Let's say we are going back in time to the early 2000s to advise Eliezer Yudkowsky on how to address AI risks. Do you think he should have aimed to get a high-paying job and paid someone else to blog about them? Or the Givewell guys--should they have paid some other people to start Givewell? How about Cognito Mentoring?
I think your logic makes sense if there are already competent, knowledgable, articulate, funding-constrained activists for your cause who know how to hire and have a pool of qualified, passionate-for-the-cause candidates they'd love to hire if they had the funds. I'm less sure that your idea is the best if there aren't already such people. In the same way hiring contractors seems like a bad idea for getting all of the work done for your startup, it seems like a bad idea for getting all of the work done for your nonprofit.
You could think of money and qualified passionate volunteers as being the two reagents in a chemical reaction. Sometimes the limiting reagent is going to be money, sometimes volunteers.
It would be coput to say that I mentioned marginal value and supply. So I will repeat my rule of thumb from the "How valuable is volunteering" thread: If the task at hand is low skill, work more and donate the salary, if the task at hand is high skill, learn more and do it yourself.
Suppose a high school student is deeply interested in a particular social or political issue and interested in doing something about the subject. What advice would you give him/her?
You may assume that the high school student is roughly similar in profile to the typical active LessWrong participant when he/she was in high school.
Some candidate social and political issues are listed below.
Topics of particular interest to the LessWrong audience:
Others that are more commonly perceived as important issues in the world today:
I asked a few people to opine on the last two issues on the list (in Facebook posts linked above) and the respondents generally focused on the acquisition of background knowledge rather than direct activism (i.e., read and learn rather than proselytize). Prima facie, this seems like sound advice. But it's quite possible that the set of people I interact with on Facebook is biased in favor of armchair stuff to the exclusion of activism. What do people here think?
Feel free to pick on one particular item in one of the above lists, or something not on either of the lists, and provide a specific answer for that. Or, provide general guidelines. Also feel free to specify additional assumptions (such as the country the student is in, or the student's other abilities or interests) and answer within the constraints of those assumptions.
PS: For some of the issues, you may feel that the issue is overrated or misguided (for instance, you may think that global warming is a non-issue, or that the status quo is optimal with respect to civil liberties or migration policy). In this case, your advice to the hypothetical high school student might largely be directed at making him/her come around to your point of view of the irrelevance of the issue. Comments suggesting you'd give advice of that sort are also welcome. If you'd simply suggest to the high school student to refrain from thinking about socially or politically charged topics entirely, that would also be interesting to know (cf. politics is the mindkiller).