I spent most of my early career as a data analyst in industry, which engendered in me a deep wariness of quantitative data sources and plumbing, and a neverending discomfort at how often others tended to just take them as given for input into consequential decision-making, even if at an intellectual level I knew their constraints and other priorities justified it and they were doing the best they could. ...and then I moved to global health applied research and realised that the data trustworthiness situation was so much worse I had to recalibrate a lot of expectations / intuitions.  In that regard I appreciate GiveWell's new guidance on burden note:   The rest of the note was cathartic to skim-read. For instance, when I looked into the idea of distributing low-cost glasses to correct presbyopia in low-income countries awhile back (a problem that afflicts over 1.8 billion people globally with >$50 billion in annual lost potential productivity annually in LMICs alone), the industry data analyst in me was dismayed to learn that the WHO didn't even collect data on how many people needed glasses prior to 2008, so governments and associated stakeholders understandably prioritised allocation of resources towards surgical and medical interventions instead. I think the existence of orgs like IHME and OWID greatly improve the GHD data situation nowadays, but there are many "pockets" where it remains a far cry from what it could be, so I appreciated that GiveWell said they're considering  Another example: a fair bit of my earlier analyst work involved either reconciling discrepant figures for ostensibly similar metrics (e.g. campaign revenue breakdowns etc) or root-cause analysing-via-data-plumbing whether a flagged metric needed to be acted on or was a false positive, which made me appreciate this section: 

I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Comment threads on fire in the community section. I watched upvotes glitter in the dark of the codebase. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.

Reflections on "Status Handcuffs" over one's career (This was edited using Claude) Having too much professional success early on can ironically restrict you later on. People typically are hesitant to go down in status when choosing their next job. This can easily mean that "staying in career limbo" can be higher-status than actually working. At least when you're in career limbo, you have a potential excuse. This makes it difficult to change careers. It's very awkward to go from "manager of a small team" to "intern," but that can be necessary if you want to learn a new domain, for instance.  The EA Community Context In the EA community, some aspects of this are tricky. The funders very much want to attract new and exciting talent. But this means that the older talent is in an awkward position. The most successful get to take advantage of the influx of talent, with more senior leadership positions. But there aren't too many of these positions to go around. It can feel weird to work on the same level or under someone more junior than yourself. Pragmatically, I think many of the old folks around EA are either doing very well, or are kind of lost/exploring other avenues. Other areas allow people to have more reputable positions, but these are typically not very EA/effective areas. Often E2G isn't very high-status in these clusters, so I think a lot of these people just stop doing much effective work. Similar Patterns in Other Fields This reminds me of law firms, which are known to have "up or out" cultures. I imagine some of this acts as a formal way to prevent this status challenge - people who don't highly succeed get fully kicked out, in part because they might get bitter if their career gets curtailed. An increasingly narrow set of lawyers continue on the Partner track.  I'm also used to hearing about power struggles for senior managers close to retirement at big companies, where there's a similar struggle. There's a large cluster of highly experienced peop

For those among us who want to get straight back to business - I've tagged (I think) all the april fools posts, so you can now filter them out of your frontpage if you prefer by adding the "April Fools' Day" tag under the "Customize feed" button at the top of the frontpage, and changing the filter to hidden. 

SummaryBotV2 didn't seem to get more agree reacts than V1, so I'm shutting it down. Apologies for any inconvenience.