Hoping to post some shallow takes on global health and development this year!

This is incredible. I skimmed all the sections and I'm impressed with the quality, scope, concreteness, and kindness throughout. 

This is an area where Probably Good blows the 80,000 Hours version out of the water. I'll be pointing people here for a one-stop shop for all their job searching needs and almost certainly coming back to this in the future.

Quick anecdote: I found this dynamic surprising in all the paths you mentioned: academia, research, EA research, and non-profit work. But I realized it very quickly for academia (one month) and painfully slowly for non-profits (several years).

In academia, the markers of success are transparent, the divide between "good" and "bad" jobs is sharp, and even very successful professors complain about the system.

On the other extreme, the non-profit sector is much fuzzier about credentials and career progression. So I might see an employee who graduated from a school like mine and think I could be that person, but not realize that they took on increasing amounts of responsibilities over various low-paid volunteer roles or not realize how much insider information they absorbed from their parents.

This caused me to underestimate how many skills I needed to build. Then I underestimated how long it would take to "make it", which meant setting goals too high for myself and almost giving up too early.

Hey Ozzie, a few quick notes on why I react but try not to comment on community based stuff these days:

• I try to limit how many meta-level comments I make. In general I’d like to see more object-level discussion of things and so I’m trying (to mixed success) to comment mostly about cause areas directly.
• Partly it’s a vote for the person I’d like to be. If I talk about community stuff, part of my headspace will be thinking about it for the next few days. (I fully realize the irony of making this comment.)
• It’s emotionally tricky since I feel responsibility for how others react. I know how loaded this topic was for a younger me, and I feel an obligation to make younger me feel welcome

• These conversations often feel aspirational and repetitive. Like “there should be more X” is too simple. Whereas something like “there should be more X. Y org should be responsible for it. Tradeoffs may be Z. Failure modes are A, B, and C.” is concrete enough to get somewhere.

   

   

I also share these frustrations with career advice from 80,000 Hours and the EA Forum. There was time about 2 years back where my forum activity was a lot of snarky complaints (of questionable insight) about career advice and diversity.

Like you mentioned, the career advice usually leaves a lot to be desired in the concrete details of navigating a lack of mentors, lack of credentials, lack of financial runway, family obligations, etc. I've sometimes wondered about writing an article to fill in the gap, but it's not exactly a "one article" sized hole. Maybe that's a yearlong project you or I or someone else can work on someday.

As for my comment on "above-the-curve", I think we're in agreement but I could have worded this better. I don't think the community is diverse but the initiatives are much higher quality than I see elsewhere. Usually, these initiatives range from bad to useless. Whereas this list of EA diversity initiatives feels mostly harmless or slightly positive nudges. A few feel like they'll pay dividends in a few years.

This is great stuff. I often find it hard to remember a lot of initiatives have happened (despite having read 80% of this list already) so this timeline is a good reference

As an aside, I think others may benefit from reading about diversity initiatives outside EA to remember this is hard problem. It's totally consistent for EA to be above-the-curve on this and still not move the needle much (directionally I think those two things are true but not confident on magnitudes), so linking some stuff I've been reading lately:

• DEI Deconstructed: Your No-Nonsense Guide to Doing the Work and Doing It Right has two neat chapters at the beginning: one on corporate initiatives over the past 10 years and another on US initiatives since World War II. The tidbits on US military diversity initiatives (and their mixed results) were new to me and sadly not something I see talked about much elsewhere. The rest of the book seemed to be a corporate strategy workbook which I didn't find useful but others might.
• Affirmative Action and the Quality-Fit Trade-Off explores the stronger forms of affirmative action practiced at law school + elite undergraduate universities. It summarizes the economic theory and evidence on whether these stronger forms can "backfire" for minority students. Ultimately, it's hard to say but mild forms seem good. Plato Stanford Encylopedia of Philosophy takes a legal and philosophical look at how the justification and practice for affirmative action has shifted over time.

Echoing what Eva said, I think you should consider waiting a year then apply for IDE / applied econ masters. An IDE program is probably the right fit given your goals, but I don't know any beyond Yale's IDE which expects you to already have worked in development first.

For Applied Econ, I like University of Maryland's Applied Economics Master's program. The program only requires Calc I and is very transparent about what it can do. Dev / global health placements, content, and networking will take a huge hit compared to IDE programs though.

You can use the year in the workforce to save money and take online classes on the side. Believe me, you'll want the savings. Development and global health can be financially tough in early career.

In general, the econ and math background required isn't too high for these type of real-world Master's degrees. Working + getting good grades in first-semester calculus, first-semester probability and stats, intermediate micro, and intermediate macro may be enough for admission.

This is my favorite in the series so far. I really enjoy the tacit knowledge flavor of it and that some of these lessons generalize beyond the CBA domain.

Would also love this. I think a useful contrast will be A/B testing in big tech firms. My amateur understanding is big tech firms can and should run hundreds of “RCTs” because:

• No need to acquire subjects.
• Minimal disruption to business since you only need to siphon off a minuscule portion of your user base.
• Tech experiments can finish in days while field experiments need at least a few weeks and sometimes years.
• If we assume treatments are heavy tailed, then a big tech firm running hundreds of A/B tests is more likely to learn of a weird trick that grows the business when compared to a NGO who may only get one shot. 

Something I've noticed more in the EA Forum is the increase in drive-by professional posts. Organizations will promote a idea, a job posting, or something else. Then they'll engage as long as they're on the front page before bouncing.

That's fine in small amounts or if the author is a regular contributor. But if the author is just stopping by to do their public engagement, then it breaks the illusion of a community.

And for me, that is the aesthetic draw of the forum. It's a place where expects and amateurs alike coexist in the same space, say things that are too rough for professional publication, and then respond to each other in real time.

It's magical and unreal that I can develop these (admittedly shallow and sometimes parasocial) relationships with people. It's cool that I have some chance of getting a leading expert to respond to my quarter-baked comment. It's cool that people sometimes recognize me in real life from what I wrote online.

And that feeling has been decreasing over time, which has made me lean more towards Slack, Discord, or even Twitter for real-time engagement. Meanwhile, I treat the Forum more as a searchable repository for EA-style research