All of Jessica McCurdy🔸's Comments + Replies

Quick Pitch for Using Toggl

• Reduces task switching:
  • Actively changing the task in Toggl makes you more aware of switching.
  • Helps maintain focus on one task longer.
  • For small or miscellaneous tasks, I use grouped categories (e.g. "Smalls", "Slack/email") and batch them.
     
• Tracks time against priorities:
  • Allows reflection on whether your actual time spent aligns with your intended priorities.
  • Easy to spot when too much time is going to low-priority tasks.
     
• Improves time estimation:
  • Over time, you get calibrated on how long tasks really take.
  • Some tasks consis

Thank you for sharing this! I think it is a really great and helpful read and highlights some important values that I identify with.  I have already shared it a few times :) 

Thanks for sharing your experiences and reflections here — I really appreciate the thoughtfulness. I want to offer some context on the group organizer situation you described, as someone who was running the university groups program at the time.

On the strategy itself:
 At the time, our scalable programs were pretty focused from evidence we had seen that much of the impact came from the organizers themselves. We of course did want groups to go well more generally, but in deciding where to put our marginal resource we were focusing on group organizers. I... (read more)

Thank you for thoughtfully engaging! On the growth team side, Angelina is unfortunately ill right now, but we plan on responding to this in a few days when she gets back :) 

I just want to quickly note that I think there are a lot of people who would resonate with the principles of EA but haven't heard about it. Very few people have heard of EA, and while there are some methodological nuances to be had with this study, it suggests that the number of EA-sympathetic students on NYU’s campus is over 5x the number of students who were sympathetic and familiar with EA. So generally, I think there is a lot of potential growth available of people who do strongly align to EA principles.

You could argue that growth mechanisms ... (read more)

Thanks Neel! I’ve jotted down some quick clarifications below.

Overall: as I mentioned in my previous comment, I don’t think growth is obviously good and there are a lot of various risks to be aware of. I also think that even though it is only one of four strategy pillars at CEA it is a somewhat easier pillar for us to contribute to as we have more foundations for it. That could mean us unintentionally prioritizing it too much, and that is something I am trying to track. So, overall, I am sympathetic to a lot of your concerns but generally am... (read more)

Hi, I'm Jessica, and I lead the growth pillar of CEA’s strategy. I’m excited about the potential for the EA community to grow and for EA ideas to reach more people, and I wanted to share how we’re thinking about that growth.

Our main goal is the same as EA’s: to help others as effectively as possible. We believe that growing the EA community can help us achieve more of the good we want to see in the world. While the community isn’t perfect, I’m proud of its accomplishments. I believe it can help many more people increase their impact—while the EA ... (read more)

Agus is one of my favorite people I have ever worked with! Would recommend :) 

Quick take on Burnout

Note: I am obviously not an expert here nor do I have much first hand experience but I thought it could be useful for people I work with to know how I currently conceptualize burnout. I was then encouraged to post on the forum. This is based off around 4 cases of burnout that I have seen (at varying levels of proximity) and conversations with people who have seen significantly more.

• Different Conceptions of Burnout
  • Basic conception that people often have: working too hard until energy is depleted.
  • Yes, working too hard can lead to exhaust

Very quickly: I feel like it's useful to share that I did this survey and found it very hard, and a lot of other people did too. In particular, it did feel pretty rushed for such difficult questions that we didn't necessarily have a fully informed pre-existing take on. OP does mention this, but I wanted to stress that for people reading this post.

I still think it has a lot of useful information and is directionally very informative. I might get a chance to write up more thoughts here, but I am not sure I will be able to. I mostly wanted to give a quick additional flag :) 

Thanks for sharing this! The power of prompts and letting go of nice to haves have been things I've noticed in my work as well. Good luck with your future efforts here!

Thank you! And thank you so much for your podcasts - like I mentioned in the post I found them really helpful and relatable and am grateful for you sharing so much!

I'm on buproprion xl and generally they don't recommend taking it at night because it can cause insomnia but I'm really lucky and have never really had problems with that. Instead, I just found waking up in the morning extremely difficult - I often woke up sad and just wanted to stay in bed and keep sleeping (even if I had slept a really long time). Due to the extended release, taking it at night means that peak effects are now happening in the mornings when I was most sad / low motivation before. So that was honestly just really great for me.

This is super interesting! How do you do the experiments? Do you change one thing at a time and track?

Thanks! I actually also was using bearable for a while there and had a similar experience of "it's hard to find out info because of confounders but this is generally useful for being mindful of my wellbeing". I don't use it any more but might look into it again :)

I remember thinking it was super cool when I found it

Thank you for writing and sharing this! I'm excited about your work and also excited for other orgs to learn from it :)

This is really impressive output for such a small team!

Just wanted to drop in this study: Harvard Undergraduate Survey on Generative AI since it seems somewhat related/interesting :) 

Hey

I am really sorry to hear about all of these negative experiences.  I feel lucky to have gotten to work with you over the years and seen the positive impact you have had on others in the community and the exciting work you have moved into. I think the community will be losing a really lovely person. I admire both your courage in posting this and that you are prioritizing your well-being right now. 

I was sad to hear that our team contributed to your negative experiences though I definitely understand. When I first was introduced to the idea of ... (read more)

Hi Andreas,

This is a different and unrelated role (you can compare the role descriptions to see more differences)

We are currently doing work trials for candidates for the group support contractor role. 

Hi Isaac, this is a good question! I can elaborate more in the Q&A tomorrow but here are some thoughts:

Ultimatley a lot depends on your personal fit and comparative advantage. I think people should do the things they excel at. While I do think you can have a more scalable impact on the groups team, the groups team would have very little to no impact without the organizers working on the ground! 

I can share some of the reasons that led me to prefer working at CEA over working on the ground:

• I value having close management to help me think through my

Hey Camille,

Thanks for writing this and I am sorry you faced so many struggles and felt alone. 

Arguments around students not having time feel surprising to me. Do you feel like your students are significantly busier than say, MIT students? I would defer to you since you have more context, but I have heard the "students don't have time" answer from a lot of universities that eventually ran quite successful clubs. So I think it would be interesting to know what ENS students are doing with their time? Do more students work outside schooling or is there a... (read more)

(I lead the CEA uni groups team but don’t intend to respond on behalf of CEA as a whole and others may disagree with some of my points)
 

Hi Dave,

I just want to say that I appreciate you writing this. The ideas in this post are ones we have been tracking for a while and you are certainly not alone in feeling them. 

I think there is a lot of fruitful discussion in the comments here about strategy-level considerations within the entire EA ecosystem and I am personally quite compelled by many of the points in Will’s comment. So, I will focus specifical... (read more)

Hi! Just responding on the groups team side :)

This is a good observation. As we mentioned in this retrospective from last Fall, we decided to restrict UGAP to only new university groups to keep the program focused. In the past, we had more leeway and admitted some university groups that had been around longer. I think we have hit a ~ plateau on the number of new groups we expect to pop up each semester (around 20-40) so I don't expect this program to keep growing.

We piloted a new program for organizers from existing groups in the winter alongside the most ... (read more)

I want to chip in that several years ago it was very normal for retreat participants to chip in on the cost of the retreats. I think this is pretty normal in comparison settings (ie: student group retreats for clubs in the US) and would be excited about more groups doing a bit more of this (not necessarily all of them but I think this isn't in the option space of some group organizers right now and should be). I think this gives participants a bit more stake in the retreat going well but that is not super evidence-based. 

It is also, always possible to... (read more)

In case anyone is interested, here is that piece. 

I also want to express some appreciation for what you are doing. I am really glad to see this series being posted and I think it is generating a lot of useful conversation. <3

Published: Who gives? Characteristics of those who have taken the Giving What We Can pledge

The paper I worked on with Matti Wilks for my thesis was published! Lizka successfully did her job and convinced me to share it on the forum. 

I'm sharing this here, but I probably won't engage with it (or comments about it) too seriously as a heads up --- this was a project I worked on a few years ago and it's not super relevant to me anymore.

Hi Robert,

Thanks for the questions! 

I am just adding a quick response now because I think Max’s response does a good job of covering most of your questions. I would be happy to expand if you like, though.

We are more optimistic now because, as mentioned, the landscape is quite different and we are testing out focusing on different types of support than before. For example, we are not currently planning on restarting the campus specialist program but are investigating things like group organizer retreats for top universities (which was a more well-received aspect of the campus specialist program).

Writing this in a purely personal capacity in my effort to comment more on forum posts as I think of responses:

This is just a general meta point but, to me, this post is trying to take on wayyyy too many ideas and claims. I was really intrigued by some of them and would like to see more thorough and detailed arguments for them (ie: the fog, where are the effects, arbitrage, and the ants) . However, since this tried to make so many separate points, many claims were left unsubstantiated which decreased my confidence in the post and most single points within ... (read more)

Hi Ivy,

Just wanted to hop in re: the University Group Accelerator program. You are definitely hitting on some key points that we have been strategizing around for UGAP. I just want to clarify a few things:

• * We see 25 hours as the minimum amount of time engaging with EA ideas before someone should help start a group. Often times we think it should be more but there have been cases of really great organizers springing up after just an intro fellowship. We have additional screening for UGAP groups beyond just meeting the pre-requisites that dive a bit more in

Overall, CEA is planning to spend ~$1.5mil on uni group support in 2022 across ~75 campuses, which is a  lot less than $1mil/campus. :) 

Sorry, I was trying to get a quick response to this post and I made a stronger claim than I intended. I was trying to say that I think that EA careers are doing much more good than the ones mentioned on average and so spending money is a good bet here. I wasn’t intending to make a definitive judgment about the overall social impact of those other careers, though I know my wording suggests that. I also generally want to note that this element was a personal claim and not necessarily a CEA endorsed one. 

Just another super quick response that doesn't cover everything and is purely my own thoughts and not necessarily accurate to CEA:

• We are currently expanding the groups team :) We are careful about scaling too fast and want to make high-quality offers. You can read some more on hiring in previous CEA reports.
• Ideally, people have entirely passed off their group by the end of their senior year (ie: someone else has been running the group and they have just been advising). 
• Much of the groups team's hiring process is blinded and has clear guidelines and ru

Hi Jack,

Just a quick response on the CEA’s groups team end.

We are processing many small grants and other forms of support for CB  and we do not have the capacity to publish BOTECs on all of them. 

However, I can give some brief heuristics that we use in the decision-making.

Institutions like Facebook, Mckinsey, and Goldman spend ~ $1 million per school per year at the institutions they recruit from trying to pull students into lucrative careers that probably at best have a neutral impact on the world. We would love for these students to instead foc... (read more)

Hi Charles,

I am not writing in an official CEA capacity but just wanted to respond with a couple quick personal thoughts that don't cover everything you mentioned

• I am sorry you had negative experiences while organizing.
• I do think a lot has changed in the community building space in the past year.
• Right now CEA has about 1.5 fte covering ~100 groups so it isn't possible to keep completely up to date on each group but we are working to expand capacity so we can offer some additional support.  In particular, our new University Group Accelerator Program ai

Hi Michael, 

We've primarily been responding to the existing demand of group leaders running university groups, as opposed to seeding groups from scratch and we are prioritizing particularly scalable programs right now instead of bespoke support (as we wrote about in the "MVP University Group Program" in our Q3 update). There is significant existing demand for supporting new group organizers and we want to be sure to make the pathway smooth and simple for interested and prepared university groups. We expect to support the start-up stages of ~20 new uni... (read more)

This is very exciting! 

I am looking into creating and running some trainings for group organizers through CEA Scalable Uni Support :).  If you or others would be interested in helping to create these, please let me know at jessica.mccurdy@centreforeffectivealtruism.org.  

I am particularly excited to hear from people who are willing to take lead on creating and running specific trainings. I think winter break is a great time for organizers to take on projects like this. For example, last winter I made the facilitator training for EAVP as a wi... (read more)

I think the big ones were the cluelessness week and the small probabilities week.

 Cluelessness week pointed out that we can't really know the long-term effects of our actions. So people became suspicious that we can knowably affect the long-term future at all. This ended up being more of an empirical claim than a moral one.

The small probabilities week was challenging when put to the extreme (ie: God at your deathbed thought experiment). Additionally, some felt like the numbers of the expected future that people like  Bostrom use were basically pu... (read more)

I was lucky enough to get to take this class and really enjoyed it (though it was very difficult!). I thought it did a good job of showing both strengths and weaknesses in longtermism.  Interestingly, it seemed to have pretty different impacts on different students with some becoming significantly less longtermist and a few becoming more longtermist. Would be happy to answer any questions people have about the course :)

Hi Tony!

We actually originally created the scoring breakdown partly to help with unconscious biases. Before, we had given people a general score after an interview but we learned that that is often really influenced by biases and that breaking scores down into components with specific things to look for would reduce that.  We are hoping the checkbox system we are trialing out this semester will reduce it even more as it aims to be even more objective. It is still possible, though, that it would lead to a systemic bias if the checkboxes themselves have... (read more)

Ah thanks for the reminder! I meant to do this and forgot! :)

My instinctual response to this was: "well it is not very helpful to admit someone for whom it would be great if they got into EA if they really seem like they won't".

 However, since it seems like we are not particularly good at predicting whether they will get involved or not maybe this is a metric we should incorporate. (My intuition is that we would still want a baseline? There could be someone it would be absolutely amazing to have get involved but if they are extremely against EA ideas and disruptive that might lower the quality of the fellowship... (read more)

Okay, thanks! 

Thank you so much for this! It is super helpful! Is the raw data from the 2018 survey available anywhere?

From what I have read there is an important difference between perceptions of life satisfaction and well-being/happiness. Perception of life satisfaction continues to grow but actual affective well-being basically stops increasing after around $75,000. I have seen this a lot stemming back to this study. I did most of my research on this a few years ago so it might be outdated. Of course well being research is just really difficult and it is still unknown what exactly we should be measuring.

This is really helpful! I appreciate it :)

Note: While I contributed to one of the posts about unsuccessful high-school outreach my experience with teaching EA concepts to high schoolers is much more limited than the others in the post. Most of my thoughts on this are based off of a few experiences teaching high schoolers, discussions with other people teaching high schoolers, my relative freshness out of high school (Graduated in 2017), and some extrapolations from running Yale EA and interacting with first-years.

As someone who contributed to one of the posts about unsuccessful high-school outreac... (read more)

Could you possibly share how much the ACE off-set was? I have been having trouble finding a good number for this when people ask me about it.

General Positive Notes:

I think building relationships between EA professionals and groups is highly valuable and think that programs such as residencies could be really beneficial.

As someone, who had not met too many EA professionals (outside of community builders) until fairly recently I can at least attest to how beneficial it was for me. I was able to have deep discussions on EA issues with those who knew more about EA than anyone I had met before. This led to me changing some of my ideas on things and generally having a better understanding of where E... (read more)

For the past couple of bazaars we have been following the aim to get lots of email sign ups but I am starting to wonder if this is the best strategy for us. At Yale in particular the bazaar is super hectic and first-years end up signing up for tons of panlists. It seems like that leads to not that many people actually reading all of these emails.

In our experience people are exceptionally more likely to come to things after being personally invited as compared to reading about it on an email. I agree that the bazaar is much too loud and hectic for a good co... (read more)