All of Aaron Gertler's Comments + Replies

I think of EA as a broad movement, similar to environmentalism — much smaller, of course, which leads to some natural centralization in terms of e.g. the number of big conferences, but still relatively spread-out and heterogenous in terms of what people think about and work on. 

Anything that spans GiveWell, MIRI, and Mercy for Animals already seems broad to me, and that's not accounting for hundreds of university/city meetups around the world (some of which have funding, some of which don't, and which I'm sure host people with a very wide range of vie... (read more)

Hi Vasco,

Thanks for asking these questions.

I work on Open Phil's communications team. Regarding how Open Phil thinks about allocating between human and animal interventions, this comment from Emily (the one you linked in your own comment) is the best summary of our current thinking.

I'm glad to hear you liked the piece! Best of luck with everything.

We don't currently have concrete plans for this, but it's something we might consider doing in the future; if we do, we'll post about it on the Forum.

I love that we're still seeing new "writing about my job" (WAMJ?) posts 2.5 years after the initial post, especially for jobs like this one that are on the obscure side (and thus unlikely to be covered by 80,000 Hours, Probably Good, or other career-focused resources). 

Thanks for taking the time to share this!

I'm an OP staffer who helped to put the post together. Thanks for the nitpicks!

I suppose I'm asking what's the benefit of this format over individual recommendations?

I see the main benefit as convenience. If I'd asked OP staff to write individual Forum posts, I'd have gotten less interest than I did with "send me a few sentences and you can be part of a larger post". Writing an entire post is a bigger hurdle, and I think some people would feel weird writing a post just a few sentences long (even if the alternative was "no post").

Why should I put any more w

The Glassdoor numbers are outdated. We share salary information in our job postings; you can see examples here ($84K/year plus a $12k 401k contribution for an Operations Assistant) and here (a variety of roles, almost all of which start at $100k or more per year — search "compensation:" to see details).

Thanks! I've added a direct link to the roles now, to reduce potential confusion.

Who is your audience for the course? Are you a teacher somewhere?

If you have a guaranteed audience, I think the best starting point would be to look up existing materials of this kind, like the AI courses offered by BlueDot Impact or the curiosity/scout mindset training in the CFAR Handbook. It can be tempting to create all your materials from scratch, but the results rarely live up to what you imagined. (This was my experience trying to write a new version of the EA Handbook from scratch.)

If you don't have a guaranteed audience, you'll want to consider wh... (read more)

I really liked this post and agree with much of it.

I ran the Forum for a while. This involved handling interpersonal conflict. At worst, the conflicts on my plate were things like "an argument between two people" or "someone having a mild breakdown in text form". These are relatively minor issues on the CH scale, but they were among the most stressful elements of my job; I'd get lost for hours trying to write the perfect moderator response, or arguing with someone in DMs about how I'd resolved a situation.

I'd find dealing with CH situations much more stres... (read more)

In retrospect it is crazy that I updated so much on only four rejections!

Does giving up after two rejections make me twice as crazy?

(I love the "mistake" vs. "fluke" distinction, and wish I'd thought to use it in my own essay.)

This is an excellent post! 

I really like seeing profiles of jobs that are closer to being "entry-level" for classic EA-flavored career tracks, to give people a better sense of what they'll be doing early on (it's common for other things, like the 80K podcast or EAG talks, to be focused on work from more senior people).

Upvoted for pointing out that replying to people is a nice thing to do. 

But I disagree with "norm" — I prefer the framing "this is an especially nice thing to do", where "norm" feels more like "you've done something a bit wrong by failing to do this". (How people ;interpret the term will vary, of course, it's possible you meant the former.)

I am roughly as high-profile as Linch (if we use Forum karma as a proxy, and why wouldn't we?). Everything he says here also fits how I engage with EAG messages.

I also try not to use "EA" as a noun. Alternatives I've used in different places:

• "People in EA" (not much better, but hits the amorphous group of "community members plus other people who engage in some way" without claiming that they'd all use a particular label)
• "People practicing EA" (for people who are actually taking clear actions)
• "Community members"
• "People" (for example, I think that posts like "things EAs [should/shouldn't] do" are better as "things people [should/shouldn't] do" — we aren't some different species, we are just people with feelings and

Welcome to the Forum!

Speaking as an advisor to the mod team who ran this past some active mods: 

This isn't something we'd issue a warning for in this context (describing a third party's actions in a way that doesn't seem aggressive or dismissive). In the context of a direct attack (e.g. "why are you bitching to us about something that doesn't matter?"), it could make a comment seem more aggressive and might (weakly) push us toward more substantial action.

*****

Taking my advisor hat off, I generally prefer for the Forum to be less coarse, and I do see "bitching" as gendered... (read more)

Added!

I’ve started feeling super guilty and sad about how much I, the EA community, have wasted on supporting my participation in various community building and research endeavors - I’m not really any more capable or competent at doing the things I’ve done than a local American graduate would have been.

I obviously know much less about you than you do. But speaking to my own experiences, the second part of this rings false:

• I wouldn't hire someone to do something for me unless I thought they were the best person who would accept an offer. This makes me think that

I was involved with Effective Giving Quest; that project ended for reasons unrelated to the difficulty of influencing people through game development. (It wasn't really about making "EA games" — the goal was to convince pro gamers and developers to donate money from their ordinary work.)

By "their actual prio", which of these do you think they meant (if any)?

• The area where they could personally do the most good with their work
• The area that should absorb the highest fraction of EA-interested people, because it has the most strong opportunities to do good
• The area they personally cared most about, to the point where it would feel wrong to answer otherwise (even if they technically thought they could do more good in other areas)

I've sometimes had three different areas in mind for these three categories, and have struggled to talk about my own priorities as a result.

I reached out to some of the people working to make this day happen to say a few things: one, thank you for being part of making the world a safer place; two, thank you for following through after it lost all attention from the public; three, thank you for inspiring me to work in the same way.

This is outstanding!

For anyone reading who hasn't tried it, I highly recommend sending nice notes to strangers who do good things; it's a fun way to procrastinate, and it doesn't take long to write a compliment that will make someone happy.

In my experience, the term "radical empathy" isn't used very often when people explain these ideas to the public -- I more often see it used as shorthand within the community, as a quick way of referring to concepts that people are already familiar with.

In public communication, I see this kind of thing more often just called "empathy", or referred to in simple terms like "caring for everyone equally", "helping people no matter where they live", etc.

I wrote about getting rejected from jobs at GiveWell and Open Phil in this post.

Other rejections that shaped my career:

• Soon before graduating, I was rejected from Bridgewater, my dream job at that point, after full-day interview at their office. I got a bit of feedback here, along the lines of "you had trouble connecting the ground and the clouds" (however confusing that sounds, it's how confused I felt at the time).
• I was rejected by The Onion for a writing position, and by the New York Times when I submitted a review to their newsletter for student writer

I ran a contractor hiring round at CEA, and I tried to both share useful feedback and find work for some of the rejected candidates (at least one of whom wound up doing a bunch of other work for CEA and other orgs as a result). 

Given all the work I'd already put into sourcing and interviewing people interested in working for CEA, providing this additional value felt relatively "cheap", and I'd strongly recommend it for other people running hiring rounds in EA and similar spaces (that is, spaces where one person's success is also good for everyone else... (read more)

I work for Open Phil, which is discussed in the article. We spoke with Nitasha for this story, and we appreciate that she gave us the chance to engage on a number of points before it was published.

A few related thoughts we wanted to share:

• The figure “nearly half a billion dollars” accurately describes our total spending in AI over the last eight years, if you think of EA and existential risk work as being somewhat but not entirely focused on AI — which seems fair. However, only a small fraction of that funding (under 5%) went toward student-oriented

Regarding point 2, I'd argue that both "honesty" and "non-violence" are implied by the actual text of the fourth principle on the page:

Collaborative spirit: It’s often possible to achieve more by working together, and doing this effectively requires high standards of honesty, integrity, and compassion. Effective altruism does not mean supporting ‘ends justify the means’ reasoning, but rather is about being a good citizen, while ambitiously working toward a better world.

I think this text, or something very similar, has been a part of this list since at leas... (read more)

I'm not a moderator, but I used to run the Forum, and I sometimes advise the moderation team.

While "disingenuous" could imply you think your interlocutor is deliberately lying about something, Eliezer seems to mean "I think you've left out an obvious counterargument". 

That claim feels different to me, and I don't think it breaks Forum norms (though I understand why JP disagrees, and it's not an obvious call):

• I don't want people to deliberately lie on the Forum. However, I don't think we should expect them to always list even the most obvious counterar

I've watched every episode of Taskmaster and found this post utterly delightful. Hope the next event is a smash!

I think this is a reasonable question to ask here; at least a few Forum users know a lot about malaria.

But the Forum is small, and you might have better luck at r/AskDocs (which likely has at least a few hundred users with similar knowledge). I hope you find some helpful answers!

The origin of Petrov Day, as an idea for an actual holiday, is this post by Eliezer Yudkowsky. Arkhipov got a shout-out in the comments almost immediately, but "Petrov Day" was the post title, and it's one syllable shorter.

There are many other things like Petrov Day, in this and every culture — arbitrary decisions that became tradition. 

But of course, "started for no good reason" doesn't have to mean "continued for no good reason". Norms that survive tend to survive because people find them valuable. And there are plenty of things that used to be EA/r... (read more)

That's exactly what I mean! 

"I think religious people are less likely to have trait Y" was one form I thought that comment might have taken, and it turns out "trait Y" was "intelligence".

Now that I've heard this detail, it's easier to understand what misguided ideas were going through the speaker's mind. I'm less confused now.

"Religious people are bad at jobs" sounds to me like "chewing gum is dangerous" — my reaction is "What are you talking about? That sounds wrong, and also... huh?" 

By comparison, "religious people are less intelligent" sounds... (read more)

...they would be less likely to hire someone on the basis of their religion because it would imply they were less good at their job.

Some feedback on this post: this part was confusing. I assume that what this person said was something like "I think a religious person would probably be harder to work with because of X", or "I think a religious person would be less likely to have trait Y", rather than "religious people are worse at jobs".

The specifics aren't very important here, since the reasons not to discriminate against people for traits unrelated to the... (read more)

I'm seeing this late, but I love it. Many of my favorite posts on the Forum are things exactly like this — people pointing out interesting opportunities to do good in a nuanced, balanced way. Thank you for sharing!

As with many statements people make about people in EA, I think you've identified something that is true about humans in general. 

I think it applies less to the average person in EA than to the average human. I think people in EA are more morally scrupulous and prone to feeling guilty/insufficiently moral than the average person, and I suspect you would agree with me given other things you've written. (But let me know if that's wrong!)

I find statements of the type "sometimes we are X" to be largely uninformative when "X" is a part of human nature.&nbs... (read more)

FYI, Open Philanthropy recently regranted $40 million to the Gates Foundation's TB work, so I wouldn't say that EA "doesn't recommend" TB interventions. 

However, I don't know if there are GiveWell-competitive options for individual donors in TB, or whether the people who chose the OP regrant would recommend Gates Philanthropy Partners as an option for individuals (I don't see a way to target donations to GPP more specifically, so it seems like you may just be investing in their entire portfolio, which is presumably worse than their TB-focused work on ... (read more)

Thanks for writing this! I've been wondering about these numbers for a while, and it's nice to see that retention is higher than I feared (for such a weighty commitment w/no serious enforcement). 

This is also a good reminder for me to update the last few years of my GWWC records next time I donate, since I've become part of the problem :-(

This is a very cool idea! However you end up running it, I hope you'll write another post to report your results.

I could have created an entire second project. Instead, I spent a lot of time polishing some supplemental materials that almost no one read.

This is a perfect description of what happened when I tried to write a blog for a few years. I spent endless time worrying over minor wording choices when I could have been writing new content, sharing my content in more places, or doing any number of more productive things. I hadn't connected that failure to "perfectionism" before, but reading this post in 2016 would have been really beneficial to me.

I ran a search for "Lex Fridman" and read through all the times people have referenced him on the Forum. There aren't many references, so anyone could quickly check my work if they wanted.

I saw exactly one instance of someone saying something nice about him, on a post with three total votes. Almost every reference was just a link to an interview he did with someone, and was clearly about the interviewee rather than Fridman.

This comment was fantastic! Thanks for taking the time to do this.

In a world where the most prominent online discussants tend to be weird in a bunch of ways, we don't hear enough reactions from "normal" people who are in a mindset of "responding thoughtfully to a friend". I should probably be doing more friend-scanning myself.

On the subject of sockpuppets, Emile Torres is another notable puppeteer. They were banned at the time, so this was a "ban avoidance" puppet rather than an "illusion of consensus" puppet... but of course, there's no reason they couldn't have multiple puppets at the same time.

I suspect I would advise taking them less seriously than you would advise, but I'm not sure.

The range of quality in Forum posts is... wide, so it's hard to say anything about them as a group. I thought for a while about how to phrase that sentence and could only come up with the mealy-mouthed version you read.

But even more importantly, perhaps fewer EA orgs that are not any larger.

Maybe? I'd be happy to see a huge number of additional charities at the "median GiveWell grantee" level, and someone has to start those charities. Doesn't have to be people in EA... (read more)