All of Joseph Lemien's Comments + Replies

I'd also re-focus on effective at what? What is the goal or objective of these free hugs? Once you know that, then you can more easily estimate how effective free hugs are compared to other interventions.

revealing scores useful to candidates for some other reason not covered by that

Honestly, I hadn't even thought of encouraging them to apply for future roles. My main thought regarding feedback is to allow them to improve. If you assess my work and then tell me the ways in which it falls short, that allows me to improve. I know that to work on. An example would be something like "Although your project plan covered a lot of the areas we requested, you didn't explain your reasoning for the assumption you made. You estimated that a [THING] would cost $[AMOUNT]... (read more)

Regarding "disheartening people," I once got feedback for a hiring round and the organization shared what scores I got, and even shared scoring info for the other (anonymized) candidates. It was the best and most accurate data I have ever been given as feedback.

I scored very low, much lower than I had expected. Of course I felt sad and frustrated. I wish that I knew more details about their scoring methodology, and part of me says that it was  an unfair process because they weren't clear on what I would be evaluated on. But I draw a analogies to getti... (read more)

Using the analogy of hunger, here is one way that I am currently thinking about it: giving a willing stranger a hug is like giving a willing stranger a candy bar; they get some nourishment, but if they are chronically food insecure this won't solve that longer-term problem. It won't help them get regular/consistent access to meals that they can afford. So in that sense it is like a band-aid: it is treating the symptom, but it is not addressing the cause.

If someone is suffering from a consistent and pervasive lack of human touch, such as "skinship hunger," ... (read more)

Haha. Well, I guess I would first ask effective at what? Effective at giving people additional years of healthy & fulfilling life? Effective at creating new friendships? Effective at making people smile?

I haven't studied it at all, but my hypothesis that it is the kind of intervention that is  similar to "awareness building," but it doesn't have any call to action (such as a donation). So it is probably effective in giving people a nice experience for a few seconds, and maybe improving their mood for a period of time, but it probably doesn't have ... (read more)

Jamie, I've been contemplating writing up a couple of informal "case study"-type reports of different hiring practices. My intention/thought process would be to allow EA orgs to learn about how several different orgs do hiring, to highlight some best practices, and generally to allow/encourage organizations to improve their methods. How would you feel about writing up a summary or having a call with me to allow me to understand how you tried giving feedback and what specific aspects caused challenges?

That actually seems like a really strong signal of something important: can people improve, if given a modest amount of guidance/support. I'd certainly be interested in hiring someone who does rather than someone who doesn't.

But I'm also impressed that you provide feedback to candidates consistently. I've always thought that it would be something fairly time-consuming, even if you set up a system to provide feedback in a fairly standardized way. Would you be willing to share a bit about how you/your team does feedback for rejected job applicants?

It looks like there are two people who voted disagree with this. I'm curious as to what they disagree with. Do they disagree with the claim that some organizations are "very risk-averse when hiring"? Do they disagree with the claim that "reducing false positives often means raising false negatives"? That this has a causal effect with organisations scale slowly? Or perhaps that "the costs of a bad hire are somewhat bounded"? I would love for people who disagree vote to share information regarding what it is they disagree with.

Forgive my rambling. I don't have much to contribute here, but I generally want to say A)I am glad to see other people thinking about this, and B) I sympathize with the difficulty

The "reducing false positives often means raising false negatives" is one of the core challenges in hiring. Even the researchers who investigate the validity of various methods and criteria in hiring don't have a great way to deal with it this problem. Theoretically we could randomly hire 50% of the applicants and reject 50% of them, and then look at how the new hires perform comp... (read more)

I just want to chime in to say how lovely it is to see a disagreement on the internet that doesn't degrade. It was very nice to read each of you describe what you believe to be true, cite sources, explain reasoning without exaggerations or ad hominems, consider context and hypothesize about possibilities, and move a step closer to 'truth.' Bravo.

a lot of the attitudes around career planning in EA sort of assume that you are formidable within a particular, rather narrow mould

This idea is something I've contemplated previously, but I really like that you put it into words.

If you will indulge me in rambling/ranting a little, I remember looking at 80k's guidance on careers in the area of Improving China-Western coordination a few years ago. China is an area that I know a bit about and wanted to make a core of my career.^[1] I was disappointed that most of their recommendations were not realistic f... (read more)

Hi. I don't think my explanation would take 45 minutes to explore, but I can share the basics of my thought process: I'd feel pretty dumb if I donate a few thousand dollars, and then a year later I don't have enough money to pay for basic necessities. I've never had both A) a feeling of financial stability, and B) the confidence that such stability would continue in the future. Thus, I've wanted to build up a 'nest egg' for myself so that I won't starve or be homeless.

A is pretty easy to explain and understand. That covers times when I've been employed on ... (read more)

One of the best experiences I've had at a conference was when I went out to dinner with three people that I had never met before. Seeing the popularity of matching systems like Donut in Slack workspaces, I wonder if something analogous could be useful for conferences. I'm imagining a system in which you sign up for a timeslot (breakfast, lunch, or dinner), and are put into a group with between two and four other people. You are assigned a location/restaurant that is within walking distance of the conference venue, so the administrative work of figuring out... (read more)

For what it is worth, I'd want the bar for expertise to be a lot higher than a few months of work experience. I can't really think of any common career (setting aside highly specialized fields with lots of training, such as astronaut) in which a few months of work experience make someone an expert. Maybe Areas of Expertise (multiple years work experience)? It is tricky, because there are so many edge cases, and maybe someone had read all the research on [AREA] and is incredibly knowledge without having ever worked in that area.

Some questions cause me to become totally perplexed. I've been asked these (or variations of these) by a handful people in the EA community. These are not difficulties or confusions that require PhD-level research to explain, but instead I think they represent a sort of communication gap/challenge/disconnect and differing assumptions.

Note that this fuzzy musings on communication gaps, and on differing assumptions of what is normal. In a very broad sense you could think of this as an extension of the maturing/broadining of perspectives that we all do when w... (read more)

Lorenzo, I want to applaud you for actually gathering some data. As I was reading this post I thought to myself "this is provable, we could just do a low-fidelity, quick-and-dirty test by looking at some LinkedIn profiles of anyone with a job title of something like Manager or Director at a sample of EA orgs." And lo and behold, the first comment I see if a beautifully done, quick gathering of data. Bravo!

I'm not sure about the factual/epistemic aspects of it, but there is at least some element here that seems at least somewhat accurate.

It has always struck me as a bit odd to glorify an individual for accomplishing X or donating Y, when they are only able to do that because of the support they have received from others. To be trivially simplistic: could I have done any of the so-called impressive things that I have done without support from a wide away of sources (stable childhood home, accessible public schools of decent quality, rule of law, guidance from... (read more)

It seems that you are gesturing toward the supporting roles that enabled or allowed Alec to save those lives. I find it both true (in this hypothetical scenario) that those lives were saved because of Alec's choices, and also that Alex's choices are in turn dependent on other things. This seems to echo some aspects of the ideas of dependent origination. If we really want to give "credit," then maybe we would have to use something vaguely analogous to exponential smoothing: Alec get's 80% of the credit, and the person before that gets 80%^2 of the credit, t... (read more)

Great work! Nice editing choice to use the "iPad" frame to show different footage.

A very minor request: could you edit the title of your post to change "CEA" to "cost effectiveness analysis," simply to reduce ambiguity and confusion with "Center for Effective Altruism?"

I just had a call with a young EA from Oyo State in Nigeria (we were connected through the excellent EA Anywhere), and it was a great reminder of how little I know regarding malaria (and public health in developing countries more generally). In a very simplistic sense: are bednets actually the most cost effective way to fight against malaria?

I've read a variety of books on the development economics canon, I'm a big fan of the use of randomized control trials in social science, I remember worm wars and microfinance not being so amazing as people thought and... (read more)

Thanks for writing this, Ulrik. I also want to see better inclusiveness within EA, so we have something in common. 😂

My general way of learning about an area involves a lot of exploratory learning, so I've been doing some reading and having conversations with EAs about inclusion/feeling welcome in the EA community during the past year or so. I don't have any particularly amazing discoveries yet, but I'll keep my eyes open. I'm glad to see that some other people are also paying attention to these kinds of issues.

I'd be happy to listen to conversations with interesting and articulate people who are low-key. I suspect that a major challenge will be finding these people. My general/vague understanding is that most (not all) people who are on podcasts (or who have any type of public image) tend to do a certain amount of self-promotion, and I predict that tendency to self-promote is negatively correlated with being low-key.

I've met a handful of people who are doing good work that don't appear to spend much effort on what I'll label as "image," but if you are searching for interesting and articulate people for a podcast it will be hard to find those people, exactly because they don't promote themselves.

Oh, that's not bad! Maybe I'll use that someday. 🤣  Unfortunately, I think that will encourage people to mispronounce my surname; it isn't pronounced less like "lemon" and more in a way that rhymes with "the mean" or "the keen."

I suspect there would be a lot of challenges with this, such as how to measure/assess the impact, and the actual implementation of the project/intervention. The details matter a lot. But I also think that at its core this idea has merit.

I was just recently thinking about how reading two pieces of writing in my early 20s had a very beneficial effect on my long-term happiness. If I was building a curiculum on something like how to have a happy life or practical wisdom, I'd include these.

• If money doesn't make you happy, then you probably aren't spending it ri

Some people involved in effective altruism have really great names for their blogs: Ollie Base has Base Rates, Diontology from Dion Tan, and Ben West has Benthamite. It is really cool how people are able to take their names and with some slight adjustments make them into cool references. If I was the blogging type and my surname wasn't something so uncommon/unique, I would take a page from their book.

the worry that someone with high degrees of partiality for a particular cause manages to hijack EA resources is much weaker than the concern that potentially promising cases may be ignored because they have an unfortunate messenger

I think you've phrased that very well. As much as I may want to find the people who are "hijacking" EA resources, the benefit of that is probably outweighed by how it disincentivized people to try new things. Thanks for commenting back and forth with me on this. I'll try to jump the gun a bit less from now on when it comes to gut feeling evaluations of new causes. 

I suspect you are right that many of us (myself included) focus more than we ought to on how similar an idea sounds in relation to ideas we are already supporting. I suppose maybe a cruxy aspect of this is how much effort/time/energy we should spend considering claims that seem unreasonable at first glance?

If someone honestly told me that protecting elephants (as an example) should be EA's main cause area, the two things that go through my heard first are that either that this person doesn't understand some pretty basic EA concepts^[1], or that there is som... (read more)

the community can easily vet and detect bad cases

You make a good point. I probably allow myself to be too affected by claims (such as "saving the great apes should be at the center of effective altruism"), when in reality I should simply allow the community sieve to handle them.

I think that to a certain extent that is right, but this context was less along the lines of "here is a cause that is going to be highly impactful" and more along the lines of "here is a cause that I care about." Less "mental health coaching via an app can be cost effective" and more like "let's protect elephants."

But I do think that in a broad sense you are correct: proposing new interventions, new cause areas, etc., is how the overall community progresses.

I'm concerned whenever I see things like this:

"I want to place [my pet cause], a neglected and underinvested cause, at the center of the Effective Altruism movement."^[1]

In my mind, this seems anti-scouty. Rather than finding what works and what is impactful, it is saying "I want my team to win." Or perhaps the more charitable interpretation is that this person is talking about a rough hypothesis and I am interpreting it as a confident claim. Of course, there are many problems with drawing conclusions from small snippets of text on the internet, and if I me... (read more)

I want to say that not only was this a good summary, this post also nudged a professional development book club that I am in to read the book, and we all agreed that it had a lot of helpful/useful ideas.

If anybody wants to read and discuss books on inclusion, diversity, and similar topics, please let me know. This is a topic that I am interested in, and a topic that I want to learn more about. My main  interest is on the angle/aspect of diversity in organizations (such as corporations, non-profits, etc.), rather than broadly society-wide issues (although I suspect they cannot be fully disentangled).

I have a list of books I intend to read on DEI topics (I've also listed them at the bottom of this quick take in case anybody can't access my shared Notio... (read more)

Rough thoughts and musings, not to be taken too seriously.

Some subjects (computer science, engineering, political science) are often only taught starting at the university level. This isn't to say that no pre-university education ever involves these, but they are generally at a much more watered down level (such as social studies or a class called western civilization compared to political science). I think that the standard approach for parents who want their keeps to be exposed to these areas is to do it yourself, rather than relying on the school system... (read more)

This may seem silly, but when I walk up or down stairs that have a handrail, I almost always hover my hand near/over the handrailing. This a just in case behavior of mine: if my feet slip/stumble my hand can quickly grab the railing. If it is in my own house I just allow my hand  to hold the railing, but if it is in a public place that I assume is filthy (such as a subway handrailing) I don't want to touch something that so many other people have touched, so my hand hovers.

If you own a house with stairs that lack hand rail, I suggest getting one installed. That seems like a fairly easy preventative measure.

Informally, I've heard from people at various EA orgs that using headhunters or recruiting firms generally hasn't worked out in the past. I wasn't told detailed information about why these experiences didn't work well, but my vague impression is something like headhunters/recruiters didn't understand important aspects of effective altruism, and thus lacked the ability to identify relevant criteria in potential candidates. While I do think there might be some value in using such services, my naïve assumption is that in the context of EA there are also many costs/challenges to doing so.

Best books I've read in 2023

(I want to share, but this doesn't seem relevant enough to EA to justify making a standard forum post. So I'll do it as a quick take instead.)

People who know me know that I read a lot.^[1] Although I don’t tend to have a huge range, I do think there is a decent variety in the interests I pursue: business/productivity, global development, pop science, sociology/culture, history. Of all the books I read in 2023, here is my best guess as to the ones that would be of most interest to an effective altruist.

For people who hav

This is about donation amounts, investing, and patient philanthropy. I want to share a simple excel graph showing the annual donation amounts from two scenarios: 10% of salary, and 10% of investment returns.^[1] While back a friend was astounded at the difference in dollar amounts, so I thought I should share this a bit more widely. The specific outcomes will change based on the assumptions that we input, of course.^[2] A person could certainly combine both approaches, and there really isn't anything stopping you from donating more than 10%, so int... (read more)

An additional option: if you don't know people who are willing to review a document and give you feedback, you could ask people in the Effective Altruism Editing and Review Facebook group to review it.

I encourage you to share your ideas.

I've often felt a similar my thoughts aren't valuable enough to share feeling. I tend to write these thoughts as a quick take rather than as a normal forum post, and I also try to phrase my words in a manner to indicate that I am writing rough thoughts, or observations, or something similarly non-rigorous (as sort of a signal to the reader that it shouldn't be evaluated by the same standard).

I have an answer for this now: line functions and staff functions. Line functions do the core work on the organization, while staff function "supports the organization with specialized advisory and support functions."

My vague impression is that this labelling/terminology is fairly common among high-level management types, but that people in general likely wouldn't be familiar with it.

I double-checked my copy of How to Launch a High-Impact Nonprofit — and sure enough, towards the end of the chapter on productivity, the book actually encourages the reader to add that title to their Linkedin verbatim. Not explicitly as a certification, nor with CE as the certifier, but just in general..

Thanks for mentioning this. I wasn't aware of this context, which changes my initial guesswork quite a bit. I just looked it up at in Chapter 10 (Take Planning), section 10.6 has this phrase: "As you implement most or some of the practices introduced here, ... (read more)

choosing to not do this sort of resume padding creates bad selection

That is definitely something for us to be aware of. The simplistic narrative of "lots of people are exaggerating and inflating their experiences/skills, so if I don't do it I will be at a disadvantage" is something that I think of when I am trying to figure out wording on a resume.

I have mixed feelings about this, but broadly speaking I would love to see more interpersonal warmth, agreeableness, friendliness, and general empathy in EA.

I see it as vaguely aligned with virtue ethics (in the vague sense of "be a good person"), and I think that the standard EA mix (heavily consequentialism with a little bit of deontology) would benefit from just a little bit more virtue ethics.