All of Aaron Gertler 🔸's Comments + Replies

As the person who led the development of that policy (for whatever that's worth), I think the Forum team should be willing to make an exception in this case and allow looser restrictions around political discussion, at least as a test. As Nick noted, the current era isn't so far from qualifying under the kind of exception already mentioned in that post.

(The "Destroy Human Civilization Party" may not exist, but if the world's leading aid funder and AI powerhouse is led by a group whose goals include drastically curtailing global aid and accelerating AI progress with explicit disregard for safety, that's getting into natural EA territory -- even without taking democratic backsliding into account.)

The core point of the post is, in fact, true! (And all the other points, to the best of my knowledge.)

I'll make the same offer Joseph did; I'd be happy to talk to you in depth about this post, review a resume, and try to be otherwise helpful. I've run some hiring processes, failed some applications, and had a lot of conversations with people in similar positions (thanks to this post).

Do you have any updates on whether the Los Angeles summit is happening?

I didn't see any mention of Loretta Mayer's work here. She is testing what seems to be a viable product in several major cities (here's some NYT coverage). Do you see this work as having a different purpose/target market?

(I only skimmed the post — sorry if I missed an obvious reference!)

I didn't read the full post, but the gist of it aligns with what I did as an organizer (started Yale EA):

• I ran another organization (and joined many others) before founding YEA, which gave me some experience with logistics/keeping a group on task. I also talked to a few other new organizers to share ideas and observations (though we were all newbies at that point).
• The most important aspect of the group was that we had fun and became friends. The times I remember aren't the quixotic "EA" activities (which were pretty shambolic, since there were no intro cou

Low-effort comment!

There are many stories I enjoy despite plot holes because the setting/characters/prose delight me so much that it's fun to imagine what hidden factors could justify the plot holes — I can trust an author so much that I assume they'll explain things later (or that there's a hidden explanation they created for me to discover myself).

Recent examples include Sousou no Frieren (lots of symbolism and emotion to obscure thin worldbuilding, I feel so many feelings that I barely think about the plot) and Moonfall (written like a fable from the pe... (read more)

I can speak only for myself, but I treat linkposts like any other post unless the poster provides additional context.

I've linkposted many things I thought were flawed in some respect, but still worth sharing and contemplating; if someone disagreed, I'd want them to downvote me for my poor judgment.

All true! I'll add a note to the post.

Forgive me if you've written about this elsewhere, but how did the collaboration come to pass? Did the Daily Show just reach out to you? Was SWP pitched to them by someone?

Outstanding! If you end up deciding to try for a nuclear job, I wish you the best of luck.

If you're open to disclosing this, how many people reached out to you about the position? I'm curious about the Forum's overall level of appetite for ETG-oriented posts like this, which I think could be written for many other jobs too!

Thanks! 

ETFs do sound like a big win. I suppose someone could look at them as "finance solving a problem that finance created" (if the "problem" is e.g. expensive mutual funds). But even the mutual funds may be better than the "state of nature" (people buying individual stocks based on personal preference?). And expensive funds being outpaced by cheaper, better products sounds like finance working the way any competitive market should.

This isn't about your giving per se, but have your views on the moral valence of financial trading changed in any notable ways since you spoke about this on the 80K podcast?

(I have no reason to think your views have changed, but was reading a socialist/anti-finance critique of EA yesterday and thought of your podcast.)

The episode page lacks a transcript, but does include this summary: "There are arguments both that quant trading is socially useful, and that it is socially harmful. Having investigated these, Alex thinks that it is highly likely to be benefi... (read more)

I used to work as a part-time advisor and ops person for a family foundation (no actual staff) that gave away ~$500k annually; they've worked with several other people since then.

Much of my advisory time was spent researching and evaluating fairly small grants (workable for someone in the $20k-100k range), since the foundation's "experimental/non-GiveWell" budget was a small fraction of the total. I think I could have done this work for a group of 10-20 clients of that size at a time if I'd been a full-time advisor.

As a starting point, you can see the Fund's current goals here, and the grants made so far here.

Again, I’m aware that concrete, impactful projects and people still exist within EA. But in the public sphere accessible to me, their influence and visibility are increasingly diminishing, while indirect high-impact approaches via highly speculative expected value calculations become more prominent and dominant.

This has probably been what many people experienced over the last few years, especially as the rest of the world also started getting into AI.

But I think it's possible to counteract by curating one's own "public sphere" instead.

For example, you coul... (read more)

I'd have benefited from that kind of nudge myself! I was aware of 80K for years but never even considered coaching.

Thanks for sharing your views!

Have you written anything about your own take on the project, and how it compares to other donation options you were considering?

Open Philanthropy has published a summary of the conflict of interest of policy we use. (Adding it as another example despite the age of this thread, since I expect people may still reference the thread in the future to find examples of COI policies.)

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)