Not an error, but a few clarifying questions:

1. "For how many hours have you roughly been productive during the past 7 days?" <<this is in total over the last 7 days? 
2. Does "productive" mean.. doing productive work for my job?  

Yea, good question. It's basically because I started with NHS psychiatrists (who strongly prefer to prescribe SSRIs), and only later moved to a private psychiatrist (who recommended I start first with agomelatine because of the excellent side effect profile, given that side effects were my main complaint).

I tracked my mood and thought patterns in a few different ways:

• I use Daylio to track my overall mood once a day and I have 2 years worth of data there.
• I use the GAD9 and PHQ-7 to track my depression and anxiety scores once every week. I have 3 years worth of data from that.
• I use perfectionism and low self esteem questionnaires to track those things once a month. Data for those for about 2 years

Perhaps you approached these tests as mostly about finding one that didn't have acute side-effects, and also wasn't obviously not working?

Yea, I basically did this ^^ 


It was just extremely obvious to me when something was working/wasn't, and the fact that many antidepressants I was super optimistic about didn't work makes me think I wasn't getting huge placebo issues. 

While self-reported data is obviously a bit tricky, my sense of whether something was/wasn't working was backed up by the data I collected.
 

• I use Daylio to track my overall mood once a day and I have 2 years worth of data there.
• I use the GAD9 and PHQ-7 to track my depression and anxiety scores once every week. I have 3 years worth of data from that.
• I use perfectionism and low self esteem questionnaires to track those things once a month. Data for those for about 2 years

Hi Dan, I’m Luisa — I’ve been helping EA-aligned organizations find candidates for their open roles as part of my work at 80,000 Hours. I think there’s a good chance one of the direct outreach emails you’ve seen at IDinsight came from me, so I thought it’d be good to share a bit more about what kinds of headhunting we’re doing, and how we’re thinking about it. 

Briefly, 80,000 Hours is sometimes asked by hiring managers at EA-aligned orgs to recommend potential candidates for specific roles. Given we get to know lots of EA-aligned people through our programs, we think we’re pretty well-placed to help talented people find out about impactful roles they might be a good fit for (that they might not have been aware of otherwise).

This does sometimes include reaching out to people who already have jobs — sometimes at EA-aligned (and adjacent) organizations — to find out if they’re open to other roles, and if so, put some roles we think are especially impactful on their radar. 

We hope that the fact that we don’t have the same financial incentives as normal headhunters (who are paid when they get placements) means we’re able to act as a neutral-ish third party trying to think about which roles are extra-worth putting on more people’s radars. 

We recognize that there are potential downsides, like increasing costs to organizations that spend a year training a new hire, only to have that person leave for another org soon once they’ve skilled up. And we absolutely don’t endorse pushing people harder on switching jobs than they would endorse, or in any way misleading people. 

We hope this means we’re able to help create a better-working talent pipeline for orgs doing high-impact work, while minimizing the costs to orgs doing great work (like IDinsight!)

Thanks so much for sharing this publicly — I just shared with 8 people :)

 

I really loved this post! Thanks for writing it, Julia!

This meant so much <3

I love the idea of adding a section on good things that imposter syndrome’s trying to protect :) I’d love your help writing it if you’re up for it! I’ll DM you :) 

Do you have a citation for the 100-1000 figure?

Comes from here https://mason.gmu.edu/~rhanson/collapse.pdf and the papers it cites:

It seems that groups of about seventy people colonized both Polynesia and the New World (Murray-McIntosh, Scrimshaw, Hatfield, & Penny, 1998; Hey, 2005). So let us assume, as a reference point for analysis, that the survival of humanity requires that one hundred humans remain, relatively close to one another, after a disruption and its resulting social collapse. With a healthy enough environment, one hundred connected humans might successfully adopt a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. If they were in close enough contact, and had enough resources to help them through a transition period, they might maintain a sufficiently diverse gene pool, and slowly increase their capabilities until they could support farming. Once they could communicate to share innovations and grow at the rate that our farming ancestors grew, humanity should return to our population and productivity level within twenty thousand years. (Murray-McIntosh, Scrimshaw, Hatfield, & Penny, 1998; Hey, 2005)

Oh dear — yes it should! Edited, thanks for flagging!