All of Kirsten's Comments + Replies

I don't have an "in" but I'd love to hear the book discussed on Best Laid Plan (a podcast about planning) or Best of Both Worlds (a podcast about making work and life fit together, primarily aimed at mothers - better fit if someone at HIP can speak to combining parenting with a high impact career).

In the EA space, people like Will sharing every thought they have could in some cases have negative effects because people in EA have a history of deferring (and it gets worse the more Will talks to EAs about EA).

If Will had a weekly podcast where he was like "Does lobster welfare matter? Ehh, probably not" and "I'd love to see an EA working on every nuclear submarine" that wouldn't actually be a good thing, even if he believed both of those points. I predict a small group of EAs would love the podcast, defer to it way too much, and adopt Will's opinions wholesale.

(I notice that all three of your examples are situations where you wanted people to adopt the public intellectual's opinions wholesale)

I find it annoying if people argue for a policy for reasons other than the ones that truly motivate them, although it is very instrumentally useful and I don't think it's necessarily morally wrong.

Declining to share an opinion on a topic (eg Kelsey not telling the public she was proposing for a global pandemic) seems completely fine? Unless I'm missing some context and she was writing about COVID in a way that contradicted her actual beliefs at that time? I agree it would have been better for her to share her beliefs but there is no rule that people, even public intellectuals, need to share every thought!

When on the fence, I ranked smaller and newer charities higher

Same - wrote about it once. https://x.com/kirsten3531/status/1400747953090969602?s=46&t=7jI2LUFFCdoHtZr1AtWyCA

>If I'm happy to buy you a beer or cover your portion of the Uber, why wouldn't I donate £5 or £10 to your fundraiser for a cause you care a lot about?

thanks for sharing! Glad to hear it

Glad to see people engaging with this consultation. My experience when I've done work reviewing consultation responses in UK government:

-put more weight on novel, well-supported arguments (so I'd recommend including a short, clear piece of strong evidence for your arguments)

-put more weight on responses from credible people or organisations with legible qualifications or expertise (so I'd recommend emphasising any legible qualifications, experience or affiliations - or if you don't have that, just presenting yourself as a normal private citizen)

-put less w... (read more)

Kids can't always easily explain what's going on. Even adults would have a tough time answering that question I think! Most would probably just say "... because I need to use the bathroom??"

I'd be curious to understand his views on the role of individual Christians and the Church as an institution in politics

We also experimented with an EAG in the Bay Area focused on Global Catastrophic Risks

Have you decided yet whether to run another GCR-focused EAG?

I absolutely agree! One thing I've been thinking about recently: I used to think that if I want to make a career move in the next 6 months, I should start out by applying to really ambitious jobs and then lower my standards. I'm rethinking this. I now think it's probably good to get better-than-now Plan B offers early on too, even if I end up turning them down, both because it helps me calibrate, but honestly much more importantly because it keeps me motivated! Getting even 3 or 4 rejections in a row can be really hard emotionally

The British civil service is really good for this. We don't pay as much at a senior level as the private sector, so instead we put a lot of effort into creating a good work culture with lots of training and feedback (of course still varies between departments and managers!).

It's also very easy to get experience presenting to boards or helping to hire people, and relatively easy to get management experience.

The year in question, when they decided to hold some cash for a few months, it was because they had been researching new giving opportunities that were 10x cash and wanted to be able to use the money for that, rather than dropping the bar. (GiveDirectly criticised them for this and said they should've effectively lowered their bar to 1x cash in order to use the funds as soon as possible; they thought GiveWell's decision would be indefensible to the world's poorest people.)

A bit of feedback, since this is a sales piece and I do actually like Giving What We Can:

Saying that there's no good reason not to pledge if you're already donating 10% sits really poorly with me. It feels insulting that you've decided that my reasons aren't good enough and must be only based misunderstandings.

Even if my only reason not to pledge is that I've thought about it carefully and decided I don't want to, shouldn't that be enough?

I also really disliked this section. "Let’s say only one other person in your network hears that you took the pledge and is inspired to do the same."

I don't care if other people take the pledge! I only care if other people give, and give effectively.

If they'd be influenced to "take the pledge" because me taking the pledge, why wouldn't they be influenced donate a proportion of their income effectively by seeing me donate?

You can make the argument for why the pledge is more effective than just donating, but you haven't done it here.

That would make sense! I think the civil servant in charge might also have a certain level of discretion with regards to how they represent the results - I did in my case.

I'm sorry, I didn't mean to imply that more responses mean nothing, just that bringing up a sensible consideration is more likely to affect outcomes than copying and pasting a response (which may have between no weight and a little weight with the policymakers)

There weren't many, so I don't know unfortunately. In this consultation you'd have a better chance because it's about a public-facing issue

Yes that's true, if they use statistics like this, similar or duplocated responses might count

I can confirm that copying and pasting doesn't move the needle, at least in consultations I've been involved with - they will put weight on people actually engaging with the ideas (Similarly feel free to skip or provide very short answers to questions you don't care much about and focus on the ones who care most about)

I can imagine a first step would be it being offered as an option to mothers. Many late term abortions happen with wanted babies after a serious diagnosis.

However this post doesn't seem to talk about the main drug used for late abortions in the UK? So I'm sceptical. https://www.nice.org.uk/guidance/ng140/chapter/Recommendations#medical-abortion-after-236-weeks

This is entirely consistent with two other applications I know of from 2023, both of which were funded but experienced severe delays and poor/absent/straightforwardly unprofessional communication

"When life gives you Lemiens"?

Okay, sorry for misreading, the poll makes much more sense now! I've edited the first part of my comment at it doesn't make much sense

Sorry, did this always say externally? Maybe I just need better reading comprehension!

As a government employee, I have a duty to speak candidly internally and not to share restricted information externally. I suspect most organisations have weaker but similar norms about the difference between how you speak to colleagues and externals.

What’s more, in areas that use primarily observational data there’s a really big gap between fields in how often papers even try to use causal inference methods and how hard they work to show that their identifying assumptions hold.

Just highlighting this paragraph because I think it's extremely important. As a policymaker, the vast majority of research I see from think tanks etc include poorly justified assumptions. It's become one of the first things I look for now, in part because it's an easy prompt for me to spot a wide range of issues.

Thanks for sharing your story, and for your family's sacrifice for the sake of those who need it most

I disliked the opening parable too

-13 karma from 5 votes for a comment that doesn't seem to break any Forum norms? Odd

You're right about the effort involved, but when these are real people who you are discussing deanonymizing in order to try to stop them from getting jobs, you should make the effort.

I raised some awkward questions, without offering any answers, conclusions, or recommendations.

I don't feel like you raised discussion with no preference for what the community decided. When I gave my answer, which many people seem to agree with, your response was to question whether that's REALLY what the EA community wants. I think it's a bit disingenuous to suggest that you're just asking a question when you clearly have a preference for how people answer!

Whistleblower anonymity should remain protected in the vast majority of situations, including this one, imo

Yes, I've been wondering who's on Nonlinear's board for the better part of a year!

Before Ben's post, I had heard some good things and many bad things about Nonlinear, to the point that I was trying to figure out who their board members were in case I needed to raise concerns about one or both of the co-founders (I failed to figure it out because they weren't a registered charity and didn't have their board members listed on their website either).

Can I suggest you make this a new top-level post and link to it here? It sounds like you've been thinking about it a lot, and I think continued discussion would probably be better in its own post rather than here (although your original comment makes sense here for sure!)

Yes, I meant some combination of this + this was not a good place to publish that allegation, which again imo harms the accuser if it's true. No worries at all Joel!

Yes, that's what I mean. If a friend of mine confided in me about something really bad that had happened to her, I wouldn't want to publish it 2/3 of the way down a post about my own drama, even if she said it was okay - and especially wouldn't then tell people not to believe her. But obviously I wasn't sitting in on the conversation and there might be important context I'm missing. It just seems really wrong to me.

Sorry that was an error! I didn't know how else to see who had found it helpful on mobile, but I meant to untap it after I had checked

"she said it was finally time to be strong and speak up now, as long as she was fully anonymized ... She’s still lying awake each night, replaying, over and over, the nightmare of what Ben did to her."

And then you publish it for the first time telling everyone not to believe her???

If what you describe is actually what she told you, how dare you use it for your own gain here? What a cruel and bizarre thing to do

Voted because of this, thanks for the nudge!

In Canada my final exams finished in April

I'm excited!

If we're thinking of it as "ideally I'd like 75% of the money to go here, 20% here, etc" we could just give people 100 votes each and give money to the top 3?

Are you continuing your focus on the UK for the time being? I was surprised by the US picture

Number 3 for me, although I didn't vote