I suppose I'm skeptical that quant scores in an auto-sent email will actually give you a nuanced sense - but I do see how, e.g., if over time you realize it's always your interview or always your quant question that scores poorly, that is a good signal

I do think being kind is an underrated part of hiring!

Quantitative scoring doesn't really give you that, though!

(I run hiring rounds with ~100-1000 applicants) agree with Jamie here. However, if someone was close to a cutoff, I do specifically include "encourage you to apply to future roles" in my rejection email. I also always respond when somebody asks for feedback proactively.

Is revealing scores useful to candidates for some other reason not covered by that? It seems to me the primary reason (since it sounds like you aren't asking for qualitative feedback to also be provided) would be to inform candidates as to whether applying for future similar roles is worth the effort.

James this is great! I really like your framing of donations as in line with other personal actions; I've seen the FP graph but never actually interpreted it in the way you have. 

Semi-related ramble, I've been workshopping this idea of giving as a way of expressing agency—especially when it comes to climate, I think a lot of people turn to plastic bags etc. because they want to feel like they're directly responsible for a Good Thing. People want to see and feel the impact of their actions, and donations don't often provide that sense of "I did this, and it meant something". I think a framing of donations as one of many possible actions actually might break that hesitation down a bit (and specifically, is related to some lefty mutual aid thoughts about money as one of many resources we offer in community). Will experiment with this, thanks for the idea :)

(disclaimer: personal hat on! I do fundraising in my non-work organizing spaces)

strong upvoted, I think it's good to encourage non-EAs to give more effectively and I think it's good to broaden what we think of as "evidence" and consider its pros and cons.

I work with a community in my city that gives primarily locally (leaving aside my judgment on that), and I find that many people think that they're not giving based on any idea of effectiveness: e.g. they'll say they're giving based on community need, or trust in a relationship they have, or values-alignment. But usually there's an implicit sense of "what is effective" underneath that, and it's helpful to push people to make that explicit: if you're giving because you trust the relationship you have with this organization, how good of a signal is that about the organization's work? Is it a better signal than other evidence you have access to?

(Aside: Quite often with small grassroots organizations, I think a strong relationship with the right people honestly is one of the best available signals! In particular, I find that the organizations that community leaders consider important/tractable/neglected - though not using those words - are not always the ones that gain a lot of media attention, external funding, etc.)

Yeah, strong agree with this. [I used to work in VC and frequently diligenced ARPA-E grantees.] I don't think the cited study supports the claim that all externalities are priced in in the US, let alone globally. 

I would also guess that the valuation of the 26 exited companies is an underestimation of overall impact for other reasons - top of mind: impact of non-exited companies, learning benefit to the field of a company that "fails" and exits at a very low valuation.

@charrin thanks for writing this, as a below commenter said it's nice to see an EA-style investigation of a potentially impactful career path outside the community! 

Thank you for sharing that!

For what it's worth, I think "discussions of DEI end up becoming discussions about women" is pretty common - not to say it's excusable, but I don't think that's unique to EA.

Thanks, I realize this is a tricky thing to talk about publicly (certainly trickier for you, as someone whose name people actually know, than for me, who can say whatever I want!). I'm coming in with a stronger prior from "the outside world", where I've seen multiple friends ignored/disbelieved/attacked for telling their stories of sexual violence, so maybe I need to better calibrate for intra-EA-community response. I agree/hope that our goals shouldn't be at odds, and that's what I was trying to say that maybe did not come across: I didn't want people to come away from your comment thinking "ah, Maya's wrong and people shouldn't criticize EA culture." I wanted them to come away both knowing the truth about this specific situation AND thinking more broadly about EA culture, because I think this post makes a lot of other very good points that don't rely on the Kathy claims. (And thinking more broadly could include updating positively like I did, although I didn't expect that would be the case when I made that comment!)

You're probably right that it's not worth giving much more of a response, but I appreciate you engaging with this!

Thank you, this is clarifying for me and I hope for others.

Responses to me, including yours, have helped me update my thinking on how the EA community handles gendered violence. I wasn't aware of these cases and am glad, and hope that other women seeing this might also feel more supported within EA knowing this. I realize there are obvious reasons why these things aren't very public, but I hope that somehow we can make it clearer to women that Kathy's case, and the community's response, was an outlier.

I would still push back against the gender-reversal false equivalency that you and others have mentioned. EA doesn't exist in a bubble. We live in a world where survivors, and in particular women, are not supported, not believed, and victim-blamed. Therefore I think it is pretty reasonable to have a prior that we should take accusations seriously and respond to them delicately. The Forum, if anywhere on earth, should be a place where we can have the nuanced understanding that (1) the accusations were false AND (2) because we live in a world where true accusations against powerful men are often disbelieved, causing avoidable harm to victims, we need to keep that context in mind while condemning said false accusations.

So to clarify my stance: I don't think it was wrong to mention that the false accusation is false. I think it seems dismissive and insensitive to do so without any acknowledgement of the rest of the post.  I don't think it would have hurt your point to say "yes, EA is a male-dominated culture and we need to take seriously the harms done to women in our community. In this specific instance, the accusations were false, and I don't believe the community's response to these accusations is representative of how we handle harm."

I think the disconnect here is that you are responding / care about this specific claim, which you have close knowledge of. I know nothing about it, and am responding to / care about the larger claim about EA's culture. I believe that Maya's post is not trying to to make truth claims about Kathy's case and is more meant to point out a broad trend in EA culture, and I'm trying to encourage people to read it as such, and not let the wrongness of Kathy's claims undermine Maya's overall point.

(edit: basically I agree with your comment above: 

if I appear to be implicitly criticizing Maya for bringing that up, fewer people will bring things like that up in the future, and even if this particular episode was false, many similar ones will be true, so her bringing it up is positive expected value, so I shouldn't sound critical in any way that discourages future people from doing things like that.)