All of ethai's Comments + Replies

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, a... (read more)

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... (read more)

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 ... (read more)

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 fal... (read more)

Thank you, yeah I think I may be overindexing on a few public examples (not being privy to the private examples that you and others in thread have brought up). Glad to hear that there are plenty of examples of the community responding well to protect victims/survivors.

I still also don't think everything's fine, but unsure to what extent EA is worse than the rest of the world, where things are also not fine on this front.

Yeah, this is very fair and I agree that transparency is not always the right call. To clarify, I'll say that my stance here, medium confidence, is: (1) in instances which the victim/survivor has already made their accusations public,  or in instances where it's already necessarily something that isn't interpersonal [e.g. hotness ranking], the process of accountability or repair, or at least the fact that one exists, should be public; (2) it should be transparent what kind of process a victim can expect when harm happens.

There's some literature around... (read more)

edit: after discussion below & other comments on this post, I feel less strongly about the claim "EA community is bad at addressing harm", but stand by / am clarifying my general point, which is that the veracity of Kathy's claims doesn't detract from any of the other valid points that Maya makes and I don't think people should discount the rest of these points.

A suggestion to people who are approaching this from a "was Kathy lying?" lens: I think it's also important to understand this post in the context of the broader movement around sexual assault a... (read more)

thanks for pointing this out - I think this is a key point AND I think it is inflected by gender. My guess (not being an expert on autism, but being somewhat of an expert on gender) is that women who are autistic are more likely to learn, over time, how to display and react to emotion "like normal people", because women build social capital through relational and emotional actions. Personal experience (I am a woman, to a first degree approximation): as a child I did not  really understand emotion / generally felt aversive when other people expressed i... (read more)

Thanks for writing this - this resonates a lot with my experience, as I was also exposed to and very put off from EA in college! But have eventually, slowly, made my way back here :)

I want to add that many of the "disconcerting" tactics community builders use are pretty well-established among community organizers (and larger student groups, like Greek life). So my sense is that the key problem lies in EA using well-proven community building tactics, but implementing them poorly. Having a scripted 1:1, a CRM, intro talks; making leadership asks of younger a... (read more)

I do community building with a (non-student, non-religious, non-EA) group that talks a lot about pretty sensitive topics, and we explicitly ask for permission to record things in the CRM. We don't ask "can we put you in our database?"; we phrase it as "hey, I'd love to connect you with XYZ folks in the chapter who have ABC in common with you, would you mind if I take some notes on what we talked about today, so I can share with them later?" But we take pretty seriously the importance of consent and privacy in the work that we're doing.

Also, as someone who ... (read more)

I think that's precisely what I'm saying - people have different preferences, but that doesn't negate the existence of broader dynamics of privilege, i.e. John's earlier comment, and doesn't negate that the facts of the matter are shaped by intersecting oppressions. 

Assuming that we take as true that systemic oppression is a real thing, the distinction is this: I don't consider myself to have a dating "advantage", but I do think that I have a larger dating pool than the average Asian man because of the ways in which Asian women sit at the intersection... (read more)

Ah, I apologize, I think I've phrased my first comment poorly. I believe that the difference in desirability is due to both fetishization of women and emasculation of men. My initial comment did not make that clear due to the word "mostly", which was the wrong word to use. I meant simply to highlight that desirability as an Asian woman is not without its downsides. 

Re: 

It doesn't predict that being a member of two "oppressed" classes can result in an intersectional "privilege"... In any case, there are disadvantages associated with fetishization,

I've been thinking about the (perceived or actual) tension between intersectionality and effective giving for a while now and haven't had the words to think through it productively, so thank you for providing those words and sparking this discussion!

One thing I would add that is relevant to EAs thinking about this:

Being both a part of the wealthy global elite and people of colour, they feel a special obligation to help people within their own communities who are not blessed with the same advantages. Whether or not this feeling of obligation cashes out in c

To weigh in here as someone who had to read some race studies literature in college: 

the idea that privileged white men find it easier to take a universalising, impartial approach to doing good seems intuitively plausible

I think that's probably true - the theory I've read is based on the idea that white straight men are positioned as the "norm" under racial/gender hierarchy in Western society. Everyone else is othered and seen in relation to that norm. Some oversimplified examples: 

• "Unisex" sizing is actually men's sizing.
• Fresh Off The Boat is ma

I think the theory of intersectionality actually does address this well, though perhaps for a different reason than John:

a) Intersectionality is explicitly about the idea that people can be both privileged and oppressed, e.g. Black men having privilege along a gender axis but oppression along a racial axis

b) Intersectionality is explicitly not about "double oppression", it is about unique forms of oppression. 

For instance, we can break down this idea that Asians earn more than white people in the US. When you consider factors like country of origin, c... (read more)

Ha, I never check my forum notifications - a belated thank you for responding and engaging with this, it's clear that you've already really thought through a lot of the potential harms folks are bringing up which is much appreciated. I definitely see the reasons why each word individually makes sense, but I do also wonder if there's a better synonym for rare.

The only thing I'd push back on is:

For folks in China, calling something "Chinese" is generally a symbol of pride, the same way American products might brag that they're "made in America." There are de

I'm part Chinese and I agree that the perception of appropriation is a significant risk - "rare Chinese tofus" is off-putting enough to me that I would be hesitant to try a product marketed as such. This is despite being otherwise excited about the idea - I love tofu and am on a long campaign to find a tofu dish that my white American partner will enjoy. I think that, beyond chefs, you'll need a base of everyday consumers who help the project take off, and IMO the most likely people to form that base are younger Asian-Americans. (For instance, I think the ... (read more)