All of Marisa's Comments + Replies

Update: We've extended the deadline to apply for LPSI to June 24. If you think you might be a good fit, we'd love to see your application!

Very valid! I guess I'm thinking of this as "approaches EA values" [verb] rather than "values" [noun]. I think most if not all of the most abstract values EA holds are still in place, but the distinction between core and secondary values is important.

9
Vaidehi Agarwalla
2y
This was mainly a linguistic comment because I find that sometimes people disagree with a post if the terminology used is wrong, so I wanted to get ahead of that. I think I probably could have been more clear that I think you've identified something important and true here, and I am somewhat concerned about how memes spread and wouldn't want people who haven't updated along those lines to feel less like they are part of the EA community.  

I made this so I could easily link all the posts on this but then I realized they're almost all here: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/4mWxEixs5RZ8DfCKe/annotated-list-of-project-ideas-and-volunteering-resources Feel free to delete!

99% Invisible had a podcast on this that I found really interesting. The scale of the problem must have gone completely over my head. Great write-up!

That makes sense though I feel like this still applies. It's still not great optics to pay lots of money to people working on global poverty, but it's far from unheard of and, if there's concrete evidence that those people are having an impact then I think a lot of people would consider it justified.

I think the reason it's acceptable for AI researchers to bring in large sums of money is more because of the market rate for their skillset and less because of the cause directly. I think if someone were paid a high salary to build complex software that solved ... (read more)

3
Gordon Seidoh Worley
2y
Maybe I can help Chris explain his point here, because I came to the comments to say something similar. The way I see it, neartermists and longtermists are doing different calculations and so value money and optics differently. Neartermists are right to be worried about spending money on things that aren't clearly impacting measures of global health, animal welfare, etc. because they could in theory take that money and funnel it directly into work on that stuff, even if it had low marginal returns. They should probably feel bad if they wasted money on a big party because that big party could have saved some kids from dying. Longtermists are right to not be too worried about spending money. There's astronomical amounts of value at stake, so even millions or billions of dollars wasted doesn't matter if it ended up saving humanity from extinction. There might be nearterm reasons related to the funding pipeline they should care (so optics), but long term it doesn't matter. Thus, longtermists will want to be more free with money in the hopes of, for example, hitting on something that solves AI alignment. That both these things try to exist under EA causes tension, since the different ways of valuing outcomes result in different recommended behaviors. This is probably the best case for splitting EA in two: PR problems for one half stop the other half from executing.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding this but I disagree. I think the average person thinks spending tons of money on global health poverty is good, particularly because it has concrete, visible outcomes that show whether or not the work is worthwhile (and these quick feedback loops mean the money can usually be spent on projects we have stronger confidence in).

But I think that spending lots of money on people who might have a .000001% chance of saving the world (in ways that are often seen as absurd to the average person) is pretty bad optics. A lot non-EAs don't t... (read more)

4
Chris Leong
2y
Sorry, I think you might have actually misunderstood my point. I was talking about spending money on people working on global poverty vs. people working on longtermism, rather than spending money on global poverty vs longtermism. My point is that if you invest a lot of money in people working on global poverty, the question that arises is why aren’t you spending it on global poverty, while it’s hard to spend money on longtermism without spending it on people. In any case, people are more accepting of ai researchers bring paid large sums.

Is the source of this graphic public? This affected my perspective a lot and it'd be great to have a clean copy. :) 

This is fantastic, thanks for writing this up! I've been hearing a lot about federal consulting (it seems to be one of the most common careers people pursue after an MPP) so it's helpful to see an analysis from an EA perspective. :) 

1
Wesley Garner
2y
Happy to help! I have not earned an MPP [yet], so I cannot speak from first hand experience, but I have worked with, under, and over people with them. The frameworks you learn in graduate school will definitely make you more analytical and let you earn a higher salary. I am somewhat skeptical of whether MPP courses themselves teach you to be a "better" federal contractor. I suspect it would be helpful in the way that I found undergrad helpful: My coursework on international relations theory doesn't have offer me any helpful topic knowledge at all, but learning to think broadly and conceptually about different points of view is immensely valuable.    Maybe MPP coursework's do shine in harder technical skills, like financial modeling, which might help on some niche federal contracts. The federal reserve and DFC love CFAs, for example. I can't say for sure.

Just found this now, thank you for putting it together! I'd never thought about this before.

In case anyone else is curious I dug into Polish citizenship by descent. It looks like the main requirements are (a) someone in your family had citizenship after 1920,  (b) the chain of citizenship isn't broken, i.e. you can't become a citizen if neither of your parents are, and they can't become a citizen if neither of their parents are, etc. and (c) no one in that chain was adopted, involved in the military (including signing up for the draft), in a publicly funded job (including teaching), plus maybe a few more exceptions.

This is great! I'll add a personal endorsement for GregMat. I actually found it quite enjoyable and it bumped my verbal score up 8 points.

I totally understand your concerns. FWIW as a former group organizer, as the Torres pieces were coming out, I had a lot of members express serious concerns about longtermism as a result of the articles and ask for my thoughts about them, so I appreciate having something to point them to that (in my opinion) summarizes the counterpoints well.

There is! Linked it in the last point now too, thanks!

Actually in the very early days of EA Anywhere, I toyed with the idea of having a separate student sub-group in part for this purpose (and for university students without EA groups). I dropped it partially for capacity reasons and partially because there didn't seem like much demand for it, but I'd be excited about this being part of our expansion with our new organizer. 

I see EA Anywhere as a good supplement to small groups. While we advertise as "a local group for people without local groups", I think it makes a lot of sense to also work with group ... (read more)

Agree with Sami's comment below. Virtual events are certainly a good way to get people from more isolated parts of the region engaged, but if 90% of the attendees already know each other from in-person events, that may be even more isolating. I suspect this is fairly easy to mitigate though if the organiser is conscientious about it.

It might be worth connecting them with other virtual communities too. Besides us, there are lots of virtual groups popping up (Giving What  We Can, EA for Christians, EA for Jews, the EA Hispanic group, EA Consulting, Effe... (read more)

I started to write a more thorough response to this but realized I was essentially copying Rethink Priorities' post on Ballot Initiatives, which covers a lot of EA causes with high leverage at the local/state level.

Two popular EA causes that I think are missing:

  • Climate change interventions
  • UBI (difficult, but not impossible to enact at the state level in the US because states can't deficit spend. See Alaska as an example)

I had similar concerns about our Operations AMA recently. It wasn't wildly popular, but we got 7 questions and I still felt like it was a good use of my time. Several people in the group said they really enjoyed it and would be interested in doing another one, and I liked it enough that I'm planning to do another AMA for one of my other projects as well. 

I'll also mention that it's a (relatively) low-effort way to create content (and get karma, if you care). I often feel like I should post to the Forum more but either don't feel like I have anything w... (read more)

4
MichaelA
3y
Yeah, my view is that it takes little time to set up an AMA, and can take very little time if you go for a barebones approach, such that the "may as well just run an AMA and see" bar is fairly low. Personally, I had relatively little engagement with my AMA, which was basically what I expected (as I was focusing on a somewhat niche topic that I'm not a proper expert on). But I still think setting it up made sense ex ante, since it took me little time and there was some chance it wouldn't been more useful.  (Also, focusing on Jamie Harris's case specifically, I share Marisa's view that an AMA by Jamie would get a decent amount of engagement.)
2
Alex HT
3y
Agree with Marisa that you'd be well suited to do an AMA

How can experienced EA groups best provide organizational support for new/small ones?


I consider myself a new organizer so I don’t have much to add here other than a) one-on-ones, and b) sharing systems etc. that work for you (e.g. for tracking attendance, advertising, workshops). I think every new group is going to have different questions and different needs so I suspect there’s not a one-size-fits-all formula, which is why I think one-on-ones with organizers can be especially helpful, since you can gauge their bottlenecks and help brainstorm solutions.

What relatively low-cost things can leadership do, if any, that go far in improving new team members’ (especially volunteers’) morale/engagement/commitment/initiative?


A few things come to mind: 


1) Be an understanding, compassionate human. It sounds easy but I (and I think many others) actually suck at this once you bring important projects with deadlines into the mix. If someone doesn’t do things on time, it’s easy for me to get frustrated with them, but as a student leader I wish I would have reached out to people who were dropping balls and act... (read more)

4
Gina_Stuessy
3y
I recall hearing from Alex Barry at the EA Summit a couple years ago who, at the time, was leading Cambridge EA (iirc) and they had an absolutely incredible rate of engagement from volunteer organizers/members contributing time to the EA group's events and activities. And huge numbers of them. IIRC, he said the key for them was to have one basic requirement: the organizers had to commit to checking and responding to Slack daily. That way, they'd know write away if someone didn't have time to keep working on something, and they'd quickly find someone else to do it.

How can EA groups grow their teams and activities while maintaining good team coordination and management?


Short answer: Asana. Long answer: Clearly define everyone’s roles and responsibilities and delegate wherever you can. As you get bigger you’ll probably want to have something like a traditional management structure, where e.g. the President oversees four committees, and each committee is run by one person, rather than one giant executive board. That way the President doesn’t have to keep track of every little thing that’s happening. This works bes... (read more)

Fellow group organizer here! (and former uni club leader, though not for an EA group) Honestly I don't think there were that many specific skills I learned from operations that helped me in group organizing, but rather it was the general operations mindset, which to me involves: a) noticing when things aren't running smoothly as they can be (for me this is feels like a special kind of stress, and if I'm not careful, my brain directs the blame towards other people involved in the system rather than the system itself), and b) trying things, whether that be n... (read more)

how difficult is it to get a position doing operations work for an EA org, especially if you have some but not tonnes of operations experience? 

For a long time I would discourage people from going into operations unless I (or they) had reason to think they're an especially good fit because I thought it was difficult to get in (mostly based on reading this post, and my assumption that operations roles have looser requirements than other roles, so more people tend to apply).

However, at recent EA conferences I've talked to a lot of people interested in o... (read more)

1
Martin Fukui
3y
+1. Like Marisa mentioned, some operations individuals get jobs without applying to jobs via the "traditional" route. I started off as a contractor and was promoted to a full-time employee. 

is there currently a need for more operations people in EA orgs?

I've heard differing opinions on this from different organizations, and I think this is in large part because different organizations have different standards for operations hires. 

For example, an organization that thinks that having an EA-aligned hire is important and is looking for someone with significant nonprofit/operations experience will have a more difficult time filling a role than an organization that's just looking for someone with certain soft skills (e.g. problem solving, lea... (read more)

Thanks! I absolutely agree. I don't think that EAs should surround themselves with only EAs in the name of preventing value drift (this seems borderline cult-like to me), but I think having people in one's social circle who care about doing good, regardless of whether in the EA sense or not, seems like a good idea, for the reason you mentioned, and because I think there are things EAs can learn from non-EAs about doing good in the world. 

(Also, non-EAs can make good friends regardless of their ability to contribute to your impact or not. :) )

Agree with these. I'll also throw in Carnegie Mellon's Public Policy and Data Analytics program.

McCourt, Harris, and Heinz (at CMU) are essentially the top three schools offering this track from what I can tell. 

1
mrp2
3y
Thanks as well. These programs were not on my radar at all, and I appreciate you and HStencil flagging the most prominent ones.

I would definitely look into lobbying as a career route! That seems like a high-impact use of sales skills

Also, if you want to get involved in policy directly (rather than via research), an MPP or MPA might be a better fit for you rather than an MA/PhD. 

(Context: I work in operations at an EA org.)

I think #1 sounds like a good bet. At this point, I get the sense that EA has more aspiring operations and management people than it can handle, so funding organizations so that more qualified people can be employed and make an impact sounds high-impact. Of course that could change in 5+ years, but I wouldn't count on it, and your current role seems like it might lend itself to gaining useful skills for ops anyway. 

#2 isn't bad either if the opportunity comes up, but if you enjoy your work and don't mind earning to give, I think you have a really big opportunity for counterfactual impact in option #1.

For what it’s worth, in my experience at TLYCS it takes a lot more than just a website to move money.

+1 to this. RC Forward wrote a bit about this in our year-in-review in 2019. 

Thanks for the thorough post! I appreciate the transparency CEA has been keeping in its strategy and plans. 

Small question: does EEAs = engaged EAs? Is that defined by a specific metric?

2
MaxDalton
3y
Hey Marisa, thanks, I'm glad you appreciated this!  Yes, EEAs=highly-engaged EAs (I've now edited this throughout, so that it's a bit less jargon-y). This is a term that we're using internally to refer to people who are taking significant action (e.g. a career plan or a significant giving pledge or similar) based on a detailed understanding of EA ideas.  

Good question! Relatedly, are there common characteristics among people/organizations who you think would make promising applicants but often don't apply? Put another way, who would you encourage to apply who likely hasn't considered applying?

6
Jonas V
3y
Another one is that people assume we are inflexible in some way (e.g., constrained by maximum grant sizes or fixed application deadlines), but we can often be very flexible in working around those constraints, and have done that in the past.

A common case is people who are just shy to apply for funding. I think a lot of people feel awkward about asking for money. This makes sense in some contexts - asking your friends for cash could have negative consequences! And I think EAs often put additional pressure on themselves: "Am I really the best use of this $X?" But of course as a funder we love to see more applications: it's our job to give out money, and the more applications we have, the better grants we can make.

Another case is people (wrongly) assuming they're not good enough. I think a lot of people underestimate their abilities, especially in this community. So I'd encourage people to just apply, even if you don't think you'll get it.

This is a really helpful list! I noticed a couple of organizations that I consider EA aligned that should perhaps be on the list:

2
JamieGittins
3y
Thank you for this! I won't add DMI, since it is currently a GiveWell standout charity  rather than a 'top charity' (and my criteria is just to list their top charities, in order to keep this list easier to manage!).  I'll add OPIS - that's a great addition!

Love this post and would love to see more like it on the forum! Congrats on a successful EA Student Summit.

I especially want to emphasize this:

there are so many EAs who would genuinely like to talk to you.

In my experience, EAs are almost always super willing to provide advice to others within the EA movement, often because they're nice people, but also because they get to help you have an impact, which helps them have an impact, so everybody wins!

As a single data point, nothing makes my day more than getting emails from random EAs. :)

Answer by MarisaOct 30, 20207
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I think I've mentioned a few times on the Forum that Strangers Drowning and Doing Good Better have probably been the most influential parts of my EA journey, and I probably wouldn't have been involved in EA without them. Strangers Drowning seemed like a good priming for EA, while Doing Good Better was a pretty compelling intro.

Others, in no particular order:

... (read more)

Congrats! Sounds like a great fit for you. :) 

Not an existing nonprofit, but you might also be interested in creating one of the Software Platforms in this post

Great post! I know a little bit about the US side of things from both watching orgs I've worked with go through the process, and working at a start-up that helped charities get 501(c)(3) status, so I can offer some data points from that perspective.

  • The IRS estimates that the DIY method would take 100+ hours. It's also worth considering that this method is most likely to lead to mistakes, which can lead to having to re-submit the application and delays in processing time.
  • US charity lawyers cost around the same, although there are companies that'll do this f
... (read more)

Great post! I think you're one of the first uni groups I've seen who's particularly selective with their fellowship - I wouldn't have initially agreed with that strategy, but you give convincing reasons for doing so and it sounds like it paid off. :) Congrats on a successful fellowship round!

I think one of the best things about hearing about EA pre-college is it would let you set up your college plan (e.g., major, internships) in an EA-directed way

To me, this seems like the best case for engaging with high schoolers over college students. I seem to meet a lot of EAs who study something that doesn't correlate well with most high-impact careers and find themselves wishing they'd heard about EA sooner so they could have studied something more practical.

The major questions I have with this are 1) can you actually convince high schoolers ... (read more)

Answer by MarisaSep 13, 20203
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Matthew Dellavedova is on Momentum's board, and they're an EA-aligned org, so I suspect he might be EA-sympathetic (or at the very least familiar with it).

I've spent a lot of time thinking about this, and I largely agree with you. I also think studying "pure" value drift (as opposed to "symptoms" of value drift, which is what a lot of the research in this area focuses on, including, to some extent, my own) comes with a few challenges. (Epistemic status: Pretty uncertain and writing this in haste. Feel free to tell me why I'm wrong.)

  • EA isn't (supposed to be) dogmatic, and hence doesn't have clearly defined values. We're "effective" and we're "al
... (read more)
1
Mati_Roy
4y
I agree. Community involvement is just instrumental to the goals of EA movement building. I think the outcomes we want to measure are things like career and donations. We also want to measure things that are instrumental to this, but I think we should keep those separated. Related: my comment on "How have you become more (or less) engaged with EA in the last year?"

Hmm. On the one hand I think these are all useful topics for an EA to know. But I don't think it's necessary for all EAs to know these things. I think there's a lot of EAs who don't have this technical knowledge, but are happy to outsource decisions relying on this knowledge (such as where to donate) to people who do. That said, I think that often leads to donating less-than-effectively (e.g. giving to whatever EA Fund appeals to you personally, rather than rationally thinking about trade-offs/probabilistic outcomes).

I guess this is, i... (read more)

5
Emma Abele
4y
I agree with Marisa Rather than a single body of knowledge being a standard education for EAs, I like the fellowship structure that many EA Uni groups use. For me, one of the main goals in running these fellowship to expose students to enough EA ideas and discussions to decide for themselves what knowledge and skills they want to build up in order to do good better. For some people, this will involve economics, statistics, and decision analysis knowledge, but for others, it will look totally different. (For fellowship syllabus examples you can check out this Intro Fellowship I'm running at Brown EA, and this In-Depth Fellowship run by EA Oxford).
Answer by MarisaAug 30, 202011
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I haven't actually heard of any EA organizations laying off staff due to COVID-19. I wouldn't be surprised if you see very little loss of jobs at EA orgs specifically, or even none at all, over the last couple of months. Most EA organizations seem to have a decent amount of runway, and with a lot of EA donors employed in big tech, which seems to have been relatively stable throughout COVID, there is fortunately still a decent amount of income coming through.

That said, I suspect most of the financial and hence employment impacts of COVID on EA or... (read more)

1
agent18
4y
How long can RC survive without additional funds? What is your typical runway (in months)? Yes, seems highly likely. I will check back around that time. Thank You very very much.

If you haven't already, I'd reach out directly to GPR organizations and mention that you're interested in applying your skillset to their work. They might be able to provide you with some concrete examples and a better idea of what's available in the field.

I heard in mid-2019 that Open Phil was interviewing EAs to identify common characteristics / background among people are most receptive to EA. I don't think it was published though.

Strongly agree with your points, although I also don't think they're mutually exclusive to the content of this post.

I think some of the most value I got out of university (and high school, to be honest) was the ability to try out a bunch of things at once with relative ease. I have a lot of interests that change and come and go rather quickly, and in the university setting, it was strangely easy to get involved in whatever new thing that caught my attention, whether via a course, a club, meetings with a professor, an internship, a volunteer oppor... (read more)

Answer by MarisaAug 14, 20203
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I'm afraid I don't have any original recommendations, but have you read the EA Handbook Motivation Series? Nate Soares' 'On Caring' might be particularly relevant.

I was also talking with some other EAs about this recently and one of them mentioned Metta meditation, which is essentially a meditation that focuses on creating an expanding circle of goodwill, which could hypothetically include the long-term future. If meditation is your thing, it might be worth a shot.

Great post! Been meaning to comment for a while - better late than never than suppose.

One thing I wanted to add - I've talked with ~50 people who are interested in working at EA orgs over the last six months or so, and it seems like a lot of them come to the decision through process of elimination. Common trends I see:

  • They don't feel well-suited for policy, often because it's too bureaucratic or requires a high level of social skills.
  • They don't feel well-suited for academia, usually because they have less-than-stellar marks or dislike t
... (read more)

Came here to recommend Replacing Guilt as well! Was very impactful for me :)

And we'd love to have you at one of our EA Virtual Group meetups! You can join our new Slack workspace here

Great response - thank you!

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