In DC. Focused on development, economics, trade, and DEI.
Happy to chat about
- teaching yourself to code and getting a software engineer role
- junior roles at either World Bank or IMF
- picking a Master's program for transitioning into public policy
- selling yourself from a less privileged background
- learning math (I had a lot of mental blocks on this earlier)
- dealing with self-esteem and other mental health issues
- applications for Econ PhD programs (haven't done it yet, but people are surprised by how much I thought about the process)
Fastest way to reach me is geoffreyyip@fastmail.com but I do check messages here occasionally
Project-based learning seems to be a underappreciated bottleneck for building career capital in public policy and non-profits. By projects, I mean subjective problems like writing policy briefs, delivering research insights, lobbying for political change, or running community events. These have subtle domain-specific tradeoffs without a clean answer. (See the Project Work section in On-Ramps Into Biosecurity)
Thus the lessons can't be easily generalized or made legible the way a math problem can be. With projects, even the very first step of identifying a good problem is tough. Without access to a formal network, you can spend weeks on a dead end only realizing your mistakes months or years after the fact.
This constraint seems well-known for professionals in the network, as organizers for research fellowships like SERI Mats describe their program as valuable, highly in-demand, yet constrained in how many people they can train.
I think operations best shows the surprising importance of domain-specific knowledge. The skill set looks similar across fields. So that would imply some exchange-ability between private sector and social sector. But in practice, organizations want you to know their specific mission very well and they're willing (correctly or incorrectly) to hire a young Research Assistant over, say, someone with 10 years of experience in a Fortune 500 company. That domain knowledge helps you internalize the organization's trade-offs and prioritize without using too much senior management time.
Emphasizing this supervised project-based learning mechanism of getting domain-specific career capital would clarify a few points.
I always read therapeutic alliance as advice for the patient, where one should try many therapists before finding one that fits. I imagine therapists are already putting a lot of effort on the alliance front
Perhaps an intervention could be an information campaign to tell patients more about this? I feel it’s not well known or to obvious that you can (1) tell your therapist their approach isn’t working and (2) switch around a ton before potentially finding a fit
I haven’t looked much into it though
Love this and excited to see more of it. (3) is the biggest surprise for me and I think I’m more positive on education now.
Interested to hear your thoughts on growth diagnostics if you ever get around to it
P.S. I imagine you’re too busy to respond, but I’d be curious to hear if these findings surprised you / what updates you made as a result
EA organizations often have to make assumptions about how long a policy intervention matters in calculating cost-effectiveness. Typically people assume that passing a policy is equivalent to having it in place for around five years more or moving the start date of the policy forward by around five years.
I am really really surprised 5 years is the typical assumption. My conservative guess would have been ~30 years persistence on average for a “referendum-sized” policy change.
Related, I’m surprised this paper is a big update for some people. I suppose that attests to the power of empirical work, however uncertain, for illuminating the discussion on big picture questions.
How Much Does Performance Differ Between People by Max Daniel and Benjamin Todd goes into this
Also there’s a post on “vetting-constrained” I can’t recall off the top of my head. The gist is that funders are risk-adverse (not in the moral sense, but in the relying on elite signals sense) because Program Officers don’t have enough time / knowledge as they’d like for evaluating grant opportunities. So they rely more on credentials than ideal
I liked this a lot. For context, I work as a RA on an impact evaluation project. I have light interests / familiarity with meta-analysis + machine learning, but I did not know what surrogate indices were going into the paper. Some comments below, roughly in order of importance:
I’ve read conflicting things about how individual contributor skills (writing the code) and people management skills relate to one another in programming.
Hacker News and the cscareerquestions subreddit give me the impression that they’re very separate, with many complaining about how advancement dries up on a non-management track.
But I’ve also read a few blog posts (which I can’t recall) arguing the most successful tech managers / coders switch between the two, so that they keep their technical skills fresh and know how their work fits in a greater whole.
What’s your take in this? Has it changed since starting your new job?
Flagging quickly that ProbablyGood seems to have moved into this niche. Unsure exactly how their strategy differs from 80k hours but their career profiles do seem more animals and global health focused
I think they’re funded by similar sources to 80k https://probablygood.org/career-profiles/
Not knowing anything else about your friend, CEA intro resources + saying you’d be excited to discuss it sometime sounds like the best bet.
Cruxes here include:
Not knowing either of these makes me suspect you should do the same as usual but mention the community’s not always the best at communicating / makes stuff more complicated than it needs to be