All of Michelle_Hutchinson's Comments + Replies

Thanks for this! 

We're less focused on uni-students right now, just because there's a longer lead time from them hearing the content and being able to work on the areas we're highlighting. Having said that, there are obviously also significant advantages of targetting the group - they're particularly flexible in what they work on, and are often keen to learn about different world views. 

We do actually do some putting shorts on instagram! We haven't engaged as much with Tiktok yet, in large part because our team isn't that familiar with the platform. We're interested in experimenting with it in future though! 

Thanks for letting me know your experience with the podcast. I'm sorry you're finding it less valuable right now. To be clear, things like the Ajeya and Hugh White episodes are centrally the kinds of episodes we'll still be putting out a lot of (in fact, we've recorded another episode with Ajeya which we're currently getting towards releasing). We'll likely still do occasional episodes like the Levy and Glennerster ones, but fewer. 

I agree that AI risk is an incredibly large, complex area and that it's going to take a lot more work for us to build out a full understanding of it! 

Thanks for letting us know about your experience with it! 

Yes, length is one of the things we're interested in experimenting with. We've also started putting a bit more work into producing written 'interview in a nutshell' sections on the transcripts, so that people can get the key insights swiftly (or use it to decide whether to listen to the full episode).

Are there particular formats you have in mind? 

If you haven't come across it yet, you might be interested in the work 80k's video team does.

Thanks for all the suggestions!

Thanks for the nudge. I agree it seems crucial to try to find things that are actually different to cover - both for the sake of being interesting and more importantly to actually have an impact. I'd love to hear any particular suggestions you have about things that seem underexplored and important to you! 

With respect to numbers of episodes: 
- We're considering potential new hosts publishing on new feeds. They might try a different format, or they might try the same format but a different target audience 
- Over the last ~year, most of our growth has been on youtube, rather than audio feeds. As far as we can tell, on youtube it's very uncommon to find new episodes directly via a subscription, and relatedly there seems to much less of an effect of reduction in engagement if you have episodes more than once per week. 

This is all pretty tentative... (read more)

Useful to know, thanks

Thanks for the feedback!

Thanks for letting us know! That's useful data.

I don't ever learn how good the people I rejected were!

Definitely agree this is a challenge and limits learning from hiring rounds. I don't quite agree with the strength of this statement though. A great thing about the agency and tenacity of people in our community is that people often apply to a bunch of roles at similar organisations, and so you end up seeing what people you turned down work on from afar, and how well that goes. It seems reasonably informative to me to track which people end up doing great work at other orgs, and thinking through how mu... (read more)

This post really resonates with me, and its vision for a flourishing future for EA feels very compelling. I'm excited that you're thinking and writing about it!

Having said that, I don't know how to square that with the increased specialisation which seems like a sensible outcome of doing things at greater scale. Personally, I find engaging on the forum / going to EAGs etc pretty time/energy-intensive (though I think a large part of that is because I'm fairly introverted, and others will likely feel differently). I also think there's a lot of value in picki... (read more)

I do not have the spirit to throw myself into a direct work project^[3]

Fwiw, GTP seems like reasonably little evidence about whether you could find a role you enjoyed that you also thought had substantial direct impact. There are so many different roles with direct impact, and setting up your own charity start up is very different from working at existing charity in a more defined role, or working in government, or for a large tech company. 

Obviously, changing direction in your career is a substantial undertaking, and it's reasonable to not want ... (read more)

Yes, connecting with other parents is really useful! My go to place for this right now is the Parents in EA facebook group (https://www.facebook.com/groups/1669940986561413). What people do around EA Global is one of the things that gets discussed in there.

Really glad to hear this resonated with you. Good luck figuring out how and when to go home x

Thanks for such a thorough update!

One type of specialist we're pretty bottlenecked on is people who work in cybersecurity, and have a good sense of how to succed in that industry. 

On advisees, we're particularly keen to speak to people later on in their careers, who can credibly join government agencies who care a lot about years of experience. 

I would say that it's reasonably even on these right now, and actually what we're most bottlenecked on is hiring to our team. If you know someone who you'd appreciate getting career advice from, please encourage them to apply!

Thanks for the question! We find specialists in lots of different ways, including: 
- People working at high impact orgs who we actively reach out to because we are fans of their work. 
- People who applied for coaching themselves in the past 
- Meeting them at conferences (we try to attend both generalist conferences like EA Global and more specialist ones like the AI Security Forum). 
- People referred to us by others already in our network.

Good to know, thank you!

Thanks for writing this! It seems really useful for people getting started on their career to hear concrete experiences others have had. 

I'm so impressed with your persistence in finding roles that help others as much as possible. In your place finding it difficult to get the roles I wanted, I can imagine selecting for roles I'd enjoy and would pay well, rather than continuing to look for roles that helped others like in animal advocacy. I also imagine feeling kind of bitter about my bad luck. I'm so grateful for how resiliently you've stuck with the ... (read more)

Wow, what an achievement! Amazing work. Enjoyed your write up of it

That's great news! Thanks for all the work going through the investigation, and strengthening the teams has likely been. 

I'm really sad to hear you feel that 80k isn't talking to you. Fwiw, I work at 80k now and think of myself as talking to you. 

It seems like an understatement to say 'I call it earning to give'. What you've done over the last decade seems like solidly, clearly earning to give to me.  

I wish it were easier to get away from comparative style labels, and what can feel like an incessant pressure to always be doing more for the world. To me, the ways I'm falling short compared to others are particularly salient, compared to things I'm doing that are he... (read more)

Good point, I hadn't appreciated that. Thanks! 

Those do seem like good compromises.

I think in general people find it easier to notice criticisms of things than appreciate positives. But I think having more 'picking out surprising positives' is a useful way of learning, and in addition leads to a much more appreciative environment than picking out negatives. 

I worry that we currently have overly high standards for writing about positives because in addition to it being kind of tricky to notice them, there are other difficulties around things like dislike of glorifying people. My guess is that we could create a happier, more collaborative community if we had slightly lower standards for appreciation / noticing the positives type discussions.

I'm really glad you found it helpful!

<3

I’m really excited that Zach will be coming on as CEO of CEA. After so many nominations and evaluations, it’s extremely gratifying to have found someone so qualified for the role. I’m grateful to the hard work everyone put into this, particularly to Max for coordinating and project managing incredibly smoothly, and for Oscar and Caitlin helping a tonne behind the scenes. 

Running CEA is an enormous responsibility, and one I’m glad to be able to trust Zach with. I very much look forward to watching him take CEA into the future.

Sorry to hear you didn't find what you were looking for in the 80,000 Hours career guide. You could consider checking out this website that maintains a list of social purpose job boards. I'd guess that going through some of those would yield some good options for full stack web-dev roles at organisations with a broad range of missions, hopefully including some inspiring ones!

Thanks for the announcement. I’m really glad to feel that EV is going to continue being in safe hands going forward (both given Rob’s extensive experience and knowing from personal experience how responsible he is). 

Thank you so much for your work on EV. Taking on a hugely complex organisation at a time of such turmoil was always going to be extremely challenging. You really stepped up at a time when many of us were struggling just to continue our usual jobs. And then over the start of 2023 instead of getting a break it felt as if a series of separate... (read more)

(I work at 80,000 Hours but on the 1on1 side rather than website.) Thanks for writing out your thoughts so clearly and thoroughly Nick. Thanks also for thinking about the issue from both sides - I think you’ve done a job job of capturing reasons against the changes you suggest. The main one I’d add is that having a lot more research and conversations about lots of different areas would need a very substantial increase in capacity.

I’m always sad to hear about taking away the impression that 80,000 Hours doesn’t care about helping present sentient creatures.... (read more)

:-p

Thank you for the prompt.

Thanks very much for all your work on EV over the years. Your contribution to my work and to me personally have been significant enough that anything in the way of ‘thanks’ feels kind of trite and inadequate, and hopefully obvious to you. But I still want to mark the change by expressing some of the gratitude I feel for the work you’ve done at EV over the years. 

Amongst other things, in your role stewarding EV you co-founded all three of the orgs I’ve spent my working life at (GWWC, 80k, GPI). In my (wholly unbiased! :-p) opinion, setting those up has... (read more)

Mine would too. Thank you for writing this!

Thank you for all your hard work as a trustee. I’m personally sad to know you won’t be on the board of the organisation I work for anymore. But I’m also excited that you get to put your full attention into your next venture. 

Being a trustee seems extremely difficult to do well at the best of times, given the amount of responsibility entailed without day to day involvement. Being a trustee for CEA/EV has seemed particularly unenviable to me, even before this year.

I felt kind of sceptical when we first set up CEA (now EV) about how long we’d manage to m... (read more)

Speaking for myself, my org would definitely be happy to reimburse travel. But I very much dislike travelling for a number of reasons including travel time and jet lag increasing the cost significantly. I don't want to be away from my family longer than necessary, in part because I already optimise fairly strongly for working long hours. So I'm most likely to go to EAGs nearby. Like Greg, going to another EA hub has advantages that sometimes offset the cost of needing to travel for me.

Nice! You might also be interested in this effective giving platform based in Denmark. I wonder if, until you get charitable status, it's possible you could partner with them to make donations tax deductible?

I'm sorry you've had such a tough experience. Thanks for turning it into something that can help others. 

Looks like a great program. Thanks for posting! 

Thanks, I really relate to this. It's helpful to hear about other people feeling similarly as I try to do a retrospective on the weekend and how to make things go better next time. 

I think another thing that can make it hard is guilt about the very fact that it feels hard. 'Surely this should be a good experience? Why can't I make it an unequivocally good experience?' is helpful for motivating me to be proactive about how to spend the weekend well. But they also bring guilt, and a feeling of being somehow broken. 

The search committee is Claire Zabel, Max Dalton and me. We've recently been appointed, so we're still figuring out our plans and how to communicate about them.

This is the kind of comment strong upvotes are for.

+1 

It seems pretty wrong to me that the thing causing SBF's bad behaviour was thinking what matters in the world is the longrun wellbeing of sentient beings. My guess is that we should be focusing more on his traits like ambition and callousness towards those around him. 

But it seems plausible I'm just being defensive, as a proudly self-identified utilitarian who would like to be welcome in the community.   

😹

For people interested in how to be a good board member, I also loved Holden's post on this. Boards seem to have a really strange set up, and I thought this article is the best explanation of that + what to do to deal with the weirdness I've read.

Thanks Niel, jokes are always funnier when thoroughly explained.

<3