Consider scaling people

A high-leverage way to do good

There’s a bunch of important problems to solve in the world. The conventional advice for making progress on them is direct personal effort, ikigai-style: find an important, interesting problem and apply yourself to it.

But the supply of problems vastly exceeds the supply of competent, motivated people working on them (low capacity), and the people we do have aren’t always aimed at the right ones (misallocation).

One way to help tackle this problem: becoming a people-scaler¹. Some examples of people-scaling:

• Forward opportunities (job postings, fellowships, grants) to friends who’d be excellent at them.

• Write up the open strategy and research questions in a subfield and publish them, so others can pick them up and run.

• Introduce people who’d benefit from knowing each other. Build the habit of referring people to whoever can help them, or vice versa.

• Connect with people at cruxy moments in their personal or career trajectories to offer context, guidance, or a helpful introduction. For instance:

  • Convince college freshmen who’d otherwise default into quant/consulting/SWE/B2B SaaS to care about agency and meaningful work, and provide them with easy on-ramp opportunities to explore other pathways.

  • Have short calls with more junior folks to provide advice or connections.

• Headhunt for orgs trying to fill open roles. Hiring is quite hard! Lots of orgs struggle to find good candidates, so consider pitching talented people who’d be good fits to apply and/or join.

• When weighing whether to take a role yourself, factor in whether someone else could be a better fit, and possibly send the opportunity their way as well.

In my experience, adopting a mindset of people-scaling can help one become much more impactful and well-placed in your own career. There’s a ceiling to the impact of your own direct work (your hours), and helping scale others into good opportunities and roles amplifies impact through network effects. Further, it can compound your own value and help you build your own connections.

In addition, people-scaling isn’t necessarily time-consuming, and it doesn’t have to interfere with your main pursuits. The low-effort version of people-scaling is creating a habit of making helpful introductions.

(Note that to be a good ‘people-scaler,’ you need a decent ‘read of the land’ – i.e., good taste and context, to be able to steer people in the right directions. I wouldn’t worry too much about this, as long as you have a relatively calibrated sense of the areas that you understand and feel comfortable giving advice in.)

Generally, I’m pretty excited about various fields creating cultures of people-scaling — prosocial, positive-sum cultures where we all become more well-connected and problems can be solved faster!

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Dedicated to the people who’ve scaled me. Thanks to Richard Ren for feedback!

1. An alternate framing of this is fieldbuilding, which is indeed what is being done here! But IMO, “fieldbuilding” tends to evoke setting up formal social infrastructure, like running events, student groups, and programs. When I started Cornell AI Alignment, I assumed that formal event-running was the best way to effectively build AI safety capacity, but it turned out that - especially at the beginning - I didn’t have enough time to run frequent events well.
I think that "people-scaling" better captures this idea of individual-level, personalized support of one's own network, which is far more in reach for people who lack the time or capacity for large-scale, fieldbuilder-y stuff (like starting programs). In my experience, thinking about fieldbuilding as scaling individual people has also led to more effective results. :)