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 g... (read more)

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:

1. Unclear contribution. I feel there's 3 contributions here: (1) an application of surrogate method to long-term development RCTs, (2) a graduate-level intro to the surrogate method, and (3) a new M-Lasso method which I mostly ignored. I read the paper mostly for the first 2 contributi

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/

This looks like a really cool framework! Hoping to experiment with the inputs sometime to inform my future career decisions / my thoughts on funding desk research versus original research / value of replications.

Moving some funders from an overall lower cost effectiveness to a still relatively low or middling level of cost effectiveness can be highly competitive with, and, in some cases, more effective than working with highly cost-effective funders.

I’ve suspected this but never had the framework to formalize it. Or what parameters my claim was sensit... (read more)

Do you think your area is more talent-constrained or cash-constrained? How about your particular role? Read this in whatever way makes sense

Thanks so much for this! I don't know why I ever thought about decomposing the idea of corruption but it seems like a really obvious framework now that you've mentioned it. Hoping to give that a read sometime.

Quick thought on the tangent, which I’d also love to hear more thoughts on from other people.

I’m skeptical that corruption is a big obstacle to growth and development. Measurement and historical comparisons are tricky here, but corruption seems to be a pervasive feature across many societies.

Even the United States had its local political machines and share of bribery before the Progressive Movement in the 1920s tried to filter it out. And conventional wisdom credits the Industrial Revolution (of the 19th century before the US reduced its corruption) with o... (read more)

My 2 cents:

Good advice but I’ll add that many of these things (solo projects, getting internships, writing, etc.) benefit substantially from attending a school with good training (which correlates somewhat with prestige and cost-of-attending).

Feedback, mentorship, and direction are bottlenecks for executing impressive projects and sometimes the best way (or only way) for someone to access these is through the conventional schooling route.

Conventional education and independent projects complement each other

Hi Ozzie, what’s the ask and intended audience here?

The problems here seem interesting and maybe even approachable to a dedicated newbie. So I was wondering if my background was any use. I used to work in software engineering with JavaScript and now work in data cleaning research assistance with R.

But I can’t tell if this is an open call to submit pull requests to an open source library on GitHub, a request for advice, or a request for someone to work part-time / full-time

I wish I could strong-upvote this three times over. It’s that good of a piece.

This reads very clearly to me today, and I think younger less-knowledgeable-with-research-world me would follow it too.

It’s a legible example of

• how research is increasingly a team effort with many behind-the-scenes people (with Principal Investigators arguably deserving little of the credit in some cases)
• what work there is to be done adjacent to research
• a theory of change (make it possible -> … -> make it required)
• how movement building and grant making rely more on heu

This was a good nudge for me to lower the frequency on all my notifications (especially the karma one to weekly, which I’ve been checking more than I’d like lately)

Hi Nick,

Ah I missed only a third of Ugandans cooking with charcoal (I’m guessing a third of Ugandan households since that’s usually how these surveys work). That does suggest we can bump up the estimate by 3x.

I don’t think we can 5x the savings because of family size. Household savings go up (compared to my individual model) but so do household expenses. So the percent income gain from charcoal savings stays the same if both scale the same.

(Technical detail: I’m not following how you got back to 1000-1500 USD from my 0.6 USD per-adopter estimate. That’s ab... (read more)

Surprised no one’s done the per-capita income comparison, since extra income from less charcoal usage would be a big selling point in an information campaign.

I did a very rough back-of-the-envelope calculation and estimated only 0.006% extra income via charcoal savings per year per adopter from soaking beans. I suspect that means lower tractability

If 1% of 50 million Ugandans adopt, we have 0.5 million adopters.

If 5-year savings for less charcoal used are 1.5 million USD, then annual savings are 0.3 million USD

So per-adopter savings (annually) is 0.6 USD.

A... (read more)

Like this a lot, especially the plot designs.

Surprised there’s not much in demographic differences even with all the caveats that go with interpreting disparities there. Not sure what to make of that yet but will be chewing on that for a while.

Lastly, got a question. Do you have any sense of what a good baseline for the mental health section might be? The question of “has your mental health increased / decreased/ stayed the same since getting involved with X” is new to me

I think this falls into a broader class of behaviors I'd call aspirational inclusiveness.

I do think shifting the relative weight from welcoming to clear is good. But I'd frame it as a "yes and" kind of shift. The encouragement message should be followed up with a dose of hard numbers.

Something I've appreciated from a few applications is the hiring manager's initial guess for how the process will turn out. Something like "Stage 1 has X people and our very tentative guess is future stages will go like this". 

Scenarios can also substitute in areas where ... (read more)

Here's some extra (low confidence) info regarding financial aid:

Some programs will have a link on their website where you can talk to a program coordinator or admissions officer. Talking to this person before you apply and forming a good impression may help you secure a much nicer financial aid package when you get accepted. This varies by school and it's luck-of-the-draw whether you hit it off with someone. Generally, you should be genuine and approach the meeting with curiosity over topics like when certain faculty teach. But that person may have info on... (read more)

Hi Caspar, 

Thanks for the response. On second thought, my objection might be different than what I initially suggested. I do think the test of overlap of scales as you mentioned would be an interesting test to run, but it doesn't seem to be capturing the overlap I ultimately care about.

Maybe this comment can captures my complaint better. We don't have any access to what "the most/least satisfied that any human could possibly be". We don't even have access to "the most/least satisfied you personally think you could become". 

As a personal example, ... (read more)

I enjoyed this a lot. I've been meaning to delve into well-being measurement and this was a nice entry-point into the field. 

One thing I'm not clear on is whether vignette anchors (or any of the comparability methods) can correct for non-overlapping well-being scales. You talked about an example like this:

But I'm more interested in examples like this:

Measuring these larger SWB (subjective well-being) differences seems crucial for detecting interpersonal differences across societies and picking up on how intense pain / pleasure can be at the long tails... (read more)

Hi Niki, glad to hear it helped. Here's some more thoughts. Can't promise they're any good.

Yes, I agree the consumption smoothing point is critical. I could have worded my answer a bit better. What I meant to say is that rural households are good at trying to smooth consumption given their situation. That can still be a low overall ability given how sporadic income can be. The crux, I suppose, is whether we trust the households to smooth their own consumption or if  we should make the decision for them. If we think the households are better able to ma... (read more)

This is great stuff. I appreciate you posting some initial results quickly, being careful about what claims you can make right now, signposting what you'll investigate later, and being explicit about what updates you've made.

I'll also echo Lily's comment about dis-aggregating POC. I'd be interested to see POCs breakdown between countries / regions of the world. For example, being a Chinese-American and being a Chinese national are different things.

 

Noted! Sorry for the misinterpretation.

One concrete idea could be an article centered on "class migrants". Perhaps it could be similar to the format of the anonymous interview series, or it could be like the imposter syndrome article where there's one personal profile and a few mini-profiles attached.

Partly, this is to help people feel less alone. But also, I think the strategy for developing your career differs based on where you're starting. Even between colleges, there's variation.

Beyond that, I'm not sure. I get that 80k's target audience is different ... (read more)

I never felt excluded either.  And 80k does a lot of things right on this front. The messages of ambition and "here's some broken stuff why don't you go fix it" are good and certainly have pushed me to do things I wouldn't have done otherwise. I genuinely feel people from underprivileged backgrounds need to hear more of it and I try to promote them as much as I can.

>I just had to discount or not read any sections that talked about status, top universities, etc., kind of assumed I'd have to write my own theory of change and have a thick skin about n... (read more)

Do you have plans for increasing class diversity via 80k career advice / tailoring advice to those with less resources? If so, what are some strategies you have?

I've loved 80k career advice and have benefited a ton from it. But one frustration I've had (especially earlier in my career) is that it doesn't offer much advice for people starting with less resources. For example, non-profit jobs can be out-of-reach without relevant / outstanding credentials or money to do a Masters degree if moving into policy.

I also suspect there's working-class cultural facto... (read more)

Adding some thoughts regarding diversity, privilege, and inclusiveness, as someone who was on the fence about applying and going last year and also about interacting with the global priorities community in general.

Like others said, I attended and loved this course last year. I think the value in this course is higher if you're from an underprivileged background or if you're a "big fish in a small pond" at a solid but non-elite university.

Mainly, it's because you'll get to hang out with other strong students across  a range of contexts. You attend rigo... (read more)

>even if you come from a highly ranked university in Latin America, getting a job outside of it is quite hard, and most people will implicitly or explicitly discriminate against you.

Anecdotally as US-native, I've been surprised with how detailed and impassioned my foreign-born econ professors (already highly accomplished and usually growing up privileged within their home country) could be about the history of US discrimination towards its own citizens. It felt like they were trying to convey the gravity of discrimination but could only do so using the ... (read more)

I live in DC and attended an econ Master's program that places some of its graduates in the International Monetary Fund. I don't think your decision matters too much, and I think you should use teaching quality, and your own interest as a tie-breaker. With the exception of Numerical Analysis, none of these classes sound particularly international-focused or standardized so I would guess they all look about the same to an employer. 

I'd lean towards dropping Economics of Inequality. It sounds way too general and I'm not even sure what someone would lear... (read more)

Has there been a past success story where a drug was developed to mimic the effects of a gene and successfully improved a complicated phenomena (in this case, sleep)?

I'm unfamiliar with drug development, but my limited knowledge of genetics and sleep suggests this would be complicated. A past success story would sway my mind a little bit.

The candidate pool was much stronger than expected

This one can be sent to every applicant and still provides very useful information. It tells me that my expectations of the hiring bar might have been correct in the past. However, the market has changed and I should adjust my expectations. 

For this one, concreteness is essential. One hiring manager phrased it like, "We had to reject many exceptional candidates that would have been instant hires a few years ago.  Everyone did well on our take-home test that we thought impossible to complete within... (read more)

This post resonated a lot with me. I was actually thinking of the term 'disillusionment' to describe my own life a few days before reading this.

One cautionary tale I'd offer to readers is don't automatically assume your disillusionment is because of EA and consider the possibility that your disillusionment is a personal problem. Helen suggested leaning into feelings of doubt or assuming the movement is making mistakes. That is good if EA is the main cause, but potentially harmful if the person gets disillusioned in general. 

I'm a case study for this. ... (read more)

Appreciate the post! A similar topic came up in a recent DC global health & development discussion

Could another argument for skipping the cash arm be having more resources for other RCTs?

Ideally, we'd study the cash arm and the asset transfer program simultaneously at multiple time periods. But each extra treatment arm and time period costs extra. I imagine one could use the savings for other RCTs instead.

Quick clarifying questions about your abstract if you have time.  I'm confused about the term "weakly constrained"

Does "weakly constrained" mean (a) the leader is weak because elite supporters make the leader weak, (b) the elite supporters are weak and can't limit the leader much, (c) a jargon-loaded academic definition that I shouldn't worry too much about because it's too hard to explain, or (d) something else?

Also, does personalist always mean anything about constrained-ness in theory? (Like I get in reality, it may correlate a certain way, but I'm wondering about the definition)

This post offered concrete suggestions for increasing representation of women at EA events and in the movement as a whole. Before reading this, I thought of diversity-type issues as largely intractable, and that I had limited influence over them, even at the local level.

Immediately after reading this, I stopped doing pub socials (which was the main low-effort event I ran at the time). Over time, I pivoted towards more ideas-rich and discussion-based events.

Really enjoyed the post. Would like clarification on something

However, I note that when some developmental economists venture out to do something new in climate change, these problems immediately rear up. This to me is moderate evidence for motivated reasoning and selection bias also being rampant in that cause area.

I'm not fully following this point and would like to hear more about it. Is this suggesting that development economists over-estimate the impacts of climate change or something else? And do you have any examples (any  will do, they don't h... (read more)

How would you categorize the schedule flexibility at think tanks?  Do you believe it varies by the three categories you've mentioned or by seniority levels? My well-being and productivity are much higher with a later start time

I can think of one factor that encourages a rigid schedule. Government work starts at 8am or 9am, sometimes by mandate. Think tanks will have their workday earlier to maximize overlap with bureaucrat schedules

But I can also think of another factor that encourages a flexible schedule. "Ideas industry" work have deliverables that may not be time-sensitive. This means less hard deadlines, less need for "putting out fires", and less need for everyone to be on the exact same schedule

Hi Sonia, this was a path I previously considered. Hopefully someone else with actual experience will chime in. In the meantime, here's some armchair thoughts in no particular order.

If you haven't already, check out Chris Blattman's blog: https://chrisblattman.com/ He's a professor at UChicago who posted a lot on academia, policy, and economics. Highly recommend the articles linked on the sidebar.

If you're targeting a PhD, your school's ranking probably trumps everything else. And rankings tend to be consistent across sub-disciplines. There are some outlie... (read more)

Could the Individual Approach be considered a complement to the Funnel Model?

The Individual Approach explains "Entry/ Transition" as a major life change. To me, that sounds a lot like moving deeper into the funnel

Long-term retention sounds like staying at your current stage. And drop-off sounds like moving back a stage, or leaving the funnel entirely

I highly recommend Lightning Talks. Participants are allowed to present on any topic they want for 5 minutes. They've worked wonders for Effective Altruism DC.

The main consideration is how to do questions:  You can do these immediately after each talk. Or you can finish all talks, then do a giant free form discussion. Or you can finish all talks, ask who's interested in each speaker, and then split them up into breakout rooms. Or you can let people have ongoing conversations in the chat room. Or you can tell people to message the speaker individually.... (read more)