MaxDalton
Bio
I am currently an interim advisor at the Centre for Effective Altruism, an organization that is trying to support the EA community in order to create a radically better world. Before that I was Executive Director for 4 years: I set our overall strategy, hired people to further in our work, and managed and empowered the leadership team.
I used to be a moderator here, and helped to launch the new version of the Forum in 2018. Before that I studied economics, did some mediocre global priorities research, and helped to set up an early version of EA Funds.
Feel free to reach out if you think I might be able to help you. Follow the links to give (anonymous) feedback to me or CEA.
How others can help me
- Give me (anonymous) feedback on effective altruism, and CEA's work (groups, Forum, events, etc.)
- Point me towards great group organizers, writers, designers, software engineers, product managers, and junior operations people (and more)!
How I can help others
- I might be able to help you talk through issues you're facing relating to management, and I can point you towards some good resources if you're new to management.
- I might be able to fix issues you see in CEA's work.
Posts 39
Comments248
Topic Contributions10
I'm not sure if this is answering your first question, but they wouldn't just be CEO for two weeks! Instead we'd design particular work trials to test attributes they would need in the role, set up meetings for them to get to know staff and stakeholders, and give them time and information to begin to develop a vision for CEA.
Re your second question: as we say, this is our ideal but we'd shape things around candidates. We know that this might not work for some candidates, but we think that it would work for others. If it did work out for candidates, it would give both us and them a lot more information, and we think that would be worthwhile. If this didn't work out, we'd work with candidates to find other ways of testing fit (shorter trial tasks, references, etc).
If they don't trust GW, why would they trust your calculation, which also rests on GW's analysis? Here's a spreadsheet with GW's analysis: I think that the 159,000 figure is just them doing a pretty similar BOTEC to yours, but across all of their top charities (and they seem to have a higher figure for total donations to AMF, not sure what's driving the difference there).
Moreover, GiveWell estimate that "GiveWell-directed donations to our recommended charities between 2009 and 2021 will avert over 159,000 deaths" (accounting for all top charities, not just AMF).
Here's a post from a few months ago where they announced the event. (Maybe this is what Owen wanted to link to.)
- I'm not sure, but I'll ask someone who knows to respond. (Though looks like you managed to delete a comment below, so maybe you figured it out?)
- I think another thing you could do is message the author (go to their profile page and then click "message"), but I think that commenting is also fine. Pointing out typos is an act of community service, so I think that people will be OK with you leaving the comment up!
You can read a bit more about why we did this here. We handed the funding side off to OP, and we hoped someone else would take on the support side, but no-one did. OP are currently handling funding only, and we would work on support only, which reduces much of the risk of duplication.
I'll ask someone on the groups team to explain more about why we're more optimistic about our approach now.
Thanks for the feedback! We're still discussing how we should get community input on visions later on in the process, so I don't yet have a clear answer, sorry. One thing that we've (briefly) discussed is asking candidates (probably anonymously) to share their visions on the Forum, for people to comment on. But there's some disagreement among committee members about whether that would make sense, and it might depend a bit on the visions/candidates, so we don't have firm plans yet.