These are excellent

[The clean limerick is a] periodic fad and object of magazine contests, rarely rising above mediocrity. - G.B. Shaw

However, given how few people read poetry for fun at present, we expect that poetry will have to be especially good to win. - Aaron Gertler

An EA Limerick

(Lacey told me this was not good enough to actually submit to the writing contest, so publishing it as a short form.)

An AI sat boxed in a room 

Said Eliezer: "This surely spells doom! 

With self-improvement recursive, 

And methods subversive 

It will just simply go 'foom'."

Welcome Jen!

Hey David! Congratulations on publishing your first post :)

Thanks Larks! I somewhat regularly encounter people who are hesitant to post on the forum, and can't recall a time when telling them about the existence of the prize made them seem more likely to post. I can, however, think of people who have told me that they were more willing to post after having received the prize or other recognition for their work.

My guess is that something like imposter syndrome is more of a barrier to people posting than money is.

Thanks for posting this! I ended up liking it, although it took me a while to figure out what the poem was trying to say. In case others have the same confusion, here's the Kipling society's summary:

From its place out over the shoals, the Bell Buoy’s voice is lifted to issue warning and protect human life while the church bell safe in its tower, knows nothing of these dangers and stands aloof. Its voice is one controlled by the authority of the church and limited by the church’s interests. In contrast the bell buoy glories in its independence and in the vital work it performs.

I found this motivational. Thanks for posting!

Thanks for posting this! I had read some of their other stuff, but hadn't come across this story

Thanks! "EA organizations are bad" is a reasonable answer.

(In contrast, "for-profit organizations are bad" doesn't seem like reasonable answer for why for-profit entrepreneurship exists, as adverse selection isn't something better organizations can reasonably get around. It seems important to distinguish these, because it tells us how much effort EA organizations should put into supporting entrepreneur-type positions.)

Thanks for writing this up. At the risk of asking obvious question, I'm interested in why you think entrepreneurship is valuable in EA.

One explanation for why entrepreneurship has high financial returns is information asymmetry/adverse selection: it's hard to tell if someone is a good CEO apart from "does their business do well", so they are forced to have their compensation tied closely to business outcomes (instead of something like "does their manager think they are doing a good job"), which have high variance; as a result of this variance and people be... (read more)

Sure, those other things are also ways in which I would say that Bob is underqualified, not overqualified.

I see. My model is something like: working uses up some mental resource, and that resource being diminished presents as "it's hard for you to work more hours without some sort of lifestyle change." If you can work more hours without a lifestyle change, that seems to me like evidence your mental resources aren't diminished, and therefore I would predict you to be more productive if you worked more hours.

As you say, the most productive form of work might not be programming, but instead talking to random users etc.

Thanks for writing this up – I'm really interested in answers to this and have signed up for notifications to comments on this post because I want to see what others say.

I find it hard to talk about "working harder" in the abstract, but if I think of interventions that would make the average EA work more hours I think of things like: surrounding themselves by people who work hard, customizing light sources to keep their energy going throughout the day, removing distractions from their environment, exercising and regulating sleep well, etc. I would guess th... (read more)

Thanks! I added these to the comment (because of how big query works, I can't easily add them to the dashboard).

I've received a couple of kind suggestions of people I should have included as "EA adjacent influencers". Please reply to this comment (or DM me) if you see more.

• SBF_FTX - 1 IPW Follower
• LinchZhang - 1 IPW Follower
• sapinker - 24 IPW Followers
• tylercowen - 28 IPW Followers
• mattyglesias - 24 IPW Followers
• dominic2306 - 0 IPW Followers
• lxrjl - 1 IPW Followers
• chanamessinger - 0 IPW Followers
• nathanpmyoung - 0 IPW Followers

Thanks SEADS for your help with this research, and for taking the time to share it publicly!

Thanks! This is helpful to know.

A digest for notifications is an interesting idea. And I agree the current UI gives more information on desktop, which is probably unavoidable given that there's just more real estate, but I do think we want our mobile experience to be good. (About half of our users are on mobile devices.)

Thanks! I appreciate the feedback

Thanks! Your comment is helpful information that we should make tag subscriptions more findable, even if we don't change the underlying functionality.

But to the extent these come at the cost of rational discussion, this is a cost we should be happy to pay.

What do you think the effect size is of adding pictures? My guess is that it's pretty small.

For example, the "beauty premium" in employment compensation is usually considered to be small (<10%),^[1] and I would expect that to be much larger than the effect of profile pictures on a forum, because a) how your coworkers look is much more salient than how some commenter with a tiny picture looks, and b) beauty is more plausibly correlated with product... (read more)

Thanks Nathan! I look forward to hearing your feedback on them

Hi Arepo, I think you are describing a tiny portion of EA software development, but are using the term "EA tech" to describe that small portion. I would suggest changing your post to something like "small EA organizations should hire an agency instead of hiring <=1 FTE of developers" and drop the term "EA tech work" unless it's something that genuinely applies to all EA tech work.

The claim “EA tech work is bad for technical career capital” seems particularly unsubstantiated.

I care about this not so much because it affects your agency proposal, but more ... (read more)

I feel like these conversations often get confusing because people mean different things by the term "entrepreneur", so I wonder if you could define what you mean by "entrepreneur" and what you think they would do in EA?

Even with very commercializable EA projects like cellular agriculture, my experience is that the best founders are closer to scientists than traditional CEOs, and once you get to things like disentanglement research the best founders have almost no skills in common with e.g. tech company founders, despite them both technically being "entrepreneurs" in some sense.

Thanks for writing this up! 

An EA-specific agency would have to be low-bono, offering major discounts to EA orgs - otherwise it would be indistinguishable from the countless existing for-profit agencies.

This is building a bit on what Sanjay said, but I think this sentence deserves more highlighting.

If the only advantage of an EA agency is that it has lower prices, then it's equivalent to donating more money to the organization which hires the developers.

Donating more money has a lot of advantages over building an entire new agency: we don't have to go... (read more)

Congrats on the comment prize!

Would you agree that, if Bob was more politically skilled, he would be a better fit for this position? (E.g. he would be better able to convince Carol to do this ambitious project.)

If so, then maybe you want to say that he is "overqualified in technical knowledge and underqualified in political ability" or something, but chalking the problem up to being "overqualified" across-the-board seems misleading.

If you are a junior employee then sure, it's your managers responsibility to listen to your ideas. But as you become more seni... (read more)

Are you or the grantee planning to publish the results of the creatine investigation? I think it would be helpful for many in the community, even if it's a null result.

Write / find a single solid reference on “list-based sequence screening is flawed”

• Next Steps for Access to Safe, Secure DNA Synthesis doesn’t quite cover this

Do you have non-single/solid references about this? I know someone who might be interested in doing this write up, but is trying to get more background understanding.

Cool, for what it's worth my experience recruiting for a couple EA organizations is that labor supply is elastic even above (say) $100k/year, and your comments seem to indicate that you would be happy to fund at least some people at that level.

So I remain kind of confused why the grant amounts are so small.

This means that when we do encounter such an opportunity, we should most likely take it, even if it seems expensive or unlikely to succeed... Some EAs doing direct work could literally earn >$1,000 per hour if they pursued earning to give, but it's generally agreed that direct work seems more impactful for them

I notice that the listed grants seems substantially below $1000/hour; e.g. Rethink getting $250,000 for seven FTEs implies ~$35,000/FTE or roughly $18/hour. *

Is this because you aren't getting those senior people applying? Or are there other constraints?

* (Maybe this is off by a factor of two if you meant that they are FTE but only for half the year etc.)

Thanks for commenting! Unfortunately applications for this position have closed, but I hope you will apply in a future round, or to one of the other positions for which we are currently hiring, if they are relevant to your skill set.

Congratulations on such a successful event! 

1. Regarding your NPS of 74: I think that's quite good; this page describes an NPS of 60+ as "very, very special, your only daughter probably just got married". 
2. "We sent a lot of emails in the few weeks leading up to the summit, with various actions for participants to take, and that seemed like a good way to build enthusiasm / engagement." – could you say more about what you asked the attendees to do?
3. I recently found out about Gather and was also pretty impressed. Do you happen to have filled out versions

Positive: The people I work with, both at CEA as well as the wider EA community, are often impressive, talented, and kind.

Negative: I'm not a morning person, and living in Pacific time while working with Brits means I have to be up early a lot

I sometimes speak to people who aren't aware how many career paths in community building there are, even outside of EA. I do think this causes there to be fewer community builders than there "should" be.

It feels hard to make really broad statements though; some people's skills and interests are pretty clearly not a fit for community building, and I don't think they should try to force it.

Thanks for writing this up! Really helpful to hear about your experiences with governments, and it's cool that you've been able to make so much progress.

I speak with a lot of people with software engineering backgrounds who are looking for impactful projects. Are there any software projects you wish people would take on?

I sometimes refer engineers to the cultivated meat modeling consortium, but that group doesn't seem very active.

I've heard that academic research is funding constrained, in the sense that there are academics who would be willing to do research, particularly in the field of cellular agriculture, but they can't get grants. (I think this funding constraint is partially a reflection of biological research being pretty expensive.) I noticed that very few of your grantees are formally affiliated with an academic institution.

Is this just because you don't get applications from academics, or are there reasons against funding them (e.g. the minimum grant size is too high)?

I sometimes hear from people who are interested in working on cellular agriculture or other meat alternatives, and want to do a PhD, but can't find an advisor who is working on one of those subjects, so they instead plan to research e.g. tissue engineering or cell modeling for the purpose of treating human disease (or some other better funded domain).

In your request for proposals, you seem mostly interested in people who are working full-time on animal-related research.

I'm curious if you have advice for people who are in the situation I described (includin... (read more)

Thanks for posting this! If I understand your "risky" assumptions correctly, it seems to be targeted at people who believe (as a simple example):

1. Apples are better than oranges, and furthermore no amount of oranges can equate to one Apple
2. Nonetheless, it's better to have a high probability of receiving an orange than a small probability of getting one Apple

Is that correct?

If so, what is the argument for believing both of these? My assumption is that someone who thinks that apples are lexically better than oranges would disagree with (2) and believe that any ... (read more)

Sure, but that's also a reason against appropriately qualified people working there also, right?

What I'm pushing against is the assumption that employees love outsiders coming in and telling them all the things they are doing wrong, and if they don't like you pointing out their mistakes it must mean you are "overqualified".

I actually hear the opposite more frequently: having a more junior title makes it easier for people to listen to your suggestions, because it's less threatening for you to point out mistakes.

Thanks! I agree with the concern, but I think I disagree about the root cause:

She likes Bob's ideas and wants to find ways to implement them, but doesn't like Bob's leadership style so doesn't want to put him in a leadership position

In general, I'm skeptical about "putting" people in leadership positions, especially when their colleagues don't want to be led by them.

If people aren't listening to Bob because they don't like his leadership style, then I would say that Bob is a bad culture fit (or, to be blunt, not a good leader). I wouldn't describe this as ... (read more)

Interesting point – my interpretation of that statistic is that external people are hired into more senior roles than internal people. I guess it's also consistent with the hypothesis that external people get less mentorship though.

Thanks! I agree that the amount of career capital a position will generate is an important factor in any career decision, "overqualified" or not.

I'm curious about your "it can be hard to reverse" statement though: how frequently do you think this happens? At least in US tech, it's pretty common for people to take a year off to organize against Trump or whatever, and a year of charity work is definitely not irreversible. When I've talked to recruiters they basically just ignore charity work, at worst.

Anecdotally it always feels like now is the wrong time to... (read more)

Thanks for correcting my mistaken impression Jakub! I've updated my comment to link to yours.

I guess I don't know OP's goals but yeah if their goal is to publicly shame ACE then publicly shaming ACE is a good way to accomplish that goal.

My point was a) sending a quick emails to someone about concerns you have with their work often has a very high benefit to cost ratio, and b) despite this, I still regularly talk to people who have concerns about some organization but have not sent them an email.

I think those claims are relatively uncontroversial, but I can say more if you disagree.

Basic statistics question: the GMA predictors research seems to mostly be using the Pearson correlation coefficient, which I understand to measure linear correlation between variables.

But a linear correlation would imply that billionaires have an IQ of 10,000 or something which is clearly implausible. Are these correlations actually measuring something which could plausibly be linearly related (e.g. Z score for both IQ and income)?

I read through a few of the papers cited and didn't see any mention of this. I expect this to be especially significant at the tails, which is what you are looking at here.

Yep, definitely don't want people to swing too far in the opposite direction. Just commenting that "talk to people about your concerns with them" is a surprisingly underutilized approach, in my experience.

Thanks! I had interpreted "We are yet to see how successful the leadership transition turns out" as a pretty strong statement, but I agree that the review doesn't specify how the different factors they list are weighted and your interpretation could be correct. I hope someone from ACE can clarify.

I do wish we could be having this discussion in a more productive and conciliatory way, which has less of a chance of ending in an acrimonious split.

At the risk of stating the obvious: emailing organizations (anonymously, if you want) is a pretty good way of raising concerns with them.

I've emailed a number of EA organizations (including ACE) with question/concerns, and generally find they are responsive.

And I've been on the receiving side of emails as well, and usually am appreciative; I often didn't even consider that there could be some confusion or misinterpretation of what I said, and am appreciative of people who point it out.

Edit: Jakub says that ACE's evaluation was based on the Facebook comments, not leadership transition. The below is kept for historical purposes. Also, I should have noted in this post my appreciation for Anima's transparency – it wouldn't have been possible for me to post something like this with most organizations, because they would state that their CEO stepped down "spend more time with her family" or something similar.

Nevertheless, given the overall positive assessment, it's strange that Anima was awarded a "weak" rating in this category, and I think