All of Emily Grundy's Comments + Replies

Thanks so much for this comment, Robert - I appreciate the engagement.

It’s interesting to hear what mistakes you see, and what you’ve experienced as working better.

It sounds like you’re really considering who your audience is – something that I think is crucial. For example, you don’t assume that people (especially those not involved in EA) will be sold by more philosophical arguments. These arguments can work for some, but definitely not everyone. I also agree that having a positive reputation (e.g., being seen as credible and honest) can attract people. ... (read more)

Thanks for the feedback Constance, that's great to know!

Thanks for sharing this! I really appreciated hearing your personal experience and perspective on this. 

I agree that it's important to consider the realistic counterfactual (maybe that term is already implying 'realistic', but just wanted to emphasise it). There's definitely a world in which I could have spent six months doing something that was even better for my career on the whole. But, whether I actually knew what that alternative was or would have actually done it is a different story.

Your message that almost everything is suboptimal is also real... (read more)

Thanks so much for your comment. I hadn't thought about that perspective in the context of this post, and will spend some more time thinking on this. It definitely wasn't my intention to imply malintent - I actually think the opposite, that almost all this advice is provided with good, positive intentions. 

I appreciate the prompt to to reflect on this!

I agree Nathan, there's definitely a lot of content there for future interviews. I'm sure the interviewers will get tired of me saying, 'Well, when I hiked...'

Yeah I recommend checking that curriculum. I also found it really useful to discuss the content with others (which could be through signing up to the actual AGISF course or finding a reading buddy etc.)

I agree Jenny - I think educational materials, especially those that collate and then walk you through a range of concepts (like AGISF) are really useful. 

Thanks for sharing Yonatan, it's always interesting to hear which barriers are the most salient for different people! I imagine those ones are pretty pervasive, especially with regards to AI safety (I can definitely empathise).

Did you end up writing that intro to EA and would you be able to share it? I'm currently looking for a similar list of examples to use in a talk I'm giving on EA, and it would be useful to read what you ended up with.

I loved this write-up Luisa, thanks so much for sharing! This line made me laugh (and resonated with me quite a bit):

Sure, that might be the case for people who are really suffering from imposter syndrome, but I’m an actual imposter”

Really interesting topic, thanks for sharing James! I was wondering whether you could share any info about your lit review methods (e.g., how you found your included articles)?

4
James Özden
2y
Thanks Emily, much appreciated! I also really enjoyed your recent work on interventions that influence animal product consumption so thanks for doing that. For methodology, that's a good point and definitely something we should include more information on so will do that for an updated version in the near future. Not sure if you saw it but we do have a database of resources we compiled whilst doing this if you want to see the inputs.  On how we actually found the included pieces, this was a mix of methods, and we didn't do it in a systematic way akin to your work, although we might consider doing this in the future (suggestions welcome if you think is a good idea!). As we were mainly doing this for our own understanding and getting a lay of the land, we didn't think it was too crucial to do a systematic analysis (and our advisors also suggested this). But a few of the ways we did find papers: * Tools such as Google Scholar, ResearchRabbit and Elicit that helps find studies adjacent to your question or other studies you're interested in. We would use keyword searches such as "protest outcomes", "protest effectiveness", "impacts of protest", etc. for the outcomes, and similar variations of keywords for the success factors work. This is how we found the majority of the useful studies. * We looked at the research groups and prior publications of basically all the academics we found using the above method, which was especially useful to find newer papers and other academics who were newer in the field doing this work (e.g. just joined a relevant research group) * I read two academic-focused books on the relevant topics (How Social Movements Matter and Prisms of the People), Sam read 1-2 similar books, and we found literature via that * We interviewed 5 academics who had some influential papers in the various fields and asked them to recommend us the most important / key papers in the field which was useful to make sure we didn't miss anything crucial (we probably

I'm late to the party but this is a great post. In particular, I think this is really important:

Follow up with the person: Let them know what you changed because of their advice.

I meet with quite a few people to ask for career advice and always try to email them afterward to:

  • Express gratitude for their time
  • Dot-point key takeaways
  • Highlight any ways in which my view point has shifted after meeting with them (e.g., 'I was thinking of doing X, but now I think Y')  

The intention is that this:

  • Provides clear examples of what I got from our meeting (rather th
... (read more)
8
MichaelA
3y
Thanks for sharing this! I think it's a cool idea, and plan to try out this habit.  It also reminds me of two other ideas I liked (in addition to the "following up" part of this post): "Repeat-backs", as discussed by The Management Center * The Management Center also recommend doing this verbally after discussions with one's manager * That screenshot is from a doc shared here * Some further discussion here Part of Neel Nanda's weekly review process

Hi Ajeya, that's a wonderful idea - I have a couple of questions below that are more about how you find working as a Senior Research Analyst and in this area:

What do you love about your role / work?

What do you dislike about your role / work?

What’s blocking you from having the impact you’d like to have?

What is the most important thing you did to get to where you are? (e.g., network, trying out lots of jobs / internships, continuity at one job, a particular a course etc.)

6
Ajeya
3y
* The thing I most love about my work is my relationships with my coworkers and manager; they are all deeply thoughtful, perceptive, and compassionate people who help me improve along lots of dimensions. * Like I discussed in the podcast, a demoralizing aspect of my work is that we're often pursuing questions were deeply satisfying answers are functionally impossible and it's extremely unclear when something is "done." It's easy to spend much longer on a project than you hoped, and to feel that you put in a lot of work to end up with an answer that's still hopelessly subjective and extremely easy to disagree with. * I think I would do significantly better in my role if I were less sensitive about the possibility that someone (especially experts or fancy people) would think I'm dumb for missing some consideration, not having an excellent response to an objection, not knowing everything about a technical sub-topic, making a mistake, etc. It would allow me to make better judgment calls about when it's actually worth digging into something more, and to write more freely without getting bogged down in figuring out exactly how to caveat something. * I think the most important thing I did before joining Open Phil was to follow GiveWell's research closely and to attempt to digest EA concepts well enough to teach them to others; I think this helped me notice when there was a job opportunity at GiveWell and to perform well in the interview process. Once at Open Phil, I think it was good that I asked a lot of questions about everything and pretty consistently said yes to opportunities to work on something harder than what I had done before.
3
MichaelA
3y
I'm also interested in hearing more of what Ajeya has to say on these questions. People might also be interested in her answers to questions similar to at least the first and second of those questions on the 80k podcast, from around 2 hours 17 minutes onwards. (I also commented here about how parts of her answers resonated with my own experiences.)

Thanks also for the feedback Jamie. We should be posting a summary of the results on the forum, though if you participated and wanted to ensure that you get that when it becomes available just send me through an email (address in original post). In response to your comments:

1) This is a good point, and the scales can at times be ambiguous and open to interpretation. You are correct in that the wording was maintained to be consistent with existing scales.

2) Unfortunately due to some constraints/ethics applications we were required to select one charity, and... (read more)

Thanks for your feedback! We're currently altering those questions.

Great article! Just wondering if this study was published/submitted for publishing?

Bit of a late comment, but in terms of "collect[ing] a variety of metrics to find students most inclined to engage with effective charity in the long-term", is this something that you have progressed with, or created a summary of? And would this be publicly available?