TL;DR: The EA movement has yet to fully incorporate ideas, skills, people, and knowledge from existing fields (e.g. monitoring and evaluation). You could potentially have a lot of impact just through stealing these and adapting them to our contexts.

Epistemic status: Quick informal post on something I've been thinking about.

I’m currently basing a large portion of my career (and more importantly, my impact) on stealing ideas, best practices, and people from existing sectors and applying them in new contexts:

• Within both The Mission Motor and my freelance co-work, we’ve been taking monitoring and evaluation (M&E) standards from global development organisations and applying them to EA and animal organisations.
• I was able to step away from Fish Welfare Initiative, in part, because we hired someone with years of experience running research and programs in global development to replace my research-lead function.

• I am founding a charity that takes strategies used by other agricultural development movements (e.g. the organic movements’ use of farmer co-operatives) and tests them for farmed animal welfare.[1]

Effective altruism is still relatively nascent. We also tend to attract people (like myself) who are young and don’t have much experience with best practices from other spaces. [...]

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.