I agree to an extent, especially at the very high level that you're talking about -- if someone hates programing or wet lab research I think it is unlikely to matter what the program or lab is. However, within more social science type research / work I'm familiar with I don't view testing your fit with different types of research as mutually exclusive with testing your fit for researching within a cause area. In fact I think they're often linked since the cause area influences the type of research and work generally you'll be doing. To take an area I know well, law: it seems reasonable to me that someone who is interested in testing their fit in legal research or working as a lawyer generally would also benefit from trying working on different cause areas since the legal issues and types of research will be significantly different. Someone who enjoys trying to draft an international agreement to ban certain types of AI models may not be interested in doing domestic litigation focused on animal welfare. Though at a high level they could be called "legal research" or just lawyering, the day to day is going to be quite different. 

Great post. I understand indoor air quality is the focus of the piece but if we're looking holistically at clean air we should also consider the significant health costs of air pollution outdoors. Patrick Collison has a great overview: https://patrickcollison.com/pollution

@JDBauman - this may be of interest to you?

Welcome to the roomba club!

Thanks! I agree there isn't definitive evidence about water vs other flossing. For me it is so much easier to do water flossing that I also would favor that if it was equal or even slightly less effective than the alternative. 
I think my prior is that anything that mechanically moves plaque and food particles from in between your teeth -- be it water, "regular" floss, or something else -- is going to work. It probably depends as much on your technique as to the underlying mechanism and so I think this would be hard to effectively study. 

FWWIW, I do something similar for free using zoom -- I start a zoom meeting, share my screen and record the meeting (with just me in it). The resulting video is my face in the corner and my screen. Not as many features as Loom obviously, but free. 

I have a fidelity DAF linked to my fidelity brokerage account and my only complaint is that there is a small cost associated with it. I of course understand why that is, and the tax benefits outweigh the cost. But if there was a nonprofit EA aligned DAF that had lower or no cost that would be preferable obviously. 

One other thought - and this isn't a complaint about a DAF exactly - is that it would be great to be able to set rules about when certain appreciated stocks would be donated to the DAF so I could totally "set it and forget it" -- I described this idea at the end of this post.

Litigator with 10+ years experience here - completely agree with Tyler and not from knee jerk legal conservativism. I've seen talking to the press go very, very wrong personally. There's a reason keeping quiet is the near universal advice from experts. 

Thanks Rachel. If anyone else reading this has any more data on this point I'd be very interested. I'm helping with the first EA for Jews intro fellowship and we're thinking about how to assess its impact.  If 90-98% of people who do an intro fellowship never engage with EA again afterwards that seems quite strong grounds for rethinking whether we (as a community) should invest in intro fellowships as much as we seem to. And/or if we should experiment much more on different types of intros to see if there is greater impact.

But only 2-10% of students who start an intro fellowship end up engaging with EA afterwards;

Do you have a source for this? Thank you!