’t the field we’d most often recommend someone learn, but it turned out that during the Ebola crisis, anthropologists played a vital role, since they understood how burial practices might affect transmission and how to change them. So, the biorisk community needs at least a few people with anthropology expertise. I think that there are many people who do lots of good through pursuing a career that they were a particularly good fit for, rather than by trying to fit themselves into a top-rated EA career. But I also think it’s pretty easy to pursue such paths in a way that isn’t very useful. In this post I’m going to try to build on this advice to describe some features of how I think these nonstandard careers should be pursued in order to maximize impact. I’m going to misleadingly use the term “nonstandard EA career” to mean “a career that isn’t one of 80K’s top suggestions”. (I’m going to abbreviate 80,000 Hours as 80K.) I’m not very confident in my advice here, but even if the advice is bad, hopefully the concepts and examples are thought provoking. Doing unusual amounts of good requires unusual actions If you want to do an unusual amount of good, you probably need to take some unusual actions. (This isn’t definitionally true, but I think most EAs should agree on it–at the very least, most EAs think you can do much more good than most people do by donating an affordable but unusual share of your income to GiveWell recommended nonprofits.) One approach to this is working in a highly leveraged job on a highly leveraged problem. This is the approach suggested by the 80K career guide. They came up with a list of career options, like doing AI safety technical research, or working at the CDC on biosecurity, or working at various EA orgs, which they think are particularly impactful and which they think have room for a bunch of EAs. Another classic choice is donating to unusually effective nonprofits, which is a plan where you didn’t have to choose a particularly specific career path (though taking a specific career path is extremely helpful), the unusual effectiveness comes from the choice to donate to an unusually effective place. The nice thing about taking one of those paths is that you might not need to do anything else unusual in order to have a lot of impact. There are also some reasons to consider doing something that isn’t EtG or an 80K recommendation. For example: There might be lower hanging fruit in that field, because it doesn’t have as many EAs in it. Comparative advantage: The thing that you’re best at probably isn’t a top recommended EA career, just on priors. You can’t get a job in one of the top recommended EA careers, maybe because you’re not in 80K’s target audience of graduates aged 20-35 who have lots of career options. I care about people in this group, but I’m not going to address this situation much in the rest of this piece, because the relevant con...