Hi EA Forum,
I'm Holden Karnofsky I'm here to answer any questions about jobs at Open Philanthropy. I'll be here today from 9:30am to 12:30pm Pacific time (with some breaks) and will likely respond to comments later on as well.
We'd hate to miss out on strong applicants because of misconceptions about the roles, so I hope people will ask whatever is on their mind, on topics from office environment to day-to-day work to the likely long-term trajectory of the role. I think Open Philanthropy jobs are among the best possible ways for effective altruists to have impact, and I hope anyone who could imagine performing well in these jobs will at least consider applying!
Please post different questions as separate comments, for discussion threading.
Looking forward to it!
Added 12:32pm Pacific time: This concludes the "official" portion of the AMA, but feel free to post more questions; we may respond to them later on!
Quick replies to each:
1a. Our goals for 2018 are laid out in the post you linked to.
1b. The expectation is based mostly on the fact that we gave well over $100 million last year, and we're devoting similar time and effort to grantmaking in 2018.
2a. Open Phil is still a fairly new organization, and I don't think many know much about us yet. Probably we are best known in the effective altruism community, where we seem to have a strong reputation.
2b. Does it matter for our reputation, do you mean? I'm not sure. I'm not aware of us having received critiques about that.
The purpose of these questions was to better estimate if an RAs impact can be expected to increase, decrease, or remain the same in the coming years.
An aggressive measurable goal (ie. increase estimated QALYs gained by a factor of x) would indicate to me that an RAs expected impact would increase. (It's possible that a measurable goal might be trivial to set because the error bars might be too large. I don't know enough to know.)
If other funders (esp. big funders such as government) considered Open Phil research credible enough to base their decisions on... (read more)