All of HStencil's Comments + Replies

Glad to help!

This group isn’t exactly EA-aligned, but they’re working on questions that are very relevant to a number of the topics you raised, so you might want to give them a look.

https://forhealth.org/

Hey, sorry, I totally forgot about this until I stumbled across this recent discussion on donating to help with the situation in Ukraine earlier this week. I've pasted a bibliography of relevant papers below.

Aker, Jenny C., Paul Collier, and Pedro C. Vicente. “Is Information Power? Using Mobile Phones and Free Newspapers during an Election in Mozambique.” The Review of Economics and Statistics 99, no. 2 (May 2017): 185–200. https://doi.org/10.1162/REST_a_00611.

Armand, Alex, Alexander Coutts, Pedro C. Vicente, and Inês Vilela. “Does Information Break t... (read more)

[To clarify in case this was unclear: I am just a random outsider and have no association with this Amherst student group.]

I’m a bit skeptical that just trying to get more nonprofits to recruit on campus is a winning strategy here. Among other things, the vast majority of nonprofits don’t have dedicated recruiting staff, and the people responsible for hiring don’t have the time to travel to college campuses to recruit for entry-level positions. The same is going to be true of most public sector openings at the entry level, too. (I do think there are except... (read more)

I would say the same.

"Public service" is obviously a huge and diverse category, but my strong impression is that many public interest jobs (including at the entry level) offer substantially better exit opportunities within public service than nearly any  management consulting gig (and I think this is true to an even greater extent if the comparison is with entry-level roles at investment banks or hedge funds). The problem, I think, is that at least in the U.S., there are very few public interest jobs that are 1) entry-level, 2) open to generalists without prior experience... (read more)

Yeah, I’d be happy to, but I may not get around to it until next week, if that’s alright.

New Harvest is also listed as a standout charity in spite of (my impression is) an even narrower focus on cell-cultured product innovation than GFI (which also supports plant-based meat substitutes). I too would love some clarity from ACE on this.

Answering the question of whether a candidate is “good,” might well (at least on certain EA world views) be sufficient to answer the question of whether donating to the candidate would be (sufficiently) cost-effective (given evidence that 1) donations matter for getting elected, and 2) getting elected allows one to influence policy). Consider the case of a candidate running on a longtermist platform. My impression is that when longtermist grantmakers evaluate giving opportunities in existential risk mitigation, their decision process is much closer to “det... (read more)

If the concern is that donations don't have any impact on electoral outcomes, there is a good bit of high-quality social science research indicating that television advertising, at least, does, particularly (as OP notes) in down-ballot races. If the concern is that it nonetheless isn't worth its cost, that's plausible, but I don't think OP said anything to suggest strong grounds to believe campaign donations beat GiveWell's Maximum Impact Fund, nor (I assume) would most readers leap to that conclusion, given the unique depth and rigor  of GiveWell's r... (read more)

Great, thanks so much!

Does Open Phil have any plans to re-open applications for early-career funding for work on biosecurity, as well (sometime in the next 12 months, say)?

Yeah, I mean, to be clear, my impression was that Yglesias wished this weren't required and believed that it shouldn't be required (certainly, in the abstract, it doesn't have to be), but nonetheless, it seemed like he conceded that from a practical standpoint, when this is what all your staff expect, it is required. I guess maybe then the question is just whether he could "avoid the pitfalls from his time with Vox," and I suppose my feeling is that one should expect that to be difficult and that someone in his position wouldn't want to abandon their quiet... (read more)

Yeah, I guess the impression I had (from comments he made elsewhere — on a podcast, I think) was that he actually agreed with his managers that at a certain point, once a publication has scaled enough, people who represent its “essence” to the public (like its founders) do need to adopt a more neutral, nonpartisan (in the general sense) voice that brings people together without stirring up controversy, and that it was because he agreed with them about this that he decided to step down.

I would be extremely surprised if he had any interest in doing this, given what he’s said about his reasons for leaving Vox.

https://kalshi.com/

Yeah, I think it’s very plausible that career RAs could yield meaningful productivity gains in organizations that differ structurally from “traditional” academic research groups, including, importantly, many EA research institutions. I think this depends a lot on the kinds of research that these organizations are conducting (in particular, the methods being employed and the intended audiences of published work), how the senior researchers’ jobs are designed, what the talent pipeline looks like, etc., but it’s certainly at least plausible that this could be... (read more)

I actually think full-time RA roles are very commonly (probably more often than not?) publicly advertised. Some fields even have centralized job boards that aggregate RA roles across the discipline, and on top of that, there are a growing number of formalized predoctoral RA programs at major research universities in the U.S. I am actually currently working as an RA in an academic research group that has had roles posted on the 80,000 Hours job board. While I think it is common for students to approach professors in their academic program and request RA wor... (read more)

For the last few years, I’ve been an RA in the general domain of ~economics at a major research university, and I think that while a lot of what you’re saying makes sense, it’s important to note that the quality of one’s experience as an RA will always depend to a very significant extent on one’s supervising researcher. In fact, I think this dependency might be just about the only thing every RA role has in common. Your data points/testimonials reasonably represent what it’s like to RA for a good supervisor, but bad supervisors abound (at least/especially ... (read more)

This discussion reminds of a comment R.M. Hare made in his 1957 essay “Nothing Matters”:

Think of one world into whose fabric values are objectively built; and think of another in which those values have been annihilated. And remember that in both worlds the people in them go on being concerned about the same things - there is no difference in the 'subjective' concern which people have for things, only in their 'objective' value. Now I ask, What is the difference between the states of affairs in these two worlds? Can any other answer be given except 'None

While not exactly the same, EA researchers are already doing something quite similar: https://givingmultiplier.org/.

That makes perfect sense! I agree that CE probably isn't the best fit for people most interested in doing EA work to mitigate existential risks. Feel free to shoot me a DM if you'd ever like to talk any of this through at greater length, but otherwise, it seems to me like you're approaching these decisions in a very sensible way.

Happy to help! Another thing that strikes me is that in my experience (which is in the U.S.), running an academic research team at a university (i.e., being the principal investigator on the team's grants) seems to have a lot in common with running a startup (you have a lot of autonomy/flexibility in how you spend your time; your efficacy is largely determined by how good you are at coordinating other people's efforts and setting their priorities for them; you spend a lot of time coordinating with external stakeholders and pitching your value-add; you have... (read more)

It sounds based on your description that a fairly straightforward step would be for you to try to set up calls with 1) someone on the Charity Entrepreneurship leadership team, and 2) some of the founders of their incubated charities. This would help you to evaluate whether it would be a good idea for you to apply to the CE program at some point, as well as to refine your sense of which aspects of entrepreneurship you’re particularly suited to (so that if entrepreneurship doesn’t work out—maybe you discover other aspects of it that seem less appealing—you’l... (read more)

That seems like a sound line of reasoning to me — best of luck with the rest of your degree!

I think this is a really hard question, and the right answer to it likely depends to a very significant degree on precisely what you’re likely to want to do professionally in the near and medium-term. I recently graduated from a top U.S. university, and my sense is that the two most significant benefits I reaped from where I went to school were:

1. Having that name brand on my resume definitely opened doors for me when applying for jobs during my senior year. I’m actually fairly confident that I would not have gotten my first job out of college had I gone to a

I really like this. To me, it emphasizes that moral reason is a species of practical reason more generally and that the way moral reasons make themselves heard to us is through the generic architecture of practical reasoning. More precisely: Acting in a manner consistent with one's moral duties is not about setting one's preferences aside and living a life of self-denial; it's about being sufficiently attentive to one's moral world that one's preferences naturally evolve in response to sound moral reasons, such that satisfying those preferences and fulfilling one's duties are one and the same.

This is a fascinating argument — thank you for sharing it! I think it's particularly interesting to consider it in the context of metaethical theories that don't fall neatly within the realist paradigm but share some of its features, like R.M. Hare's universal prescriptivism (see Freedom and Reason [1963] and Moral Thinking [1981]). However, I also think this probably shouldn't lead most discounting realists to abandon their moral view. My biggest issue with the argument is that I suspect (though I am still thinking this through) that there exist parallel ... (read more)

Glad to hear it helped! Of course, usual caveats apply about the possibility that your field is quite different from mine, so I wouldn't stop looking for advice here, but hopefully, this gives you a decent starting point!

Regarding the data-driven policy path, my sense is that unfortunately, most policy work in the U.S. today is not that data-driven, though there's no doubt that that's in part attributable to human capital constraints. Two exceptions do come to mind, though:

1. Macroeconomic stabilization policy (which is one of Open Philanthropy's priority areas) definitely fits the bill. Much of the work on this in the U.S. occurs in the research and statistics and forecasting groups of various branches of the Federal Reserve System (especially New York, the Board of Governor

I think a lot of the day-to-day feelings of fulfillment in high-impact jobs come from either: 1) being part of a workplace community of people who really believe in the value of the work, or 2) seeing first-hand the way in which your work directly helped someone. I don't really think the feelings of fulfillment typically come from the particular functional category of your role or the set of tasks that you perform during the workday, so I wonder how informative your experiments with data science, for instance, would be with respect to the question of ident... (read more)

If you're committed to using data science to address public policy questions in the U.S. (either in government or a think tank-type organization), I suspect you'd be best-served by a program like one of these:

https://mccourt.georgetown.edu/master-of-science-in-data-science-for-public-policy/

https://harris.uchicago.edu/academics/degrees/ms-computational-analysis-public-policy-mscapp

https://macss.uchicago.edu/  

This is all fantastic information to have — thank you so much for explaining it! I'm really glad to have improved my understanding of this.

Yes, that argument for veg*anism is a big part of why I’m a vegetarian, but it does not on its own entail that one should prefer giving to multiplier charities rather than to the GiveWell Maximum Impact Fund. That depends on the empirical question of how the relative expected values weigh out. My argument is that there are sound reasons to believe that in the multiplier charity case specifically, the best-guess expected values do not favor giving to multiplier charities. “Your donation to a multiplier charity might have a big positive impact if it pushes t... (read more)

I don’t know anything about the norms and expectations in CS, but in my field (a quantitative social science), it is basically impossible to get into PhD programs without research experience of some kind, and you would likely be advised, first and foremost, to seek a master’s as preparation, and if it went well, apply to PhD programs thereafter. The master’s programs that would be recommended would be designed for people interested in transitioning from industry to academia, and someone like you would probably have a good shot at getting in. They can be ex... (read more)

I really don’t think my argument is about risk aversion at all. I think it’s about risk-neutral expected (counterfactual) value. The fact that it is extraordinarily difficult to imagine my donations to a multiplier charity having any counterfactual impact informs my belief about the likely probability of my donations to such an organization having a counterfactual impact, which is an input in my expected value calculus. You’re right that under some circumstances, a risk-neutral expected value calculus will favor small donors donating to “step-functional” c... (read more)

It sounds like you're doing some awesome work, and these are great questions, but I very seriously doubt you will be able to get good answers to them from anyone without domain expertise in your field, so this may not be best place to look. I personally have some very cursory exposure to biostatistics and health data science (definitely less than you), but I imagine I have significantly more familiarity with the area, especially in the U.S., than most people on the EA Forum, and I have zero clue about the answers to your questions.

I may be missing or misunderstanding something, but it seems like your worries/roadblocks about your option 1 all pertain specifically to the MBA/MPA component. If that is the case, and you think you really might want to work in tech, I'd encourage you to consider trying to transition directly to a tech company without first getting another degree. Anecdotally, my sense is that MBAs and MPAs are useful mainly for networking and allowing you to command a higher starting salary in many roles, not for what you learn during the degree (though this depends some... (read more)

Thank you — please do!

I'm glad to hear you found my reasoning useful, and I appreciate your explanation of where you think it may go astray. I'm a fairly marginal actor in the grand scheme of the EA community and don't feel I am anywhere close to having a clear view on whether the returns to adding further vetting or oversight structures would outweigh the costs. Naïvely, it seems to me that some kinds of organizational transparency are pretty cheap. However, it occurs to me that even though I've spent a fair bit of time on the TLYCS website over the past several years and gave... (read more)

I suspect there may be too much inferential distance between your perspective on normative theory and my own for me to explain my view on this clearly, but I will try. To start, I find it very difficult to understand why someone would endorse doing something merely because it is “effective” without regard for what it is effective at. The most effective way of going about committing arson may be with gasoline, but surely we would not therefore recommend using gasoline to commit arson. Arson is not something we want people to be effective at! I think that if... (read more)

I’m not sure, but it seemed to me that this was the view that you were defending in your original comment. Based on this comment, I take it that this is not, in fact, your view. Could clarify which premise you reject, 1) or 2)?

I also think asking people questions about why they hold a view you think is wrong that suggestively indicate why you think it’s wrong can be a good approach (e.g. “But don’t you think...?”).

This puts to words so many intuitions that have crept up on me—not necessarily so much about EA as about job-hunting as a young generalist with broadly altruistic goals—over the last few years. Like you, earlier this year, I transitioned from a research role I didn’t find fulfilling into a new position that I have greatly enjoyed after a multi-year search for a more impactful and rewarding job. During my search, I also made it fairly deep in the application process for research roles at GiveWell and Open Phil and got a lot of positive feedback but was ulti... (read more)

It’s not clear to me how one can believe 1) that there is nothing that ultimately explains what makes a person’s life go well for them, and 2) that we have an overriding moral reason to alleviate suffering. It would seem dangerously close to believing that we have an overriding moral reason to alleviate suffering in spite of the fact that it is not Bad for those who experience it. You might claim that suffering is instrumentally bad, that it makes it harder to achieve... whatever one wants to achieve, but presumably, if achieving whatever one wants to achi... (read more)

They explain why they offer offset recommendations (even though, like Founders Pledge, they believe CATF is likely more cost-effective) at some length in their launch post: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/xfN7AwkjYBpEbbz6x/re-launching-giving-green-an-ea-run-organization-directing

A variety of different organizations have attempted projects like this in the past and have struggled to generate interest in participating among political candidates. For the most well-known, see: https://ballotpedia.org/Survey.

Looks like BlockPower is holding a hackathon tomorrow to help build out the platform they’re using for their GOTV efforts in the Georgia runoffs, if anyone’s interested!