All of Ben Williamson's Comments + Replies

A strong +1 to this - we're always looking for great new animal welfare founders, but I don't want to encourage a mindset that nonprofit entrepreneurship is by default the best or only path to doing good in the animal movement. 

Echoing your points, I see a lot of applications from people who are incredibly talented and dedicated, just not necessarily ideal founders or leaders at this stage in their career. I'd love to see more of these people go find impact in roles outside of the nonprofit space

AIM is looking for a freelance copyeditor to help us maximise the quality of our published written work, including our website and research reports. We'd be particularly excited to receive applications from students or early-stage professionals with existing knowledge of EA and a desire to test their fit with communications work. Job advert here.

The initial application deadline for these roles has been extended until November 3rd (next Sunday). If you're interested in any of the positions and on the fence about applying, please reach out. I'd love to understand why and answer any questions you may have.

We definitely have done this and we look to recommend late-stage applicants for consideration for potential job opportunities at AIM-incubated organisations where this is a good fit. I think exposure to a startup organisation - whether non- or for-profit - is a great way of getting a better sense of personal fit for founding yourself

I'm glad you found this useful! It's something we've tried to highlight more this cycle. A purely personal recommendation would be a grounding in Stoicism - e.g. reading some of Ryan Holiday's books. Founding requires a lot of grit and perseverance, and some of the principles of stoicism and exercises for practicing these are the most practical guidance of finding on how to cultivate these traits.

Excellent question! Running an organisation really stretched my strategic thinking and ability to choose a coherent path through a lot of uncertainty. Your time, and the time of everyone who works for you, could be used on seemingly 100 different highly valuable things. Often you don't have robust information to differentiate between these and decide which to prioritise, making it easy to try and do too many things simultaneously. I think one of the biggest lessons I learnt from MHI is being ruthless in prioritisation - choosing a very small number of thin... (read more)

Thank you! This is something we're thinking about at AIM in terms of fostering an openness to shutting down amongst our charities where this makes sense. Strong public examples certainly helps. I think providing evaluation and research support to charities so that they can draw conclusions on impact they're confident enough in to make shut down decisions makes a differnce. 

I also think fostering a culture that places less emphasis on founders as the ultimate driver of success or failure would help. Organisations succeed for a combination of several ke... (read more)

Hey Toby, yeah I'm not best-placed to answer this but a few quick thoughts:
- I think the skills to build and run an excellent organisation transfer quite strongly across, though the day-to-day nature of the work and 'product' might differ substantially
- This is a bit of an experiment! We think there could be incredible value to a program like this if we can make it work, but we're not claiming 100% confidence that this will work as well as hoped
- For a variety of reasons, the number of charities we can found a year currently has a clear cap: the founding t... (read more)

I'll leave out the specific data on this but we were pleased with the number and quality of applicants for this from our first recruitment round earlier this year. I'd say in general we've got a mix of more 'CEO' and 'CTO' type candidates - ones with significant experience in building startups and fundraising, and those with significant technical experience and skill. Possibly a bit of a skew to the former so we're especially excited for applicants from a more technical side this time around.
 

I certainly had doubts when I first applied to the program! I was rejected in 2021 and then accepted in 2022: I got further in the process than I expected to in 2021 so in that sense the rejection was actually a source of confidence that this might be a realistic avenue for me in future. 

I think applicants tend to believe that they need more prior experience than they do (we've had multiple excellent participants in their very early 20s), and perhaps underestimate the value of flexibility, particularly in your organisation's first 12 months. Several o... (read more)

A good question - we try and make our application effectively 'EA-neutral' but in practice I expect that our recruitment process is a little skewed in favour of people from an EA background. My guess is that's down to a greater familiarity with the types of questions or tasks we ask for (e.g. making a weighted factor model), and it being easier to pick up on key things we care about - like a commitment to cost-effectiveness - when people communicate this in an EA way.

Ultimately, we care about finding people who have the base traits we care about - we're equally open to a 0% or 100% culturally EA cohort if we feel like that's the best group of people who applied.

Cause area focus will be determined by the initiatives themselves so I'll leave it to any of the founders to comment on this further should they wish to!

An interesting idea! To my knowledge this is not something we have any plans for (see Luke's comment below). I can see a world in future where something like this would be useful though as the number of effective giving orgs grows and the levels of success between orgs becomes more apparent

An excellent writeup - thank you to the MSI team for taking the time as a large existing global health/development org to share this. I'm particularly excited to see the potential cost-effectiveness of last mile programming where the benefits to reproductive autonomy are likely to be particularly strong.

This link should now be fixed!

This is an interesting and thoughtful post. 

One query: to me, the choice to label GHD as "reliable human capacity growth" conflicts with the idea you state of GHD sticking to more common-sense/empirically-grounded ideas of doing good. 

Isn't the capacity growth argument presuming a belief in the importance of long-run effects/longtermism? A common-sense view on this to me feels closer to a time discounting argument (the future is too uncertain so we help people as best we can within a timeframe that we can have some reasonable level of confidence that we affect).

For sure! Though my rough take would this would add up to maybe $60-70k all in? (perhaps I'm undershooting average salary estimates based on UK numbers)

$110,000 for a single community builder in Boston seems awfully high? 

I'm guessing this is meant to include budget for event delivery on so on, but I think it would be worth being explicit in that given the perception at times of very liberal spending within community-building and that this is cited as an example of a marginal donation to CEA.

I definitely agree with and share the concerns over government adoption as a silver bullet of sorts on the charity's side. Outsourcing all the costs when the government's money and resources are more counterfactually precious than the charity's is not the way we want things to go!

Our aim is closer to your last sentence: government adoption to leverage the cost-savings from delivery through their existing systems of training/data collection/material distribution, with MHI continuing to pay for the costs involved that the government wouldn't incur anyway.

[disclosure: I work for a family planning organisation (MHI), these views are my own].

It’s eminently reasonable to hold philosophical views that call into the question the work of an organisation such as FEM.

I worry though that it’s somewhat against the spirit of EA and worldview diversity to suggest that donations to other charities may be more appropriate based on views that are not consistently shared across the community?

Is there not the risk of a double-standard here given people with person-affecting views may view donations to a good number of longtermist projects as a harmful misallocation of resources by prioritising future lives over present ones?

I'd love to see this as a short post of its own at some point, such a great explanation!

Changed!

Cheers for this! Think I’d skimmed the top of that thread and missed the last reply you highlighted.

Looks a little clunky but worth adding.

Thanks!

And yes, I completely agree that a voting system would be a nice addition. To the best of my knowledge and research, I couldn’t find any way of doing this through Airtable.

Would happily add this though if someone can tell me how.

Thanks for flagging this. It does seem from this that I've oversold the potential value quite significantly! I'll add a note to the section to flag this comment and that this doesn't appear to be as helpful as hoped.

I've worked on this full-time thanks to the grant, so sadly not much in the way of helpful tips. 

The only rough point I can offer here is that I took the job as a waiter last summer (2021) quite intentionally. This allowed me to work 30-35 hours over 3 days, enough to cover my living costs and leave me 4 days free. One of these days was always lost to full slug-mode tiredness/ recovery, but then I'd have 3 days clear - of which 2 I'd try to treat as fairly full-time idea/ pitch development time. 

I think this was a pretty effective method in helpi... (read more)

This makes sense and seems pretty plausible. Can speak to personal experience of the intensity of the sun in Australia!

Appreciate these thoughts. We're planning a more tailored model for our upcoming procrastination report (find the category that seems to best fit the cause of your procrastination and then skip to the solutions that fit best with that category) - might be a little more along the lines of what you're suggesting here.

(also a general thank you for leaving detailed feedback on things like this - genuinely very helpful)

Thanks for this! We do have a contact form on our website (https://effectiveselfhelp.org/contact) but I don't think I highlighted that here or that it's necessarily that obvious. Think I'll start emphasising that though instead of an email link so thanks for the prompt :)

Sorry to have to cancel this but I've come down quite ill this weekend and won't be able to present this workshop today. Thanks for your interest and we hope to reschedule this soon! Ben

This is the idea of what I'm writing up! 

I think I could have made this clearer in the short description above but I'm trying to synthesise all the recommendations that currently exist into a database (see rough Google sheet here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1InTlwLwAKprqFeD65oF0XXz64lZTHuhBxzHDt8fqzNM/edit?usp=sharing)

It seemed worth giving people a new opportunity to share any new/ further recommendations but the idea is to include everything suggested in all past posts on the same topic on the EA Forum, LessWrong, etc.

Thanks for everyone's suggestions!

Cheers! Really enjoyed chatting and hopefully see you in London!

Nice! Great to have additional perspective on something like this. I think your reasons make a lot of sense, which is all very encouraging in terms of people successfully organising lots of 1:1s.

Really impressive work! I think the idea that protest movements could be very high-impact is pretty convincing. It's a lot of ground to cover to try and find more concrete answers to how much impact movements have and how this can be maximised but I think this report makes good progress towards that. 

More generally, great to see in-depth research on plausibly impactful topics that we've not looked at much as a community. 

Edited! And thanks, most of these I haven't listened to but I can personally recommend
'Clearer paths and sharper ideas' (Spencer Greenberg) and 'Creatures of Habit' (Making Sense with Sam Harris), as well as the 80k, Ezra Klein show, The Tim Ferriss Show, and Planet Money more generally.

Thanks! I haven't come across anything specific to work addiction I'm afraid. Just had a quick search though and this looks relevant and likely a high quality discussion: https://hbr.org/podcast/2018/04/you-may-be-a-workaholic-if 

Also personally found the LessWrong articles about taking a Sabbath very useful as motivation to protect time for rest and recovery.

This sounds like an exciting and very high-potential project! I'd be curious if you've thought about the potential for impact through directing new people to EA (in terms of work as well as donations). 

It seems plausible that people might discover EA organisations, and ultimately the community as a whole, through the effective charities listed and the background info of the app. Expanding the community in this way might further increase the overall impact and also make it valuable if funding remains a relatively low constraint in the community. 

Hi Misha, I'd say a quick breathing exercise and PMR might be particularly helpful, especially as you can pretty much do them at any time/ location. Otherwise, it's maybe worth experimenting with things you particularly enjoy as a way of quickly relaxing 
- e.g. personally, I find it surprisingly effective to spend even just 5 minutes strumming on my ukulele if I'm feeling quite highly stressed

Thank you! Feel free to reach out about getting involved at any point when you have more capacity. These are some great points that I've mostly started working on but there's (always) a lot more to do. 

I have many more people I want to reach out to about the project and certainly I'm now working on building a wider community/ collaboration team for moving forward. And absolutely, I want each review to be a living document and for the recommendations to be consistently improved and updated over time. I think I'll add a note on the stress and sleep articles to reflect that.

That's a great point! I definitely intend to review what evidence is available for the size of individual differences in benefit from a given intervention. As you point out, if there are ways of accounting for this in how to select/ prioritise interventions, that could be particularly useful. 

Thanks!

There's definitely room for improvement with the rigour of the research analysis. I've discussed some of these areas in my reply to David Moss so I won't repeat it all but to note a few quick things:

- There's a lot more time that could be spent collating and reviewing evidence here but I'd expect that the effect sizes and recommendations would not change drastically. I definitely hope to come back and improve this article in future; as this is an early stage project I have no doubt there are improvements to be made.
- I have combined different measures of i... (read more)

Plant/ green space exposure definitely has a significant effect on its own, possibly in part through the smell given off.

I appreciate the detailed notes/ feedback on the research process. I think the points you make are very reasonable and definitely helpful.

I expect that I will come back to this stress article, and the sleep one before that, to improve the quality of recommendations through a better research process. I can see a number of ways to do that including points that you bring up.
 - I'd like the evidence tables to cover 90+% of interventions that appear valuable from the outside/ have been suggested elsewhere, which I agree is not a bar I think this article re... (read more)

I appreciate these thoughts, good suggestions and I agree on both counts. Running a survey like that hadn't come to mind but is definitely something I'll do now (even just a basic initial version like asking it as a question post here on the Forum)

I appreciate the detailed write-up but felt that this lacked a fair attempt to present the strongest arguments in favour of degrowth and then critique them (steelmanning). 

It's been a few years since I studied degrowth in my undergrad degree so my understanding may be weak/ rusty/ simply wrong. All the same, my impression is that a pro-growth attitude is the majority opinion in EA which makes a fair presentation of the alternative argument particularly important as many readers may be predisposed to agree with you. 

I'm not an advocate for degrowt... (read more)