My overall impression is that the CEA community health team (CHT from now on)
are well intentioned but sometimes understaffed and other times downright
incompetent. It's hard to me to be impartial here, and I understand that their
failures are more salient to me than their successes. Yet I endorse the need for
change, at the very least including 1) removing people from the CHT that serve
as a advisors to any EA funds or have other conflict of interest positions, 2)
hiring HR and mental health specialists with credentials, 3) publicly clarifying
their role and mandate.
My impression is that the most valuable function that the CHT provides is as
support of community building teams across the world, from advising community
builders to preventing problematic community builders from receiving support. If
this is the case, I think it would be best to rebrand the CHT as a CEA HR
department, and for CEA to properly hire the community builders who are now
supported as grantees, which one could argue is an employee misclassification.
I would not be comfortable discussing these issues openly out of concern for the
people affected, but here are some horror stories:
1. A CHT staff pressured a community builder to put through with and include a
community member with whom they weren't comfortable interacting.
2. A CHT staff pressured a community builder to not press charges against a
community member who they felt harassed by.
3. After a restraining order was set by the police in place in this last case,
the CHT refused to liaison with the EA Global team to deny access to the
person restrained, even knowing that the affected community builder would be
attending the event.
4. My overall sense is that CHT is not very mindful of the needs of community
builders in other contexts. Two very promising professionals I've mentored
have dissociated from EA, and rejected a grant, in large part because of how
they were treated by the CHT.
5. My impress
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Thank you! And a few reflections on recognition.
A few days ago, while I sat at the desk in my summer cabin, an unexpected storm
swept in. It was a really bad storm, and when it subsided, a big tree had
fallen, blocking the road to the little neighborhood where the cabin lies. Some
of my neighbors, who are quite senior, needed to get past the tree and could not
move it, so I decided to help. I went out with a chainsaw and quad bike, and
soon the road was clear.
The entire exercise took me about two hours, and it was an overall pretty
pleasurable experience, getting a break from work and being out in nature
working with my body. However, afterward, I was flooded with gratitude, as if I
had done something truly praiseworthy. Several neighbors came to thank me,
telling me what a very nice young man I was, some even brought small gifts, and
I heard people talking about what I had done for days afterward.
This got me thinking.
My first thought: These are very nice people, and it is obviously kind of them
to come and thank me. But it seems a little off - when I tell them what I do
every day, what I dedicate my life to, most of them nod politely and move on to
talk about the weather. It seems bad and unfair that when we do something
immediately visible and easy to grasp, recognition and gratitude come pouring
in, but when we engage in work that is indirect, more abstract, and potentially
with far-reaching consequences, the acknowledgment isn’t as forthcoming.
My second thought: But wait a minute. Here I am, sitting brooding over the
behavior of others. Am I any better? What have I done to express gratitude to
all of the amazing people out there in the world working on what they think is
the most important thing without getting any recognition? Not much.
My third thought: I should do something about this.
…
To all of you, from the bottom of my heart - thanks! The tasks you dedicate
yourselves to might not garner instant applause or make the evening news. You
might n
Application forms for EA jobs often give an estimate for how long you should
expect it to take; often these estimates are *wildly* too low ime. (And others I
know have said this too). This is bad because it makes the estimates unhelpful
for planning, and because it probably makes people feel bad about themselves, or
worry that they're unusually slow, when they take longer than the estimate.
Imo, if something involves any sort of writing from scratch, you should expect
applicants to take at least an hour, and possibly more. (For context, I've seen
application forms which say 'this application should take 10 minutes' and more
commonly ones estimating 20 minutes or 30 minutes).
It doesn’t take long to type 300 words if you already know what you’re going to
say and don’t particularly care about polish (I wrote this post in less than an
hour probably). But job application questions —even ‘basic’ ones like ‘why do
you want this job?’ and ‘why would you be a good fit?’-- take more time. You may
feel intuitively that you’d be a good fit for the job, but take a while to
articulate why. You have to think about how your skills might help with the job,
perhaps cross-referencing with the job description. And you have to express
everything in appropriately-formal and clear language.
Job applications are also very high-stakes, and many people find them difficult
or ‘ugh-y’, which means applicants are likely to take longer to do them than
they “should”, due to being stuck or procrastinating.
Maybe hirers put these time estimates because they don’t want applicants to
spend too long on the first-stage form (for most of them, it won’t pay off,
after all!) This respect for people’s time is laudable. But if someone really
wants the job, they *will* feel motivated to put effort into the application
form.
There’s a kind of coordination problem here too. Let's imagine there's an
application for a job that I really want, and on the form it says 'this
application should take you appr
I'm going to be leaving 80,000 Hours and joining Charity Entrepreneurship's
incubator programme this summer!
The summer 2023 incubator round is focused on biosecurity and scalable global
health charities and I'm really excited to see what's the best fit for me and
hopefully launch a new charity. The ideas that the research team have written up
look really exciting and I'm trepidatious about the challenge of being a founder
but psyched for getting started. Watch this space! <3
I've been at 80,000 Hours for the last 3 years. I'm very proud of the 800+
advising calls I did and feel very privileged I got to talk to so many people
and try and help them along their careers!
I've learned so much during my time at 80k. And the team at 80k has been
wonderful to work with - so thoughtful, committed to working out what is the
right thing to do, kind, and fun - I'll for sure be sad to leave them.
There are a few main reasons why I'm leaving now:
1. New career challenge - I want to try out something that stretches my skills
beyond what I've done before. I think I could be a good fit for being a
founder and running something big and complicated and valuable that wouldn't
exist without me - I'd like to give it a try sooner rather than later.
2. Post-EA crises stepping away from EA community building a bit - Events over
the last few months in EA made me re-evaluate how valuable I think the EA
community and EA community building are as well as re-evaluate my personal
relationship with EA. I haven't gone to the last few EAGs and switched my
work away from doing advising calls for the last few months, while
processing all this. I have been somewhat sad that there hasn't been more
discussion and changes by now though I have been glad to see more EA leaders
share things more recently (e.g. this from Ben Todd). I do still believe
there are some really important ideas that EA prioritises but I'm more
circumspect about some of the thin
I've heard people express the idea that top of funnel community building is not
worth the effort, as EA roles often get 100+ applicants.
I think this is misguided. Great applicants may get a job after only a few
applications. Poor applicants may apply to many many jobs without getting a job.
As a result you should expect poor applicants to be disproportionately well
represented in the applicant pool - hence the pure number of applicants isn't
that informative. This point is weakened by recruitment systems being imperfect,
but as long as you believe recruitment systems have some ability to select
people, then I think this take holds.
I'm really only making a claim about a specific argument, not whether or not top
of funnel community building is a good idea on the margin.
H/T Amarins for nudging me to post this
I was going to post something for careers week but it was delayed for various
reasons (including the mandatory last minute rewrite). I plan to post it in the
next couple of weeks.