A

Arepo

4337 karmaJoined Sep 2014

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4

EA advertisements
Courting Virgo
EA Gather Town
Improving EA tech work

Comments
614

Topic contributions
17

Thanks for the support :)

Is there any other marketing that is going along with these posts? e.g. posting on Slack channels, Facebook groups, or the like? I think that could potentially multiply the benefits and help get the word out even more. 

I tend to link the posts in the main Facebook groups and the EA Anywhere Slack channel, but nothing too lavish - it takes a nontrivial amount of time to do this, and I don't have a lot of spare bandwidth.

I see the Mental Health Navigator is mentioned under the Mental Health section, but I suggest that the Coaching session also have a reference to it at the top mentioning that there are a bunch of coaches on that resource as well, in the same Providers list. 

As in there are life/other types of coaches on MHN?

More strongly, I don't think it makes sense to only list a few coaches explicitly by name in this post. There are a ton of coaches who specifically target EAs on the Mental health Navigator, virtually all (if not all) of whom meet all the criteria. The MHN is intended to be the single source of truth list and provides useful features like filtering. It also only lists providers who have some review/recommendation (or if they've listed themselves, that has been reviewed by a gatekeeper at the Mental Health Navigator). To have another list here could only ever amount to a less complete and as such potentially confusing or less valuable list. I myself am a leadership coach to EAs and would love to be added to this list, but, I also know of a couple dozen other coaches who would also love to get more visibility, many of whom will never discover this post. I'd rather help out the entire coaching community, and also provide a more valuable interface to EAs seeking coaches, which helps out the entire EA community. 

I'm not sure how I feel here. The coaches section has definitely got a bit bloated.  I could do some rotation to highlight individuals, but that sounds quite a pain in the butt. I'm also a little wary of deferring to a single other resource, since I'm generally worried about EA groupthink that comes from deferred epistemics. Maybe a reasonable approach would be to list coaches only if they fit the opt-in criterion and for some (non-egregious) reason (e.g. that they don't deal with mental health) aren't listed on MHN?

Happy to be persuaded there's a better approach, though. If you do think that's reasonable, feel free to reach out to any coaches who that would include, or just link me to their websites (including you, though it sounds like you're on there?).

Nitpick: You use "or" a couple of times in your criteria. I believe in both cases the "or" conjoins only the bullet with the single adjacent bullet. But just to make it a tiny bit clearer what two things are conjoined by "or", you could use indenting, or include both things in the same line item. 

Good suggestion, thanks.

Do you know what kind of management she does of it? Can anyone add themselves, or does she curate it in some way?

I've put them all in a sequence, whose link is at the very top, but I guess they need something more visible?

I hadn't seen this until now. I still hope you'll do a follow up on the most recent round, since as I've said (repeatedly) elsewhere, I think you guys are the gold standard in the EA movement about how to do this well :)

One not necessarily very helpful thought:

Our work trial was overly intense and stressful, and unrepresentative of working at GWWC.

is a noble goal, but somewhat in tension with this goal:

In retrospect, we could have ensured this was done on a time-limited basis, or provided a more reasonable estimate.

It's really hard to make a strictly timed test, especially a sub-one-day one unstressful/intense.

This isn't to say you shouldn't do the latter, just to recognise that there's a natural tradeoff between two imperatives here. 

Another problem with timing is that you don't get to equalise across all axes, so you can trade one bias for another. For example, you're going to bias towards people who have access to an extra monitor or two at the time of taking the test, whose internet is faster or who are just in a less distracting location.

I don't know that that's really a solvable problem, and if not, the timed test seems probably the least of all evils, but again it seems like a tradeoff worth being aware of.

The dream is maybe some kind of self-contained challenge where you ask them to showcase some relevant way of thinking in a way in time isn't super important, but I can't think of any good version of that.

Personally I think this is much less a concern if a high time commitment involves a decently paid work trial. Since the initial application is never trivial, it could actually increase the expected value of applying if the next stage is (e.g.) a 3-day trial. 

Arepo
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Having been rejected for a few including most recently by Giving What We Can, I'd say their feedback process was a country mile ahead of any other org I've applied to, and other organisations should look to them as the gold standard for such a process. I hope they'll write it up on the forum, soon.

That's sad. For anyone interested in why they shut down (I'd thought they had an indefinitely sustainable endowment!), the archived version of their website gives some info:

Over time FHI faced increasing administrative headwinds within the Faculty of Philosophy (the Institute’s organizational home).  Starting in 2020, the Faculty imposed a freeze on fundraising and hiring.  In late 2023, the Faculty of Philosophy decided that the contracts of the remaining FHI staff would not be renewed.  On 16 April 2024, the Institute was closed down.

By inference, if you are one of those copies, the 'moral worth' of your own perceived torture will therefore be 1/10billionth of its normal level. So, selfishly, that's a huge upside - I might selfishly prefer being one of 10 billion identical torturees as long as I uniquely get a nice back scratch afterwards, for e.g.

Space lasers don't seem as much of a threat as Jordan posits. They have to be fired from somewhere. If that's within the solar system they're targeting, then that system will still have plenty of time to see the object that's going to shoot them arriving. If they're much further out, it becomes much harder both to aim them correctly and to provide enough power to keep them focused, and the source needs to be commensurately more powerful (as in more expensive to run), and with a bigger lens, so more visible while under constructive and more vulnerable to conventional attack. Or you could just react to the huge lens by building a comparatively tiny mirror protecting the key targets in your system. Or you could build a Dyson swarm and not have any single target on which the rest of the settlement depends.

This guy estimates max effective range of lasers vs anything that can react (which, at a high enough tech level includes planets) at about one light second.

Self-replicating robots don't seem like they have any particular advantage when used as a weapon over ones with more benign intent.

I don't think anyone's arguing current technology would allow self-sufficiency. But part of the case for offworld settlements is that they very strongly incentivise technolology that would.

In the medium term, an offworld colony doesn't have to be fully independent to afford a decent amount of security. If it can a) outlast some globally local catastrophe (e.g. a nuclear winter or airborne pandemic) and b) get back to Earth once things are safer, it still makes your civilisation more robust. 

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