Writing about my job: Content Strategist @ CEA

Posts from my ancestors: Aaron Gertler | Lizka Vaintrob

I love my job. I didn't expect to be in a job that I could be proud of just a few years after university, but now I am^[1]. I'm very grateful for that.

Sometimes I've heard people worry that a job in meta-effective altruism would be unmotivating, but I disagree. When I see a great conversation happening on the Forum, a valuable post existing because I nudged someone, or someone making a move to more impactful work because of a link in the EA Newsletter, I feel great, and partially responsible.

The job isn't easy. I have a lot of balls to juggle, even when I'm feeling down or unmotivated. But overall, I really can't imagine a better job for me to be in right now. I'm always learning, and getting better at skills I care about.

I'm not sure exactly who I've written this post for. At least partially, it's for me. So please do skip to a relevant section, or ask questions in the comments if you'd like more info.

PS: This job wouldn't be so great without the contributions of this Forum community. Hosting a Forum event is like hosting a party: it's crap if no one shows up. But you lot do show up. Thank you.

What is my job?

As Content Strategist on the online team, I'm responsible for:

• Writing the EA Forum Digest (every week) and the EA Newsletter (every month)
• Running events (like Career Conversations Week) on the Forum / coming up with other schemes to get great content on the Forum and grow our audience sustainably.
• Getting to know our authors, and being an approachable point of contact for new authors.
• Moderating the Forum (as part of a team of moderators).
• Ultimately, the quality of the content on the Forum and how satisfied the audience is with it. Obviously, this is a collective responsibility (I don't ghostwrite everything on the Forum), but the buck has to stop somewhere. If Forum content is bad/ skewed/ not useful, it's my job to address that.

I also dabble in:

• Coming up with ideas for features (mostly the interactive banners for events, and the debate slider poll feature).

Almost none of my job is unchangeable. The online team cares about our work having the most positive impact it can (of course), so my day-to-day could change considerably if we make different bets/ change our mind about the value of ongoing projects. This year, for example, I've dedicated a relatively greater portion of my capacity to the EA Newsletter, specifically to growing its audience.

How did I get here?

I did a philosophy degree at Warwick, and was very engaged with the effective altruism group there^[2]. The pandemic hit midway through my degree, and life shrank. I was surprisingly productive during this time, so I did very well in my degree, ran a philosophy magazine and a podcast. I strongly felt an obligation to do good with my career.

A week after I finished my degree, I began working as a research assistant to Richard Fisher on his book, The Long View. I think I got this job because a) I was recommended by a friend who had a better EA network than me b) I had written my dissertation on a very related topic from GPI's research agenda "should we enfranchise future generations?"

I enjoyed working on the book. A highlight was when I wrote sections (a few paragraphs to a page) that appeared in print. Richard is also a fantastic guy, and has been very generous in providing references and reviewing the journalistic pieces I wrote later on. However, I did learn that solo research with lossy feedback loops doesn't suit me in the long term.

I applied to a few jobs around this time, including content specialist at CEA (which felt like a moonshot). I don't think I got past the application stage because my writing sample wasn't very relevant to the role (it was an existentialist blog post from university).

After meeting Peter McIntyre at an EA Global, I worked with him for six weeks on an early prototype of non-trivial (back then it was going to be a website rather than a fellowship). I learned a lot in a short time — Peter knows his stuff on product development^[3], and the pace was fast and tiring but very productive. We'd meet in the morning to strategise, and then I'd go and write an article. Often I'd have a user interview with the article that afternoon, and I'd be able to edit it (with Peter) based on feedback from our target audience before the end of the day. I was especially proud of writing a thought experiment which actually helped 16-year-olds understand what counterfactual impact was.

After that, I took some time to earn some money and then travel with my partner in Europe (Highlights - Göreme in Turkey, and the Albanian Alps, also known as the Accursed Mountains).

Partway through that trip, I was accepted into an EA Communications Fellowship in the Bay Area. I think Peter might have nudged me to apply. I went there later in the summer. I made some great friends, grew my EA network, and experimented with journalism.

Afterwards, I had a few part-time contract jobs lined up. I wrote a piece for Asterisk magazine, which was 'spiked' after a couple months, but you can read it here. I worked with Hear This Idea on a podcast granting project. I then worked with the Centre for AI Safety on their textbook project.

Once my parts of the textbook were done (the normative ethics appendix, and a short section on AI and law), I did some freelance work (copy-editing, a bit of tutoring) while I applied for (many) jobs, mostly in EA research communication.

I got through to the final interviews (I think - there were a lot of interviews) for Founders Pledge's Climate Communications position and came in second for a research communicator role at Giving What We Can^[4].

Giving What We Can recommended me to CEA, which probably helped my application somewhat. I also did a few work tests, including an in-person two-day work test with Lizka. It felt like my ability to reason like an EA (transparently, with clear and actionable uncertainties) was very helpful in my work tests. After the first couple of stages, I take it that my experience was weighted less than my ability at the work tests.

Takeaways, i.e. the parts of my experience I think were the most important in getting my role:

• I had varied experience, which gave me examples to share if I was applying for a role that was more communications-strategy-heavy, or one that was focused on producing content.
• I’d done several short-to-medium-length tests (6 weeks at non-trivial, 6 months at CAIS), and these had taught me a lot about the kind of work I wanted to do, as well as providing proof of my skills.
• I built a network in EA. This led to my being recommended for roles and to receiving good references. This part shouldn’t be underrated — the network (read: friendships) I’d built led to a pretty steady flow of opportunities and referrals to jobs.

Why here and not somewhere else?

Why here?

The roles I applied for the summer before I got this job were not wildly different.

I was looking at roles which would have me doing some combination of strategising, writing, and understanding. These are the skills I had picked up from my philosophy degree, and further realised through my work experience. I felt like my comparative advantage was in my ability to understand and communicate ideas quickly, and I wanted to put that ability to the task of spreading ideas I think are very important (something like this had been my answer to the “how do you plan to improve the world” question in EAG applications for a long time). 

When I first saw the job ad for this role, I didn’t apply. I loved CEA - I believe that EA ideas, and the EA way of thinking, are really important, and CEA is to a large extent responsible for spreading them. But I wasn’t sure the role was for me. I think I probably anchored on some task I was less excited about (maybe moderation?) and skimmed over the job ad. It took another nudge, possibly directly from Lizka, for me to apply. 

As I understood the job better, I realised that it was perfect for me. It’s a flexible role in the sense that the team prioritises impact over specific outputs — if my skills differed from Lizka’s, then my focus and my work could be different. It’d definitely include writing, but in moderation (which is perfect). And there’d be a lot of space for strategising about the best ways to achieve goals. By the end of the process, I was very excited.

This role is an especially impactful option because:

• I’m in a position to commit to it for a few years, and the role's outputs benefit from an accrued knowledge of the area and networking with authors.
• I believe the Forum/ the EA Newsletter can be much larger than they are. Forum authors are special, but not so special that we should expect there to be only a few thousand of them in the world.
• The Forum is a crucial piece of community infrastructure. Without (at least) the Forum and EA Globals, I can’t imagine the EA community being much of a community at all. And so many great things flow from the community aspect of EA, including: impactful new ideas, a supportive network for building organisations, and collectively influenced funding. I believe these benefits scale as the community grows sustainably, but also that they’d shrink massively if the Forum wasn’t taken care of.

Why not somewhere else?

My nearby counterfactual career path was to continue with further study in philosophy. At one point, this was very tempting to me. I was good at philosophy at university, and for a while, it was what I wanted to do in my spare time as well.

Speaking to enough EA philosophers was part of what convinced me against this. From several people, I heard variations of the idea 'if you can imagine yourself doing anything else, don't pursue philosophy', and also 'it's not worth it unless you get into a top 10 (15 if they were being nice) philosophy programme'. This motivated me to search harder for other interests/ skills.

Another input was that, as a philosopher, I'm very sceptical of the value of philosophy. I pretty firmly believe that if you think a philosophy (panpsychism for example) radically changes the way you see the world, you've fundamentally misunderstood it. Most philosophy is epiphenomenal. The philosophy most linked to the kind of actions I care about is ethics, and yet I also couldn't imagine having a productive career in ethics. I'm sceptical that it can be conceived as an area of knowledge, and that the methods employed (in general) are much better than opinion-laundering. As someone who cares about doing good, I figured these ideas would be better as a disgruntled blog post than a thesis.

I also found, through my experiences with research, that I don't much enjoy working alone with little feedback. That seems pretty constitutionally damning for a potential philosopher.

If I lived in a simulation, I might spend a bunch of my time in philosophy seminars. But I don't, so I've decided to use my skills differently.  

What do I do every day?

We organise our time on the online team into octaves (6 weeks) and sprints (1 week). Each octave, I have some overall goals, like "get X good counterfactual posts on the Forum" or, my real goal to hit my August 19:  "8,587 unique Forum users who logged in in 2025".

 A large chunk of my work is using various strategies to hit these targets (which I mostly set myself).

This might include: emailing a bunch of possible authors for an event, advertising on social media, writing strategy memos and BOTECs, speaking with an expert about an event I'd like to run, searching Substack for authors I want to write on the Forum, etc.

I also have business-as-usual work (up to a quarter of my time): the EA Newsletter every month, a Digest and curation every week.

Skills - what helps, what can I get better at?

Something I've learned about careers/ the world is that skills are more distributed than I'd assumed. Tasks can be trivial to one person, and insurmountable for someone else. For a long time, I was dismissive about the value of tasks I found easy, and pretty down about those I saw others breeze through. This was a bit silly! A couple things that had me update here:

• When I was rejected from the content specialist role years ago, Aaron told me to save good emails I'd sent to use as writing samples. That seemed mad to me initially because I thought writing good emails was too low a bar to show off about. Now I've received more emails, I know this isn't the case.
• Working in a team, and seeing that the tasks some people put off for longer are the ones I'd do for a little treat.

Some skills that help me with this role:

• People skills: Although I believe that the benefits people gain from writing well on the EA Forum are worth their investment, my role requires a lot of asking for favours/ pitching. Getting the tone right, and getting to know great contributors at EAGs or over message is tricky, necessary, and I think I'm pretty good at it.
• Good taste: Deciding what kind of event to run on the Forum, what to include in the Digest and the EA Newsletter... All of these require curation. The area of possible content is large, the area of actual content small. Being able to choose content that genuinely adds information rather than merely repackages it requires a deep understanding of effective altruism, what people know, and what they've forgotten.
• EA immersion: EA has been a big part of my intellectual development, and it helps to know how effective altruists communicate/ deliberate/ think.
• Writing clearly and quickly: This role has made me better at this. I was okay before, but now I write a lot every day - whether for publication or internal communication. If writing was slow and effortful for me, this job would move a lot slower.

Some skills I'm working on which will make me better at this role:

• Greater numeracy: I'm getting better at this, but I'm not where I want to be just yet. When I'm working on strategy, it's helpful to have a good grasp of our analytics, and to be able to write defensible BOTECs. This octave, I'm working on more BOTECs to become more comfortable sharing numerical reasoning.
• Greater organisation/ prioritisation: This is a forever problem... You can always see how you could be more organised. But in such a varied role, there are obvious gains to be had by prioritising better. Some of my work is far more impactful than the rest. I recently had a conversation with my manager where I realised I was sometimes choosing more varied over more impactful work (i.e. on reflection, it would be better to focus on some of my top bets, than to spread work over a range of bets).

Thank you for reading this somewhat self-indulgent exercise! Feel free to ask questions below if you have any.

1. ^{^}

   I've been in this role since November 2023. I was working alongside Lizka until ~ March 2024, and I became a Content Strategist (rather than a Content Manager) a few months ago. 

2. ^{^}

   I haven't gone much into my journey into caring about morality/ EA here. Partly because I think it's obvious to everyone here- we should care about consequences right? More good is better? But I can do if someone asks in the comments. 

3. ^{^}

   If you want to as well, he heavily recommended this book. 

^{^}

You can read about this hiring round in Michael Townsend's comprehensive post here. I think it was very well managed - I especially liked getting results about my relative position throughout (i.e. I could see that I was doing well in the work-tests the whole way). This helped me manage expectations. 

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