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!
The purpose of these questions was to better estimate if an RAs impact can be expected to increase, decrease, or remain the same in the coming years.
An aggressive measurable goal (ie. increase estimated QALYs gained by a factor of x) would indicate to me that an RAs expected impact would increase. (It's possible that a measurable goal might be trivial to set because the error bars might be too large. I don't know enough to know.)
If other funders (esp. big funders such as government) considered Open Phil research credible enough to base their decisions on, that would also indicate more expected impact. ie. already published research would be reused in the future by other large donors to effectively allocate more funds.
Either way, it seems that an RAs expected impact is higher than many other career alternatives, even if it decreases a bit in the next few years.