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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: Announcing: EA Engineers, published by Jessica Wen on July 4, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. tl;dr EA Engineers is an organisation focused on increasing the quantity of impactful work done by physical engineers. We aim to do this by: a) providing access to engineering expertise to the EA community to connect projects that need engineering expertise with people who have these skills; b) providing resources for engineers to enable them to have a greater impact with their careers; c) increasing the coordination of engineers to create new product/projects in EA cause areas. Sign up to our mailing list here and spread the word! Why We Exist Bridging Talent Gaps Despite ample need for materials science in pandemic prevention, electrical engineers in climate change, civil engineers in civilisational resilience, and bioengineering in alternative proteins, EA has not yet built a community fostering the talent needed to meet these needs. EA Engineers aims to be that community, connecting current and future projects that lack engineering expertise to people with those skills and experience. As EA grows and develops, my guess is that there will be more object-level work that can be done, and more engineers will be needed to build physical solutions. Our vision is for EA Engineers to become a hub for engineering expertise within EA so that engineering knowledge can be disseminated to the wider EA community and non-engineering EAs can design and scale projects requiring physical engineering more effectively. Increasing Individual EA Engineers’ Impact There is little information currently available for physical engineers on how they can have an impact with their engineering careers. It wasn’t until March this year that 80k updated their Engineering career review which has “Exploratory career profile” status and is relatively sparse on concrete ways (skills/expertise needed, career paths) to contribute to these cause areas. We plan to address this by building a website with resources like job/internship opportunities, career case studies, open engineering research questions, etc. for engineers to have more impact with their careers. This will include resources for how to pivot to AI Safety or Policy if those are a better fit for the individual. The aim here is to facilitate the transition of existing EA Engineers to direct work as well as to enable non-EA engineers to transition to higher-impact career trajectories. Increasing Coordination Between Engineers Many of the members of our community didn’t know any other physical engineers in EA before being a part of this community. I certainly didn’t! Although I joined the Engineering & EA Facebook group (which has existed since May 2019), there has been minimal engagement from the 125 members, which suggests that just having an online place to congregate is not enough to make things happen. Building a network of engineers focused on impact is only the first step for us. Once established, we will then aim to provide structured events and activities to enable engineers to come together to do collaborative ideation and work in EA cause areas (hackathons, workshops, etc.). This will provide an engineering perspective on potential projects in EA cause areas and, hopefully, lead to the creation of new projects/products and increase the amount of direct work done by engineers in EA. Next Steps for EA Engineers One Year Plan (Shamelessly ripped off the High Impact Professional’s introductory post - thanks Devon and Frederico!) We have 4 main strategic goals for our first year of EA Engineers: Build a community of EA Engineers Test different approaches to support EA Engineers and find the most promising ones Create a minimum viable organization Build a strong presence in the EA community Goal 1: Build a community of EA Engineers Having a...