All of Erica_Edelman's Comments + Replies

Switch "watching children" with "working as an assistant" and you'll see why I don't think travel /activity expenses is at all a valuable payment method, even to people who would otherwise enjoy those activities.

Just a note that standard practice on these kinds of jobs is that you get a credit card to make purchases with, and are never using your own money that is later reimbursed.

A big reason for this is the massive mismatch in what money is worth. Employers might think covering a $100 grocery trip until you get reimbursed is not a big deal, but to an employee that might have been their own food money or rent.

The standard answer is you either let your employee borrow your credit card, or you give them their own credit card. You can put a lower limit on it to prot... (read more)

1[comment deleted]3mo

This got a lot of upvotes so I want to clarify that this kind of arrangements isn't UNUSUALLY EVIL. Nanny forums are filled with younger nannies or more desperate nannies who get into these jobs only to immediately regret it.

When people ask my opinion about hiring nannies I constantly have to show how things they think are perks (live in, free tickets to go places with the kids) don't actually hold much value as perks. Because it is common for people to hold that misconception.

It is really common for parents and families to offer jobs that DON'T FOLLOW pro... (read more)

1
Elizabeth
3mo
> When people ask my opinion about hiring nannies I constantly have to show how things they think are perks (live in, free tickets to go places with the kids) don't actually hold much value as perks.   Off topic: I understand thinking housing would be valued by employees, but do people honestly think that tickets to children’s activities are valuable to caretakers? Like even if someone would value the activity in their off hours, which seems like a big if, surely the parents understand that it’s not a leisure activity when you’re watching small children?  

Also children and sometimes bosses do not understand that sometimes you are off the clock and not working. So children will want your attention and engagement if you are around even when you're "off", and bosses might not respect your time off and ask you to do little tasks or last minute jobs when you aren't working.

If you were away at your own house, then your time off is completely yours, but if you're a live in then they might pull stuff like "Hey could you watch the kids for half an hour so I can run pick up some milk?" and next thing you know they consider your "time off" to be just a suggestion.

I do not think it is necessarily morally wrong to try to find a win win situation where you employ someone who really just has a passion for travel. But I think it is a generally bad idea. That situation tends towards exploitation, and it is hard to see it when you are in your own point of view.

This job also required that a young person just out of college choose to spend over 80% of their "income" on a luxurious travel budget.

Yes, but also there is a similar issue for live in nannies, where a professional live in nannies will not charge that much less hourly even when room and board are provided by the family. (They will charge slightly less) This is because it is not actually fun or nice to live with your bosses, and having a live-in is considered more a perk for the FAMILY than the nanny.

Meanwhile many well-meaning but uninformed bosses think their room is worth a lot of money to the nanny because it is expensive to the family.

For example, I live in the Bay and I would RATHER... (read more)

Also children and sometimes bosses do not understand that sometimes you are off the clock and not working. So children will want your attention and engagement if you are around even when you're "off", and bosses might not respect your time off and ask you to do little tasks or last minute jobs when you aren't working.

If you were away at your own house, then your time off is completely yours, but if you're a live in then they might pull stuff like "Hey could you watch the kids for half an hour so I can run pick up some milk?" and next thing you know they consider your "time off" to be just a suggestion.

Agreed. If you're calculating equivalent compensation, you need to apply a steep discount to work-provided perks to adjust for the restrictions. That said, it also makes sense to take into account the benefits of networking/career capital in order to figure out whether the whole deal offered is fair. I'll leave that for others to debate, was just trying to get clarification on your specific point.

Disclaimer: Previously interned remotely at Non-Linear

Can confirm. In the family assistant type professional sphere, travel is generally considered a drawback that needs to be highly compensated in order to do.

Erica_Edelman
4mo198
47
10
23
3
5

I'm a professional nanny and I've also held household management positions. I just want to respond to one specific thing here that I have knowledge about.

It is upsetting to see a "lesson learned" as only hiring people with experience as an assistant, because a professional assistant would absolutely not work with that compensation structure.

It is absolutely the standard in professional assistant type jobs that when traveling with the family, that your travel expenses are NOT part of your compensation.

When traveling for work (including for families that tra... (read more)

This got a lot of upvotes so I want to clarify that this kind of arrangements isn't UNUSUALLY EVIL. Nanny forums are filled with younger nannies or more desperate nannies who get into these jobs only to immediately regret it.

When people ask my opinion about hiring nannies I constantly have to show how things they think are perks (live in, free tickets to go places with the kids) don't actually hold much value as perks. Because it is common for people to hold that misconception.

It is really common for parents and families to offer jobs that DON'T FOLLOW pro... (read more)

Just wanted to ask a quick question: It sounds like you’re describing the conditions when someone who normally works with a family is asked to come on a trip with them, rather standards terms for nanny’s travelling with digital nomad families? (Which may not be common enough to be a thing).

I guess the reason I’m asking is because those are two quite distinct asks: one is asking you to uproot your normal life, with the nanny still presumably having to pay rent on their usual place.

In contrast, the other ask is looking for people who are keen on a particular lifestyle and who can avoid paying rent altogether.

Anyway, please let me know if I’m wrong here.

In my reading of the post and the appendix, the point Kat seemed to be making was not that professional assistants would be cheaper, but that professional assistants would have a better upfront idea of what they were getting into, and therefore be less likely to retroactively feel that this was a bad decision. This is consistent with the idea that having that upfront idea could also come with demanding higher compensation upfront before entering into the arrangement; what Kat was trying to guard against was regretting it after agreeing to it.

In a section o... (read more)

Where do you hire from?

16:58: Elie: College grads who go to top 25 schools

In case you were wondering why people find you elitist.

4
Jeff Kaufman
8y
I was curious what the context was. I went to the recording and transcribed: "What's a picture of where you're hiring from, what are their backgrounds, kind of what brings them---" "---College grads who go to generically, like, what you'd consider top 25 schools, who are interested in effective altruism. The same is basically true, mostly true, of the operations staff, the way that we've hired them, primarily entry level generalists who've come on and helped out. In both cases, we, GiveWell, know more about what types of people we need and what roles we need to fill. Our hope going forward, our plan, is not not hire as many of that type of person, and instead hire someone to fill specific roles. So on the operations side, instead of hiring a generalist to handle accounting and the accounting side of what we do, hire someone who has that kind of accounting background, because now it is a full-time role, in a way it wasn't a couple years ago. On the research side a lot of what we do is assess academic literature, and we think we can find someone who knows that stuff cold because of their background, like being a PhD economist. That's the direction I think we're heading with the GiveWell---"
-1
Linch
8y
Who's the "you" here referring to? If the "you" is referring to GiveWell, then presenting this problem at their OpenThreads makes more sense. If the "you" here is Issa, this objection would be somewhat odd. If the "you" here is the Effective Altruism community, then the hiring practices of a single organization shouldn't be a significant sign that the community as a whole is elitist.

Take the opportunity! As a girl, it's not that I WANT to take the child, it's that other people rarely step forward, and I think the parents deserve some time to participate.

It's totally not weird for a guy to take the baby. Children are pretty hardy. You're unlikely to break one. Parents are usually pretty expert at calming their kids down, so if something DOES happen, you have a parent right there.

(Note: Currently I'm the nanny to the only child who ever comes to meetups, and I'm fine with being the person responsible for taking THAT SPECIFIC baby for a bit, because I know I'm going to have a much easier time with him than anyone else. My comments are in regards to other instances.)

I would like to see both the rationalist and the EA communities be more welcoming of families. However, at the same time I often dislike when children are present at meetups. (not that I ever express this, since I most emphatically do NOT want to discourage parents)

The biggest reason for this is the gender imbalance of these groups. As a female who is good with children, I know that when a child shows up that I will be the one (and probably the only one) who will be helping to take care of the child, and so missing out on the activity that I actually came there for. OTOH I'm perfectly happy to see children at SCA (medieval recreation) events, where the distribution of responsibility is much more widespread.

4
Julia_Wise
9y
Thanks - that's a good point. It took me a while to realize that I wasn't offering my baby to young men because I didn't perceive them as good/experienced with children, but that the reason they weren't experienced with children is that nobody hands them babies. So I've tried to offer her to a group of people in general ("If anybody wants to hold Lily, she's available") without either pinning down the women or excluding the men. If you don't like being the default childcare provider (I wouldn't!), this seems like a good conversation to have with the group. I bet a lot of people haven't noticed the dynamic.
0
Bernadette_Young
9y
That's a really good point. One reason diversity matters it that it's harder work to be the minority representative in a group, to the extent people often find its not sustainable and drift away. (I was glad though to have a different experience when visiting CEA offices with my daughter - pretty much everybody there that day wanted to give her a cuddle, and she certainly enjoyed her favourite sport of beard grabbing!)

I was involved in the initial facebook thread on the topic. At the time, I made less than 30k, didn't ever expect to make much more than $30k (I'm a nanny), and was highly turned off by the conversation.

Two cross-country moves later, I have actually doubled my income, but I still am highly turned off by elitist EA conversations that assume that all the readers are high-potential-earners in their 20s with strong social safety nets.

It would have been much easier to convince me to donate 10% of a $30k income, than to upend my life in order to make some kind of career change.

1
AlexCuevas
9y
"I still am highly turned off by elitist EA conversations that assume that all the readers are high-potential-earners in their 20s with strong social safety nets." Sure, but I think your use of the term elitist is a bit unfair here. I personally know many friends that view my own identification as an EA itself elitist, because by trying to help with things like alleviating global poverty through targeted donation I am putting myself on a pedestal above people living in the developing world (or so the argument goes). To these friends, it's less elitist to try and focus on pursuing their own happiness rather than thinking you can solve other people's problems better than they can. Maybe this is why I am arguing for this angle of attack; I have friends that have different off-putting triggers as you. I agree that we shouldn't make broad generalizations about EA demographics, but at the same time we shouldn't misrepresent them; I would wager that a large number, if not the majority, of prospective EAs would fall under the high-potential-earners-in-their-20's demographic and this is very relevant in the discussion of how to advise people who are just getting into EA. I definitely agree that the same advice wouldn't work equally well when addressing every person, and sometimes it's correct to give two different people completely opposite advice. That being said, if I had to give 1 piece of advice in a generalizing way, I would want to consider the demographic of who I am giving this advice to rather than assuming that it is directed towards the median US citizen, for instance.

Given it's history, I'm not surprised that the EA movement is currently primarily non-religious people. But I am surprised that no one has tried talking to/at churches, which could be very useful, if it worked. I would guess that some denominations would be more open to it than others.

Interesting:

The war on environmental degradation has a powerful new ally: Pope Francis. Prompted by a Joint Workshop of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences and the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences on sustainability that was convened in May 2014, the Vatican has articul

... (read more)

How can we submit a draft to be published? I don't see a way to send private messages to individuals, and I don't have your email (I had seen a facebook post where you said we could email you drafts). Here's the draft if it's visible to anyone with a link.

1
RyanCarey
10y
Hi Erica, thanks for writing this. I should've said that the best way to contact me is ry [dot] duff @gmail.com, and have edited this. For reference, you can also go "Messages" -> "Compose" then type RyanCarey :) I can't yet read the draft but it looks like it's on a good and interesting topic!

FYI: When I log in on my android phone (but not on my chromebook) it sends me to the google search bar page. Then if I navigate back to the forum (but not by hitting the back button) I am logged on.

1
RyanCarey
10y
Hey Erica, thanks for noticing this. The best thing to do is submit the bug here stating the phone and browser, and describing the 'search bar page', so that Trike Apps and I can prioritise it.

I totally agree, Michael!

There are also decisions that are: hard, important, you don't have enough information, AND the cost of getting more information is too high. Especially if you did this thought experiment: If I tried to optimize every decisions of a similar level of importance as this one, how much would I actually accomplish?

Even for career decisions, once you've narrowed it down to a handful that meet your criteria, there needs to come a time when you just pick one and run with it. Especially considering that a lot of the information that is very important is also very hard to get (It's hard to know how good of a fit you can be for a job until you've actually done it for a while)

Hi, I'm Erica. I'm a New York nanny (so obviously not EtG :P), and I lean towards poverty reduction and animal activism. I got into EA through the LW/CFAR route, and am relatively active in those communities.

Other interests include: many various styles of dance, self-improvent, community organizing, board games, and trying new things. I recently joined the choir for the local Sunday Assembly, which is an organization that I highly recommend as a welcoming community of people who are into applying reasoning to things, AND doing good.

Thanks for this post, Jess! I agree that these are important issues.

Personally, for uncertainty and decision anxiety, there are a couple of ideas that actually do help me stop that cycle when I think of them:

1. Hard decisions are (usually) the least important- "Do I want to eat or do I want to slam my head against that wall?" is an easy decision because there is a big difference between them. "What should I order off this menu?" is a harder decision because they have almost exact expected payoffs (eating delicious food. Anything on the... (read more)

Hard decisions are (usually) the least important

A decision can be hard because the possible outcomes are finely balanced in expected payoff, or because you are quite lacking in knowledge about the possibly outcomes and/or their likelihood. If it's the latter then it can be hard and matter a lot! For effective altruists there can be a bit of both. "Should I buy this pen or this other one? A better pen might help me write more effectively!" is probably the former, but "What career should I choose?" is probably the latter.

Plus, the latt... (read more)

5
Jess_Whittlestone
10y
Great points Erica, thanks! I've been using very similar ways of thinking recently, actually, and it's helped a lot. One thing I've found, though, is that it's easy to reflectively know that all of these points are true, but still not believe them on an emotional level, and so still find it difficult to make decisions. I think the main thing that's helped me here is just time and persistence - I'm gradually coming to believe these things on a more gut level the more times I do just make a decision, even though I'm not certain, and it turns out ok. I think this is a classic situation where your system 2 can believe something, but your system 1 needs repeated experience of the thing actually happening - decisions you're not certain of turning out ok, in this case - to really internalise it.

Charity ain’t giving people what you wants to give, It’s giving people what they need to get.

-Terry Pratchett, "Hogfather"