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Reflection on my time as a Visiting Fellow at Rethink Priorities this summer
I was a Visiting Fellow at Rethink Priorities this summer. They’re hiring right now, and I have lots of thoughts on my time there, so I figured that I’d share some. I had some misconceptions coming in, and I think I would have benefited from a post like this, so I’m guessing other people might, too. Unfortunately, I don’t have time to write anything in depth for now, so a shortform will have to do.
Fair warning: this shortform is quite personal and one-sided. In particular, when I tried to think of downsides to highlight to make this post fair, few came to mind, so the post is very upsides-heavy. (Linch’s recent post has a lot more on possible negatives about working at RP.) Another disclaimer: I changed in various ways during the summer, including in terms of my preferences and priorities. I think this is good, but there’s also a good chance of some bias (I’m happy with how working at RP went because working at RP transformed me into the kind of person who’s happy with that sort of work, etc.). (See additional disclaimer at the bottom.)
First, some vague background on me, in case it’s relevant:
I finished my BA this May with a double major in mathematics and comparative literature.
I had done some undergraduate math research, had taught in a variety of contexts, and had worked at Canada/USA Mathcamp, but did not have a lot of proper non-Academia work experience.
I was introduced to EA in 2019.
Working at RP was not what I had expected (it seems likely that my expectations were skewed).
One example of this was how my supervisor (Linch) held me accountable. Accountability existed in such a way that helped me focus on goals (“milestones”) rather than making me feel guilty about falling behind. (Perhaps I had read too much about bad workplaces and poor incentive structures, but I was quite surprised and extremely happy about this fact.) This was a really helpful transition for me from the university context, where I often had to complete large projects with less built-in support. For instance, I would have big papers due as midterms (or final exams that accounted for 40% of a course grade), and I would often procrastinate on these because they were big, hard to break down, and potentially unpleasant to work on. (I got really good at writing a 15-page draft overnight.)
In contrast, at Rethink, Linch would help me break down a project into steps (“do 3 hours of reading on X subject,” “reach out to X person,” “write a rough draft of brainstormed ideas in a long list and share it for feedback,” etc.), and we would set deadlines for those. Accomplishing each milestone felt really good, and kept me motivated to continue with the project. If I was behind the schedule, he would help me reprioritize and think through the bottlenecks, and I would move forward. (Unless I’m mistaken, managers at RP had taken a management course in order to make sure that these structures worked well — I don’t know how much that helped because I can’t guess at the counterfactual, but from my point of view, they did seem quite prepared to manage us.)
Another surprise: Rethink actively helped me meet many (really cool) people (both when they did things like give feedback, and through socials or 1-1’s). I went from ~10 university EA friends to ~25 people I knew I could go to for resources or help. I had not done much EA-related work before the internship (e.g. my first EA Forum post was due to RP), but I never felt judged or less respected for that. Everyone I interacted with seemed genuinely invested in helping me grow. They sent me relevant links, introduced me to cool new people, and celebrated my successes.
I also learned a lot and developed entirely new interests. My supervisor was Linch, so it might be unsurprising that I became quite interested in forecasting and related topics. Beyond this, however, I found the work really exciting, and explored a variety of topics. I read a bunch of economics papers and discovered that the field was actually really interesting (this might not be a surprise to others, but it was to me!). I also got to fine-tune my understanding of and opinions on a number of questions in EA and longtermism. I developed better work (or research) habits, gained some confidence, and began to understand myself better.
Here’s what I come up with when I try to think of negatives:
I struggled to some extent with the virtual setting (e.g. due to tech or internet issues). Protip: if you find yourself with a slow computer, fix that situation asap.
There might have been too much freedom for me— I probably spent too long choosing and narrowing my next project topics. Still, this wasn’t purely negative; I think I ended up learning a lot during the exploratory interludes (where I went on deep-dives into things like x-risks from great power conflict, but they did not help me produce outputs). As far as I know, this issue is less relevant for more senior positions, and a number of more concrete projects are more straightforwardly available now. (It also seems likely that I could have mitigated this by realizing it would be an issue right away.)
I would occasionally fall behind and become stressed about that. A few tasks became ugh fields. As the summer progressed, I think I got better about immediately telling Linch when I noticed myself feeling guilty or unhappy about a project, and this helped a lot.
Opportunity cost. I don’t know exactly what I would have done during the summer if not RP, but it’s always possible it would have been better.
Obviously, if I were restarting the summer, I would do some things differently. I might focus on producing outputs faster. I might be more active in trying to meet people. I would probably organize my daily routine differently. But some of the things I list here are precisely changes in my preferences or priorities that result from working at RP. :)
I don’t know if anyone will have questions, but feel free to ask questions if you do have any. But I should note that I might not be able to answer many, as I’m quite low on free time (I just started a new job).
Note: nobody pressured me to write this shortform, although Linch & some other people at RP did know I was doing it and were happy for it. For convenience, here’s a link to RP’s hiring page.
Thanks for writing this Lizka! I agree with many of the points in this [I was also a visiting fellow on the longtermist team this summer]. I'll throw my two cents in about my own reflections (I broadly share Lizka's experience, so here I just highlight the upsides/downsides things that especially resonated with me, or things unique to my own situation):
Vague background:
Finished BSc in PPE this June
No EA research experience and very little academic research experience
Introduced to EA in 2019
Upsides:
Work in areas that are intellectually stimulating and feel meaningful (e.g. Democracy, AI Governance).
Working with super cool people. Everyone was super friendly, and clearly supportive of our development as researchers. I also had not written an EA forum post before RP, but was super supported to break this barrier.
Downsides:
Working remotely was super challenging for me. I underestimated how significant a factor this would be to begin with, and so I would not dismiss this lightly. However, I think there are ways that one can remedy this if they are sufficiently proactive/agent-y (e.g. setting up in-person co-working, moving cities to be near staff, using Focusmate, etc). Also, +1 to getting a fast computer (and see Peter's comment on this).
Imposter syndrome. One downside of working with super cool, brilliant, hard working people was (for me) a feeling that I was way out of my depth, especially to begin with. This is of course different for everyone, but one thing I struggled to fully overcome. However, RP staff are very willing to help out where they can, should this become a problem.
Ugh fields. There were definitely times when I felt somewhat overwhelmed by work, with sometimes negative spirals. This wasn't helped by personal circumstances, but my manager (Michael) was super accommodating and understanding of this, which helped alleviate guilt.
If it's helpful, I might write-up a shortform on some of these points in more depth, especially the things I learnt about being a better researcher, if that's helpful for others.
Overall, I also really enjoyed my time at RP, and would highly recommend :)
(I did not speak to anyone at RP before writing this).
Thanks a lot for writing about your experiences, Lizka and Tom! Especially the details about why you were happy with your managers was really valuable info for me.
Protip: if you find yourself with a slow computer, fix that situation asap.
Note to onlookers that we at Rethink Priorities will pay up to $2000 for people to upgrade their computers and that we view this as very important! And if you work with us for more than a year, you can keep your new computer forever.
I realize that this policy may not be a great fit for interns / fellows though, so perhaps I will think about how we can approach that.
I think we should maybe just send a new mid-end chromebook + high-end headsets with builtin mic + other computing supplies to all interns as soon as they start (or maybe before), no questions asked. Maybe consider higher end equipment for interns who are working on more compute-intensive stuff and/or if they or their managers asked for it.
For some of the intern projects (most notably on the survey team?), more computing power is needed, but since so much of RP work involves Google docs + looking stuff up fast on the internet + Slack/Google Meet comms, the primary technological bottlenecks that we should try to solve is really fast browsing/typing/videocall latency and quality, which chromebooks and headsets should be sufficient for.
(For logistical reasons I'm assuming that the easiest thing to do is to let the interns keep the chromebook and relevant accessories)
Superman gets to business [private submission to the Creative Writing Contest from a little while back]
“I don’t understand,” she repeated. “I mean, you’re Superman.”
“Well yes,” said Clark. “That’s exactly why I need your help! I can’t spend my time researching how to prioritize while I should be off answering someone’s call for help.”
“But why prioritize? Can’t you just take the calls as they come?”
Lois clicked “Send” on the email she’d been typing up and rejoined the conversation. “See, we realized that we’ve been too reactive. We were taking calls as they came in without appreciating the enormous potential we had here. It’s amazing that we get to help people who are being attacked, help people who need our help, but we could also make the world safer more proactively, and end up helping even more people, even better, and when we realized that, when that clicked—”
“We couldn’t just ignore it.”
Tina looked back at Clark. “Ok, so what you’re saying is that you want to save people— or help people — and you think there are better and worse ways you could approach that, but you’re not sure which are which, and you realized that instead of rushing off to fight the most immediate threat, you want to, what, do some research and find the best way you can help?”
“Yes, exactly, except, they’re not just better, we think they might be seriously better. Like, many times better. The difference between helping someone who’s being mugged, which by the way is awful, so helping them is already pretty great, but imagine if there’s a whole city somewhere that needs water or something, and there are people dying, and I could be helping them instead. It’s awful to ignore the mugging, but if I’m going there, I’m ignoring the city, and of those...”
“Basically, you’re right, Tina, yes,” said Lois.
“Ok,” Tina felt like she was missing something. “But Lois, you’re this powerful journalist, and Clark, you’re Superman. You can read at, what, 100 words per second? Doesn’t it make more sense for you to do the research? I’d need to spend hours reading about everything from food supply chains in Asia to, I dunno, environmental effects of diverting rivers or something, and you could have read all the available research on this in a week.”
“It’s true, Clark reads fast, and we were even trying to split the research up like that at some point,” said Lois. “But we also realized that the time that Clark was spending reading, even if it wasn’t very long, he could be spending chasing off the villain of the week or whatever. And I couldn’t get to all the research in time. I tried for a while, but I have a job, I need to eat, I need to unwind and watch Spanish soap operas sometimes. I was going insane. So we’ve been stuck in this trap of always addressing the most urgent thing, and we think we need help. Your help.”
“Plus, we don’t even really know what we need to find out. I don’t know which books I should be reading. It’s not even just about how to best fix the problem that’s coming up, like the best way to help that city without water. It’s also about finding new problems. We could be missing something huge.”
“You mean, you need to find the metaphorical cities without water?” Clark was nodding. Lois was tapping out another email. “And you should probably be widening your search, too. Not just looking at people specifically, or looking for cities without water, but also looking for systems to improve, ways to make people healthier. Animals, too, maybe. Aliens? Are there more of you? I’m getting off track.” Tina pulled out the tiny notebook her brother gave her and began jotting down some questions to investigate.
“So, are you in?” Lois seemed a bit impatient. Tina set the notebook aside, embarrassed for getting distracted.
“I think so. I mean, this is crazy, I need to think about it a bit. But it makes sense. And you need help. You definitely shouldn’t be working as a journalist, Clark. I mean, not that I’m an expert, really, but—”
“You kind of are. The expert.” Tina absently noted that Clark perfectly fit her mental image of a proper Kansas farm boy. He was even wearing plaid.
“If you accept the offer.” Lois said, without looking up from her email.
“That’s a terrifying thought. It feels like there should be more people helping, here. You should have someone sanity-checking things. Someone looking for flaws in my reasoning. You should maybe get a personal assistant, too— that could free up a massive amount of your time, and hopefully do a ton of good.” Tina knew she was hooked, but wanted to slow down, wanted to run this whole situation by a friend, or maybe her brother. “Can I tell someone about this? Like, is all of this secret?”
Clark shook his head. “We don’t want to isolate you from your friends or anything. But there will be things that need to be secret. And we’ve had trouble before— secrets are hard—” Clark glanced apologetically at Lois, who looked up from her frantic typing for long enough to shoot him a look, “But as much as possible, we don’t want to fall into bad patterns from the past.”
“I guess there are some dangers with information leaking. You probably have secret weaknesses, or maybe you know things that are dangerous—” Tina’s mind was swirling with new ideas and new worries. “Wait a second, how did you even find me? How do you know I’m not going to, like, tell everyone everything...”
Clark and Lois looked at each other.
“We didn’t really think that through very much. You seemed smart, and nice, and you’d started that phone-an-anonymous-friend service in college. And you wrote a good analysis when we asked you to. Sorry about the lie about the consulting job, by the way.”
“And you really need help.” Tina nodded. “Ok, we definitely need to fine-tune the hiring process. And I’ll start by writing down a list of some key questions.”
“I’ll order takeout,” said Lois, and pulled out her phone.
[I wrote and submitted this shortly before the deadline, but was somewhat overwhelmed with other stuff and didn't post it on the Forum. I figured I'd go ahead and post it now. (Thanks to everyone who ran, participated in, or encouraged the contest by reading/commenting!]
I recently ran a quick Fermi workshop, and have been asked for notes several times since. I've realized that it's not that hard for me to post them, and it might be relatively useful for someone.
Quick summary of the workshop
What is a Fermi estimate?
Walkthrough of the main steps for Fermi estimation
Notice a question
Break it down into simpler sub-questions to answer first
Don’t stress about the details when estimating answers to the sub-questions
Consider looking up some numbers
Put everything together
Sanity check
Different models: an example
Examples!
Discussion & takeaways
Resources
Guesstimate is a great website for Fermi estimation (although you can also use scratch paper or spreadsheets if that's what you prefer)
I don’t see mention of quantifying the uncertainty in each component and aggregating this (usually via simulation). Is this not fundamental to Fermi? (Is it only a special version of Fermi, the “Monte Carlo” version?)
Uncertainty is super important, and it's really useful to flag. It's possible I should have brought it up more during the workshop, and I'll consider doing that if I ever run something similar.
However, I do think part of the point of a Fermi estimate is to be easy and quick.
In practice, the way I'll sometimes incorporate uncertainty into my Fermis is by running the numbers in three ways:
my "best guess" for every component (2 hours of podcast episode, 100 episodes),
the "worst (reasonable) case" for every component (only 90? episodes have been produced, and they're only 1.5 hours long, on average), and
the "best case" for every component (150 episodes, average of 3 hours).
Then this still takes very little time and produces a reasonable range: ~135 to 450 hours of podcast (with a best guess of 200 hours). (Realistically, if I were taking enough care to run the numbers 3 times, I'd probably put more effort into the "best guess" numbers I produced.) I also sometimes do something similar with a spreadsheet/more careful Fermi.
I could do something more formal with confidence intervals and the like, and it's truly possible I should be doing that. But I really think there's a lot of value in just scratching something rough out on a sticky note during a conversation to e.g. see if a premise that's being entertained is worth the time, or to see if there are big obvious differences that are being missed because the natural components being considered are clunky and incompatible (before they're put together to produce the numbers we actually care about).
Note that tools like Causal and Guesstimate make including uncertainty pretty easy and transparent.
I really think there's a lot of value in just scratching something rough out on a sticky note during a conversation to e.g. see if a premise that's being entertained is worth the time
I agree, but making uncertainty explicit makes it even better. (And I think it's an important epistemic/numeracy thing to cultivate and encourage). So I think if you are giving a workshop you should make this part of it at least to some extent.
I could do something more formal with confidence intervals and the like
I think this would be worth digging into. It can make a big difference and it’s a mode we should be moving towards IMO, and should this be at the core of our teaching and learning materials. And there are ways of doing this that are not so challenging.
(Of course maybe in this particular podcast example it is now so important but in general I think it’s VERY important.)
“Worst case all parameters” is very unlikely. So is “best case everything”.
See the book “how to measure everything” for a discussion. Also the Causal and Guesstimate apps.
We’re issuing [Edit: identifying information redacted] a two-month ban for using multiple accounts to vote on the same posts and comments, and in one instance for commenting in a thread pretending to be two different users. [Edit: the user had a total of 13 double-votes, most far apart and are likely accidental, two upvotes close together on others' posts (which they claim are accidental as well), but two cases of deliberate self upvote from alternative accounts]
This is against the Forumnorms around using multiple accounts. Votes are really important for the Forum: they provide feedback to authors and signal to readers what other users found most valuable, so we need to be particularly strict in discouraging this kind of vote manipulation.
A note on timing: the comment mentioned above is 7 months old but went unnoticed at the time, a report for it came in last week and triggered this investigation.
If [Edit: redacted] thinks that this is not right, he can appeal. As a reminder, bans affect the user, not the account.
[Edit: We have retroactively decided to redact the user's name from this early message, and are currently rethinking our policies on the matter]
Do suspended users get a chance to make a public reply to the mod team's findings? I don't think that's always necessary -- e.g., we all see the underlying conduct when public incivility happens -- but I think it's usually warranted when the findings imply underhanded behavior ("pretending") and the underlying facts aren't publicly observable. There's an appeal process, but that doesn't address the public-reputation interests of the suspended person.
Moderation update: We have indefinitely banned 8 accounts[1] that were used by the same user (JamesS) to downvote some posts and comments from Nonlinear and upvote critical content about Nonlinear. Please remember that voting with multiple accounts on the same post or comment is very much against Forum norms.
(Please note that this is separate from the incident described here)
Was emerson_fartz an acceptable username in the first place? (It may not have had a post history in which case no one may have noticed its existence before the sockpuppeting detection, but that sounds uncivil toward a living person)
Moderation update: We have banned "Richard TK" for 6 months for using a duplicate account to double-vote on the same posts and comments. We’re also banning another account (Anin, now deactivated), which seems to have been used by that same user or by others to amplify those same votes. Please remember that voting with multiple accounts on the same post or comment is very much against Forum norms.
(Please note that this is separate from the incident described here)
Moderation update: A new user, Bernd Clemens Huber, recently posted a first post ("All or Nothing: Ethics on Cosmic Scale, Outer Space Treaty, Directed Panspermia, Forwards-Contamination, Technology Assessment, Planetary Protection, (and Fermi's Paradox)") that was a bit hard to make sense of. We hadn't approved the post over the weekend and hadn't processed it yet, when the Forum team got an angry and aggressive email today from the user in question calling the team "dipshits" (and providing a definition of the word) for waiting throughout the weekend.
If the user disagrees with our characterization of the email, they can email us to give permission for us to share the whole thing.
We have decided that this is not a promising start to the user's interactions on the Forum, and have banned them indefinitely. Please let us know if you have concerns, and as a reminder, here are the Forum's norms.
We have strong reason to believe that Charles He used multiple new accounts to violate his earlier 6-month-long ban. We feel that this means that we cannot trust Charles He to follow this forum’s norms, and are banning him from the Forum for the next 10 years (until December 20, 2032).
We have already issued temporary suspensions to several suspected duplicate accounts, including one which violated norms about rudeness and was flagged to us by multiple users. We will be extending the bans for each of these accounts to mirror Charles’s 10-year ban, but are giving the users an opportunity to message us if we have made any of those temporary suspensions in error (and have already reached out to them). While we aren’t >99% certain about any single account, we’re around 99% that at least one of these is Charles He.
I find this reflects worse on the mod team than Charles. This is nowhere near the first time I've felt this way.
Fundamentally, it seems the mod team heavily prioritizes civility and following shallow norms above enabling important discourse. The post on forum norms says a picture of geese all flying in formation and in one direction is the desirable state of the forum; I disagree that this is desirable. Healthy conflict is necessary to sustain a healthy community. Conflict sometimes entails rudeness. Some rudeness here and there is not a big deal and does not need to be stamped out entirely. This also applies to the people who get banned for criticizing EA rudely, even when they're criticizing EA for its role in one of the great frauds of modern history. Banning EA critics for minor reasons is a short-sighted move at best.
Banning Charles for 10 years (!!) for the relatively small crime of evading a previous ban is a seriously flawed idea. Some of his past actions like doxxing someone (without any malice I believe) are problematic and need to be addressed, but do not deserve a 10 year ban. Some of his past comments, especially farther in the past, have been frustrating and net-negative to me, but these negative actions are not unrelated to some of his positive traits, like his willingness to step out of EA norms and communicate clearly rather than like an EA bot. The variance of his comments has steadily decreased over time. Some of his comments are even moderator-like, such as when he warned EA forum users not to downvote a WSJ journalist who wasn't breaking any rules. I note that the mod team did not step in there to encourage forum norms.
I also find it very troubling that the mod team has consistent and strong biases in how it enforces its norms and rules, such as not taking any meaningful action against an EA in-group member for repeated and harmful violations of norms but banning an EA critic for 20 years for probably relatively minor and harmless violations. I don't believe Charles would have received a similar ban if he was an employee of a brand name EA org or was in the right social circles.
Finally, as Charles notes, there should be an appeals process for bans.
the relatively small crime of evading a previous ban
I don't think repeatedly evading moderator bans is a "relatively small crime". If Forum moderation is to mean anything at all, it has to be consistently enforced, and if someone just decides that moderation doesn't apply to them, they shouldn't be allowed to post or comment on the Forum.
Charles only got to his 6 month ban via a series of escalating minor bans, most of which I agreed with. I think he got a lot of slack in his behaviour because he sometimes provided significant value, but sometimes (with insufficient infrequency) behaved in ways that were seriously out of kilter with the goal of a healthy Forum.
I personally think the 10-year thing is kind of silly and he should just have been banned indefinitely at this point, then maybe have the ban reviewed in a little while. But it's clear he's been systematically violating Forum policies in a way that requires serious action.
The post on forum norms says a picture of geese all flying in formation and in one direction is the desirable state of the forum; I disagree that this is desirable.
Indefinite suspension with leave to seek reinstatement after a stated suitable period would have been far preferable to a 10-year ban. A tenner isn't necessary to vindicate the moderators' authority, and the relevant conduct doesn't give the impression of someone for whom the passage of ten years' time is necessary before there is a reasonable probability that would they have become a suitable participant during the suspension.
It makes a lot of difference to me that Charles' behavior was consistently getting better. If someone consistently flouts norms without any improvement, at some point they should be indefinitely banned. This is not the case with Charles. He started off with really high variance and at this point has reached a pretty tolerable amount. He has clearly worked on his actions. The comments he posted while flouting the mods' authority generally contributed to the conversation. There are other people who have done worse things without action from the mod team. Giving him a 10 year ban without appeal for this feels more motivated by another instance of the mod team asserting their authority and deciding not to deal with messiness someone is causing than a principled decision.
I think this is probably true. I still think that systematically evading a Forum ban is worse behaviour (by which I mean, more lengthy-ban-worthy) than any of his previous transgressions.
There are other people who have done worse things without action from the mod team.
I am not personally aware of any, and am sceptical of this claim. Open to being convinced, though.
Totally unrelated to the core of the matter, but do you intend to turn this into a frontpage post? I'm a bit inclined to say it'd be better for transparency, and to inform others about the bans, and deter potential violators.... but I'm not sure, maybe you have a reason for preferring the shortform (or you'll publish periodical updates on the frontpage
We’ve banned Vee from the Forum for 1 year. Their content seems to be primarily or significantly AI-generated,[1] and it’s not clear that they’re using it to share thoughts they endorse and have carefully engaged with. (This had come up before on one of their posts.) Our current policy on AI-generated content makes it clear that we’ll be stricter when moderating AI-generated content. Vee’s content doesn’t meet the standards of the Forum.
If Vee thinks that this is not right, they can appeal. If they come back, we’ll be checking to make sure that their content follows Forum norms. As a reminder, bans affect the user, not the account.
Different detectors for AI content are giving this content different scores, but we think that this is sufficiently likely true to act on.
It’s hard to be certain that something is AI-generated, and I’m not very satisfied with our processes or policies on this front. At the same time, the increase in the number of bots has made dealing with spam or off-topic/troll contributions harder, and I think that waiting for something closer to certainty will have costs that are too high.
We have strong reason to believe that Torres (philosophytorres) used a second account to violate their earlier ban. We feel that this means that we cannot trust Torres to follow this forum’s norms, and are banning them for the next 20 years (until 1 October 2042).
Moderation update: I'm indefinitely banning JasMaguire for an extremely racist comment that has since been deleted. We'll likely revisit and update our forum norms to explicitly discourage this sort of behavior.
Around a month ago, a post about the authorship of Democratising Risk got published. This post got taken down by its author. Before this happened, the moderation team had been deciding what to do with some aspects of the post (and the resulting discussion) that had violated Forum norms. We were pretty confident that we’d end up banning two users for at least a month, so we banned them temporarily while we sorted some things out.
One of these users was Throwaway151. We banned them for posting something a bit misleading (the post seemed to overstate its conclusions based on the little evidence it had, and wasn’t updated very quickly based on clear counter-evidence), and being uncivil in the comments. Their ban has passed, now. As a reminder, bans affect the user, not the account, so any other accounts Throwaway151 operated were also affected. The other user was philosophytorres — see the relevant update.
If you feel overwhelmed by FTX-collapse-related content on the Forum, you can hide most of it by using a tag filter: hover over the "FTX collapse" tag on the Frontpage (find it to the right of the "Frontpage Posts" header), and click on "Hidden."
[Note: this used to say "FTX crisis," and that might still show up in some places.]
Reflection on my time as a Visiting Fellow at Rethink Priorities this summer
I was a Visiting Fellow at Rethink Priorities this summer. They’re hiring right now, and I have lots of thoughts on my time there, so I figured that I’d share some. I had some misconceptions coming in, and I think I would have benefited from a post like this, so I’m guessing other people might, too. Unfortunately, I don’t have time to write anything in depth for now, so a shortform will have to do.
Fair warning: this shortform is quite personal and one-sided. In particular, when I tried to think of downsides to highlight to make this post fair, few came to mind, so the post is very upsides-heavy. (Linch’s recent post has a lot more on possible negatives about working at RP.) Another disclaimer: I changed in various ways during the summer, including in terms of my preferences and priorities. I think this is good, but there’s also a good chance of some bias (I’m happy with how working at RP went because working at RP transformed me into the kind of person who’s happy with that sort of work, etc.). (See additional disclaimer at the bottom.)
First, some vague background on me, in case it’s relevant:
Working at RP was not what I had expected (it seems likely that my expectations were skewed).
One example of this was how my supervisor (Linch) held me accountable. Accountability existed in such a way that helped me focus on goals (“milestones”) rather than making me feel guilty about falling behind. (Perhaps I had read too much about bad workplaces and poor incentive structures, but I was quite surprised and extremely happy about this fact.) This was a really helpful transition for me from the university context, where I often had to complete large projects with less built-in support. For instance, I would have big papers due as midterms (or final exams that accounted for 40% of a course grade), and I would often procrastinate on these because they were big, hard to break down, and potentially unpleasant to work on. (I got really good at writing a 15-page draft overnight.)
In contrast, at Rethink, Linch would help me break down a project into steps (“do 3 hours of reading on X subject,” “reach out to X person,” “write a rough draft of brainstormed ideas in a long list and share it for feedback,” etc.), and we would set deadlines for those. Accomplishing each milestone felt really good, and kept me motivated to continue with the project. If I was behind the schedule, he would help me reprioritize and think through the bottlenecks, and I would move forward. (Unless I’m mistaken, managers at RP had taken a management course in order to make sure that these structures worked well — I don’t know how much that helped because I can’t guess at the counterfactual, but from my point of view, they did seem quite prepared to manage us.)
Another surprise: Rethink actively helped me meet many (really cool) people (both when they did things like give feedback, and through socials or 1-1’s). I went from ~10 university EA friends to ~25 people I knew I could go to for resources or help. I had not done much EA-related work before the internship (e.g. my first EA Forum post was due to RP), but I never felt judged or less respected for that. Everyone I interacted with seemed genuinely invested in helping me grow. They sent me relevant links, introduced me to cool new people, and celebrated my successes.
I also learned a lot and developed entirely new interests. My supervisor was Linch, so it might be unsurprising that I became quite interested in forecasting and related topics. Beyond this, however, I found the work really exciting, and explored a variety of topics. I read a bunch of economics papers and discovered that the field was actually really interesting (this might not be a surprise to others, but it was to me!). I also got to fine-tune my understanding of and opinions on a number of questions in EA and longtermism. I developed better work (or research) habits, gained some confidence, and began to understand myself better.
Here’s what I come up with when I try to think of negatives:
Obviously, if I were restarting the summer, I would do some things differently. I might focus on producing outputs faster. I might be more active in trying to meet people. I would probably organize my daily routine differently. But some of the things I list here are precisely changes in my preferences or priorities that result from working at RP. :)
I don’t know if anyone will have questions, but feel free to ask questions if you do have any. But I should note that I might not be able to answer many, as I’m quite low on free time (I just started a new job).
Note: nobody pressured me to write this shortform, although Linch & some other people at RP did know I was doing it and were happy for it. For convenience, here’s a link to RP’s hiring page.
Thanks for writing this Lizka! I agree with many of the points in this [I was also a visiting fellow on the longtermist team this summer]. I'll throw my two cents in about my own reflections (I broadly share Lizka's experience, so here I just highlight the upsides/downsides things that especially resonated with me, or things unique to my own situation):
Vague background:
Upsides:
Downsides:
If it's helpful, I might write-up a shortform on some of these points in more depth, especially the things I learnt about being a better researcher, if that's helpful for others.
Overall, I also really enjoyed my time at RP, and would highly recommend :)
(I did not speak to anyone at RP before writing this).
Thanks a lot for writing about your experiences, Lizka and Tom! Especially the details about why you were happy with your managers was really valuable info for me.
Note to onlookers that we at Rethink Priorities will pay up to $2000 for people to upgrade their computers and that we view this as very important! And if you work with us for more than a year, you can keep your new computer forever.
I realize that this policy may not be a great fit for interns / fellows though, so perhaps I will think about how we can approach that.
I think we should maybe just send a new mid-end chromebook + high-end headsets with builtin mic + other computing supplies to all interns as soon as they start (or maybe before), no questions asked. Maybe consider higher end equipment for interns who are working on more compute-intensive stuff and/or if they or their managers asked for it.
For some of the intern projects (most notably on the survey team?), more computing power is needed, but since so much of RP work involves Google docs + looking stuff up fast on the internet + Slack/Google Meet comms, the primary technological bottlenecks that we should try to solve is really fast browsing/typing/videocall latency and quality, which chromebooks and headsets should be sufficient for.
(For logistical reasons I'm assuming that the easiest thing to do is to let the interns keep the chromebook and relevant accessories)
I keep coming back to this map/cartogram. It's just so great.
I tried to do something similar a while ago looking at under-5 mortality.
Superman gets to business [private submission to the Creative Writing Contest from a little while back]
“I don’t understand,” she repeated. “I mean, you’re Superman.”
“Well yes,” said Clark. “That’s exactly why I need your help! I can’t spend my time researching how to prioritize while I should be off answering someone’s call for help.”
“But why prioritize? Can’t you just take the calls as they come?”
Lois clicked “Send” on the email she’d been typing up and rejoined the conversation. “See, we realized that we’ve been too reactive. We were taking calls as they came in without appreciating the enormous potential we had here. It’s amazing that we get to help people who are being attacked, help people who need our help, but we could also make the world safer more proactively, and end up helping even more people, even better, and when we realized that, when that clicked—”
“We couldn’t just ignore it.”
Tina looked back at Clark. “Ok, so what you’re saying is that you want to save people— or help people — and you think there are better and worse ways you could approach that, but you’re not sure which are which, and you realized that instead of rushing off to fight the most immediate threat, you want to, what, do some research and find the best way you can help?”
“Yes, exactly, except, they’re not just better, we think they might be seriously better. Like, many times better. The difference between helping someone who’s being mugged, which by the way is awful, so helping them is already pretty great, but imagine if there’s a whole city somewhere that needs water or something, and there are people dying, and I could be helping them instead. It’s awful to ignore the mugging, but if I’m going there, I’m ignoring the city, and of those...”
“Basically, you’re right, Tina, yes,” said Lois.
“Ok,” Tina felt like she was missing something. “But Lois, you’re this powerful journalist, and Clark, you’re Superman. You can read at, what, 100 words per second? Doesn’t it make more sense for you to do the research? I’d need to spend hours reading about everything from food supply chains in Asia to, I dunno, environmental effects of diverting rivers or something, and you could have read all the available research on this in a week.”
“It’s true, Clark reads fast, and we were even trying to split the research up like that at some point,” said Lois. “But we also realized that the time that Clark was spending reading, even if it wasn’t very long, he could be spending chasing off the villain of the week or whatever. And I couldn’t get to all the research in time. I tried for a while, but I have a job, I need to eat, I need to unwind and watch Spanish soap operas sometimes. I was going insane. So we’ve been stuck in this trap of always addressing the most urgent thing, and we think we need help. Your help.”
“Plus, we don’t even really know what we need to find out. I don’t know which books I should be reading. It’s not even just about how to best fix the problem that’s coming up, like the best way to help that city without water. It’s also about finding new problems. We could be missing something huge.”
“You mean, you need to find the metaphorical cities without water?” Clark was nodding. Lois was tapping out another email. “And you should probably be widening your search, too. Not just looking at people specifically, or looking for cities without water, but also looking for systems to improve, ways to make people healthier. Animals, too, maybe. Aliens? Are there more of you? I’m getting off track.” Tina pulled out the tiny notebook her brother gave her and began jotting down some questions to investigate.
“So, are you in?” Lois seemed a bit impatient. Tina set the notebook aside, embarrassed for getting distracted.
“I think so. I mean, this is crazy, I need to think about it a bit. But it makes sense. And you need help. You definitely shouldn’t be working as a journalist, Clark. I mean, not that I’m an expert, really, but—”
“You kind of are. The expert.” Tina absently noted that Clark perfectly fit her mental image of a proper Kansas farm boy. He was even wearing plaid.
“If you accept the offer.” Lois said, without looking up from her email.
“That’s a terrifying thought. It feels like there should be more people helping, here. You should have someone sanity-checking things. Someone looking for flaws in my reasoning. You should maybe get a personal assistant, too— that could free up a massive amount of your time, and hopefully do a ton of good.” Tina knew she was hooked, but wanted to slow down, wanted to run this whole situation by a friend, or maybe her brother. “Can I tell someone about this? Like, is all of this secret?”
Clark shook his head. “We don’t want to isolate you from your friends or anything. But there will be things that need to be secret. And we’ve had trouble before— secrets are hard—” Clark glanced apologetically at Lois, who looked up from her frantic typing for long enough to shoot him a look, “But as much as possible, we don’t want to fall into bad patterns from the past.”
“I guess there are some dangers with information leaking. You probably have secret weaknesses, or maybe you know things that are dangerous—” Tina’s mind was swirling with new ideas and new worries. “Wait a second, how did you even find me? How do you know I’m not going to, like, tell everyone everything...”
Clark and Lois looked at each other.
“We didn’t really think that through very much. You seemed smart, and nice, and you’d started that phone-an-anonymous-friend service in college. And you wrote a good analysis when we asked you to. Sorry about the lie about the consulting job, by the way.”
“And you really need help.” Tina nodded. “Ok, we definitely need to fine-tune the hiring process. And I’ll start by writing down a list of some key questions.”
“I’ll order takeout,” said Lois, and pulled out her phone.
[I wrote and submitted this shortly before the deadline, but was somewhat overwhelmed with other stuff and didn't post it on the Forum. I figured I'd go ahead and post it now. (Thanks to everyone who ran, participated in, or encouraged the contest by reading/commenting!]
Great!
A similar story exists here: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30351690
I really liked this. It was simply, but a smooth read and quite enjoyable. I'd be happy to see more of this type of content.
I recently ran a quick Fermi workshop, and have been asked for notes several times since. I've realized that it's not that hard for me to post them, and it might be relatively useful for someone.
Quick summary of the workshop
Resources
Disclaimers:
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I attended and thoroughly enjoyed your workshop! Thanks for posting these notes
Thanks for coming to the workshop, and for writing this note!
I don’t see mention of quantifying the uncertainty in each component and aggregating this (usually via simulation). Is this not fundamental to Fermi? (Is it only a special version of Fermi, the “Monte Carlo” version?)
Uncertainty is super important, and it's really useful to flag. It's possible I should have brought it up more during the workshop, and I'll consider doing that if I ever run something similar.
However, I do think part of the point of a Fermi estimate is to be easy and quick.
In practice, the way I'll sometimes incorporate uncertainty into my Fermis is by running the numbers in three ways:
Then this still takes very little time and produces a reasonable range: ~135 to 450 hours of podcast (with a best guess of 200 hours). (Realistically, if I were taking enough care to run the numbers 3 times, I'd probably put more effort into the "best guess" numbers I produced.) I also sometimes do something similar with a spreadsheet/more careful Fermi.
I could do something more formal with confidence intervals and the like, and it's truly possible I should be doing that. But I really think there's a lot of value in just scratching something rough out on a sticky note during a conversation to e.g. see if a premise that's being entertained is worth the time, or to see if there are big obvious differences that are being missed because the natural components being considered are clunky and incompatible (before they're put together to produce the numbers we actually care about).
Note that tools like Causal and Guesstimate make including uncertainty pretty easy and transparent.
I agree, but making uncertainty explicit makes it even better. (And I think it's an important epistemic/numeracy thing to cultivate and encourage). So I think if you are giving a workshop you should make this part of it at least to some extent.
I think this would be worth digging into. It can make a big difference and it’s a mode we should be moving towards IMO, and should this be at the core of our teaching and learning materials. And there are ways of doing this that are not so challenging.
(Of course maybe in this particular podcast example it is now so important but in general I think it’s VERY important.)
“Worst case all parameters” is very unlikely. So is “best case everything”.
See the book “how to measure everything” for a discussion. Also the Causal and Guesstimate apps.
Time-of-perils- or existential-risk-themed image I made with DALL-E:
Here are slides from my "Writing on the Forum" workshop at EAGxBerlin.
Moderation updates
We’re issuing [Edit: identifying information redacted] a two-month ban for using multiple accounts to vote on the same posts and comments, and in one instance for commenting in a thread pretending to be two different users. [Edit: the user had a total of 13 double-votes, most far apart and are likely accidental, two upvotes close together on others' posts (which they claim are accidental as well), but two cases of deliberate self upvote from alternative accounts]
This is against the Forum norms around using multiple accounts. Votes are really important for the Forum: they provide feedback to authors and signal to readers what other users found most valuable, so we need to be particularly strict in discouraging this kind of vote manipulation.
A note on timing: the comment mentioned above is 7 months old but went unnoticed at the time, a report for it came in last week and triggered this investigation.
If [Edit: redacted] thinks that this is not right, he can appeal. As a reminder, bans affect the user, not the account.
[Edit: We have retroactively decided to redact the user's name from this early message, and are currently rethinking our policies on the matter]
[A moderator had edited this comment to remove identifying information, after a moderation decision to retroactively redact the user's identification]
I guess it makes sense that people who disagree with the norms are more likely to do underhanded things to violate them.
Just quickly noting that none of the double-votes were on that thread or similar ones, as far as I know.
Do suspended users get a chance to make a public reply to the mod team's findings? I don't think that's always necessary -- e.g., we all see the underlying conduct when public incivility happens -- but I think it's usually warranted when the findings imply underhanded behavior ("pretending") and the underlying facts aren't publicly observable. There's an appeal process, but that doesn't address the public-reputation interests of the suspended person.
Moderation update: We have indefinitely banned 8 accounts[1] that were used by the same user (JamesS) to downvote some posts and comments from Nonlinear and upvote critical content about Nonlinear. Please remember that voting with multiple accounts on the same post or comment is very much against Forum norms.
(Please note that this is separate from the incident described here)
my_bf_is_hot, inverted_maslow, aht_me, emerson_fartz, daddy_of_upvoting, ernst-stueckelberg, gpt-n, jamess
Was emerson_fartz an acceptable username in the first place? (It may not have had a post history in which case no one may have noticed its existence before the sockpuppeting detection, but that sounds uncivil toward a living person)
It was not, and indeed it was only used for voting, so we noticed it only during this investigation
Moderation update: We have banned "Richard TK" for 6 months for using a duplicate account to double-vote on the same posts and comments. We’re also banning another account (Anin, now deactivated), which seems to have been used by that same user or by others to amplify those same votes. Please remember that voting with multiple accounts on the same post or comment is very much against Forum norms.
(Please note that this is separate from the incident described here)
Moderation update: A new user, Bernd Clemens Huber, recently posted a first post ("All or Nothing: Ethics on Cosmic Scale, Outer Space Treaty, Directed Panspermia, Forwards-Contamination, Technology Assessment, Planetary Protection, (and Fermi's Paradox)") that was a bit hard to make sense of. We hadn't approved the post over the weekend and hadn't processed it yet, when the Forum team got an angry and aggressive email today from the user in question calling the team "dipshits" (and providing a definition of the word) for waiting throughout the weekend.
If the user disagrees with our characterization of the email, they can email us to give permission for us to share the whole thing.
We have decided that this is not a promising start to the user's interactions on the Forum, and have banned them indefinitely. Please let us know if you have concerns, and as a reminder, here are the Forum's norms.
Moderation update:
We have strong reason to believe that Charles He used multiple new accounts to violate his earlier 6-month-long ban. We feel that this means that we cannot trust Charles He to follow this forum’s norms, and are banning him from the Forum for the next 10 years (until December 20, 2032).
We have already issued temporary suspensions to several suspected duplicate accounts, including one which violated norms about rudeness and was flagged to us by multiple users. We will be extending the bans for each of these accounts to mirror Charles’s 10-year ban, but are giving the users an opportunity to message us if we have made any of those temporary suspensions in error (and have already reached out to them). While we aren’t >99% certain about any single account, we’re around 99% that at least one of these is Charles He.
You can find more on our rules for pseudonymity and multiple accounts here. If you have any questions or concerns about this, please also feel free to reach out to us at forum-moderation@effectivealtruism.org.
I find this reflects worse on the mod team than Charles. This is nowhere near the first time I've felt this way.
Fundamentally, it seems the mod team heavily prioritizes civility and following shallow norms above enabling important discourse. The post on forum norms says a picture of geese all flying in formation and in one direction is the desirable state of the forum; I disagree that this is desirable. Healthy conflict is necessary to sustain a healthy community. Conflict sometimes entails rudeness. Some rudeness here and there is not a big deal and does not need to be stamped out entirely. This also applies to the people who get banned for criticizing EA rudely, even when they're criticizing EA for its role in one of the great frauds of modern history. Banning EA critics for minor reasons is a short-sighted move at best.
Banning Charles for 10 years (!!) for the relatively small crime of evading a previous ban is a seriously flawed idea. Some of his past actions like doxxing someone (without any malice I believe) are problematic and need to be addressed, but do not deserve a 10 year ban. Some of his past comments, especially farther in the past, have been frustrating and net-negative to me, but these negative actions are not unrelated to some of his positive traits, like his willingness to step out of EA norms and communicate clearly rather than like an EA bot. The variance of his comments has steadily decreased over time. Some of his comments are even moderator-like, such as when he warned EA forum users not to downvote a WSJ journalist who wasn't breaking any rules. I note that the mod team did not step in there to encourage forum norms.
I also find it very troubling that the mod team has consistent and strong biases in how it enforces its norms and rules, such as not taking any meaningful action against an EA in-group member for repeated and harmful violations of norms but banning an EA critic for 20 years for probably relatively minor and harmless violations. I don't believe Charles would have received a similar ban if he was an employee of a brand name EA org or was in the right social circles.
Finally, as Charles notes, there should be an appeals process for bans.
I don't think repeatedly evading moderator bans is a "relatively small crime". If Forum moderation is to mean anything at all, it has to be consistently enforced, and if someone just decides that moderation doesn't apply to them, they shouldn't be allowed to post or comment on the Forum.
Charles only got to his 6 month ban via a series of escalating minor bans, most of which I agreed with. I think he got a lot of slack in his behaviour because he sometimes provided significant value, but sometimes (with insufficient infrequency) behaved in ways that were seriously out of kilter with the goal of a healthy Forum.
I personally think the 10-year thing is kind of silly and he should just have been banned indefinitely at this point, then maybe have the ban reviewed in a little while. But it's clear he's been systematically violating Forum policies in a way that requires serious action.
I have no idea if this was intentional on the part of the moderators, but they aren't all flying in the same direction. ;-)
Indefinite suspension with leave to seek reinstatement after a stated suitable period would have been far preferable to a 10-year ban. A tenner isn't necessary to vindicate the moderators' authority, and the relevant conduct doesn't give the impression of someone for whom the passage of ten years' time is necessary before there is a reasonable probability that would they have become a suitable participant during the suspension.
It makes a lot of difference to me that Charles' behavior was consistently getting better. If someone consistently flouts norms without any improvement, at some point they should be indefinitely banned. This is not the case with Charles. He started off with really high variance and at this point has reached a pretty tolerable amount. He has clearly worked on his actions. The comments he posted while flouting the mods' authority generally contributed to the conversation. There are other people who have done worse things without action from the mod team. Giving him a 10 year ban without appeal for this feels more motivated by another instance of the mod team asserting their authority and deciding not to deal with messiness someone is causing than a principled decision.
I think this is probably true. I still think that systematically evading a Forum ban is worse behaviour (by which I mean, more lengthy-ban-worthy) than any of his previous transgressions.
I am not personally aware of any, and am sceptical of this claim. Open to being convinced, though.
can you give some examples of this?
Various comments made by this user in multiple posts some time ago, some of which received warnings by mods but nothing beyond that.
Totally unrelated to the core of the matter, but do you intend to turn this into a frontpage post? I'm a bit inclined to say it'd be better for transparency, and to inform others about the bans, and deter potential violators.... but I'm not sure, maybe you have a reason for preferring the shortform (or you'll publish periodical updates on the frontpage
We’ve banned Vee from the Forum for 1 year. Their content seems to be primarily or significantly AI-generated,[1] and it’s not clear that they’re using it to share thoughts they endorse and have carefully engaged with. (This had come up before on one of their posts.) Our current policy on AI-generated content makes it clear that we’ll be stricter when moderating AI-generated content. Vee’s content doesn’t meet the standards of the Forum.
If Vee thinks that this is not right, they can appeal. If they come back, we’ll be checking to make sure that their content follows Forum norms. As a reminder, bans affect the user, not the account.
Different detectors for AI content are giving this content different scores, but we think that this is sufficiently likely true to act on.
It’s hard to be certain that something is AI-generated, and I’m not very satisfied with our processes or policies on this front. At the same time, the increase in the number of bots has made dealing with spam or off-topic/troll contributions harder, and I think that waiting for something closer to certainty will have costs that are too high.
Update, we have unbanned Vee. We are new to using AI detection tools and we made a mistake. We apologize.
Moderation update:
We have strong reason to believe that Torres (philosophytorres) used a second account to violate their earlier ban. We feel that this means that we cannot trust Torres to follow this forum’s norms, and are banning them for the next 20 years (until 1 October 2042).
Moderation update:
I'm indefinitely banning JasMaguire for an extremely racist comment that has since been deleted. We'll likely revisit and update our forum norms to explicitly discourage this sort of behavior.
Please feel free to get in touch with forum-moderation@effectivealtruism.org if you have any concerns.
Moderation update:
Around a month ago, a post about the authorship of Democratising Risk got published. This post got taken down by its author. Before this happened, the moderation team had been deciding what to do with some aspects of the post (and the resulting discussion) that had violated Forum norms. We were pretty confident that we’d end up banning two users for at least a month, so we banned them temporarily while we sorted some things out.
One of these users was Throwaway151. We banned them for posting something a bit misleading (the post seemed to overstate its conclusions based on the little evidence it had, and wasn’t updated very quickly based on clear counter-evidence), and being uncivil in the comments. Their ban has passed, now. As a reminder, bans affect the user, not the account, so any other accounts Throwaway151 operated were also affected. The other user was philosophytorres — see the relevant update.
Tagging posts doesn't work right now — apologies for the inconvenience! The Forum team is working on it, and I hope we'll fix it soon.
And it's fixed! 💜