Quick takes

Our board now has more roles than before (1600+), and a public Airtable version that you can use to set up custom views and automations (including with Slack). A quick guide for using the new Airtable: 1. Open the public Airtable and click "Use this data". Make sure "Create a synced table" is selected. Choose which Airtable base you'd like the jobs data to live in. This creates a read-only synced table with our published roles. 2. Create a filtered view in the new table (e.g., filter by cause area, location, or role type). 3. From here, you can set up Slack notifications: 1. Trigger: "When record enters view", selecting the filtered view you created in step 2.  2. Action: "Send a Slack message" (via Airtable’s built-in Slack integration) 3. Compose your message using field tokens to pull in live data from each role, e.g. New role: {Job Title} at {Org Name} | {Job URL}. Use markdown for basic formatting like bold or italics.  If you use our job board, here’s a few ways you can help us to help you: * Test out the new Airtable and let us know if there are any issues or if you do anything cool with it. * If you land a role that you found on the job board, please get in touch! Even a short message about how our services helped you makes a huge difference to our ability to continue providing these services. * If you know of any orgs you think we should monitor for the board (including ones you work for), please share them! * If you work at an org that's listed on the board, note that links to your roles from our job board automatically include utm_source=probablygood_board so if you track referral sources, you'll be able to see applications that came via us. If you have a question on your application forms regarding where candidates heard about the role, please also consider adding "Probably Good" as an option.  * If you’re a hiring manager/recruiter who ends up hiring a candidate who found your role through our job board, please let us know! Othe

We recently published an interview with Matthew Coleman - another entry in our Career Journeys series. Matthew is the Executive Director of Giving Multiplier, a platform that encourages donations to highly effective charities through donation matching. Before this, he completed a PhD in psychology, researching the psychology of altruism. The interview covers quite a lot of ground, but a few of the things we talked about include: * The gap between what a career looks like from the outside and what it's actually like day-to-day. * Advice for people wanting to make an impact through psychology. * The tension between keeping your options open and committing to a path. Here’s one of our favorite extracts from the full interview: On engaging with the (often mundane) realities of academic research: I learned a lot. By the time I started my lab manager role, I was fairly confident I wanted to do a PhD. But my research lab in undergrad, which I loved, was a very small lab where I was working closely with the faculty advisor, and I wanted to try out a larger lab studying different topics to explore a bit more. As the lab manager of an unusually large lab, I got a bird’s-eye view of a lot of the research projects going on and understood what the day-to-day looked like, whether that was grant applications, hiring and onboarding, or actually conducting research myself alongside my colleagues. I found the experience amazing and fascinating and really intellectually stimulating, which confirmed that I wanted to go the PhD route, so I followed through on my original plan from undergrad. […] I was certainly very fortunate to have gotten a lot of hands-on experience in research as an undergraduate, so I think I had a better sense of the day-to-day than many people do. But I do think it’s a very important point, and some related advice I like to give is: when you wake up on a random Tuesday in February, do you actually want to do the things that you have to do? Not just do y

Weekly Prompts Recently, an advisee told me that they've been procrastinating on replying to my email. It sits at the top of their stack each week. When they try to reply, instead they act on the prompts within, and so no longer need to correspond with me for the time-being. They run this in a loop, and keep moving forward. My email: Consider setting up such prompts for your own weekly check-ins. Let me know some of your most effective prompts in the comments!

The Forum should normalize public red-teaming for people considering new jobs, roles, or project ideas. If someone is seriously thinking about a position, they should feel comfortable posting the key info — org, scope, uncertainties, concerns, arguments for — and explicitly inviting others to stress-test the decision. Some of the best red-teaming I’ve gotten hasn’t come from my closest collaborators (whose takes I can often predict), but from semi-random thoughtful EAs who notice failure modes I wouldn’t have caught alone (or people think pretty differently so can instantly spot things that would have taken me longer to figure out). Right now, a lot of this only happens at EAGs or in private docs, which feels like an information bottleneck. If many thoughtful EAs are already reading the Forum, why not use it as a default venue for structured red-teaming? Public red-teaming could: * reduce unilateralist mistakes, * prevent coordination failures (I’ve almost spent serious time on things multiple people were already doing — reinventing the wheel is common and costly), Obviously there are tradeoffs — confidentiality, social risk, signaling concerns — but I’d be excited to see norms shift toward “post early, get red-teamed, iterate publicly,” rather than waiting for a handful of coffee chats.

alignment is a conversation between developers and the broader field. all domains are conversations between decision-makers and everyone else: “here are important considerations you might not have been taking into account. here is a normative prescription for you.” “thanks — i had been considering that to 𝜀 extent. i will {implement it because x / not implement it because y / implement z instead}." these are the two roles i perceive. how does one train oneself to be the best at either? sometimes, conversations at eag center around ‘how to get a job’, whereas i feel they ought to center around ‘how to make oneself significantly better than the second-best candidate’.

As a university organizer at a very STEM focused state school, I suspect that students getting liberal arts degrees are more easily convinced to pursue a career in direct work. If this is the case, it could be because direct work compares more favorably with the other career options of those with liberal arts degrees, or because the clearer career outcomes of STEM majors create more path dependence and friction when they consider switching careers. This is potentially another thing to keep in mind when trying to compare the successes of EA uni groups.

Dwarkesh (of the famed podcast) recently posted a call for new guest scouts. Given how influential his podcast is likely to be in shaping discourse around transformative AI (among other important things), this seems worth flagging and applying for (at least, for students or early career researchers in bio, AI, history, econ, math, physics, AI that have a few extra hours a week). The role is remote, pays ~$100/hour, and expects ~5–10 hours/week. He’s looking for people who are deeply plugged into a field (e.g. grad students, postdocs, or practitioners) with high taste. Beyond scouting guests, the role also involves helping assemble curricula so he can rapidly get up to speed before interviews. More details are in the blog post; link to apply (due Jan 23 at 11:59pm PST).

Question: Should I serve on the board of a non-EA charity?  I have an opportunity through work to help guide a charity doing work on children's education and entertainment in the UK and US. It has an endowment in the tens of millions of pounds.  Has anyone else had experience serving on the board or guiding committee of a non-EA charity? Did you feel like you were able to have a positive influence? Do you have any advice?