Hi EA Forum,
I'm Holden Karnofsky I'm here to answer any questions about jobs at Open Philanthropy. I'll be here today from 9:30am to 12:30pm Pacific time (with some breaks) and will likely respond to comments later on as well.
We'd hate to miss out on strong applicants because of misconceptions about the roles, so I hope people will ask whatever is on their mind, on topics from office environment to day-to-day work to the likely long-term trajectory of the role. I think Open Philanthropy jobs are among the best possible ways for effective altruists to have impact, and I hope anyone who could imagine performing well in these jobs will at least consider applying!
Please post different questions as separate comments, for discussion threading.
Looking forward to it!
Added 12:32pm Pacific time: This concludes the "official" portion of the AMA, but feel free to post more questions; we may respond to them later on!
It seems that OpenPhil wants a more satisfactory answer to moral uncertainty than just worldview diversification before ramping up the amount of grants per year. Is this part of why you are hiring new Research Analysts, and if so, how much will they work on this problem? (This seems like a very interesting but hard problem)
We could certainly imagine ramping up grantmaking without a much better answer. As an institution we're often happy to go with a "hacky" approach that is suboptimal, but captures most of the value available under multiple different assumptions.
If someone at Open Phil has an idea for how to make useful progress on this kind of question in a reasonable amount of time, we'll very likely find that worthwhile and go forward. But there are lots of other things for Research Analysts to work on even if we don't put much more time into researching or reflecting on moral uncertainty.
Also note that we may pursue an improved understanding via grantmaking rather than via researching the question ourselves.