All of Richard Möhn's Comments + Replies

I think Yanni isn't writing about personal favourites. Assuming there is such a thing as objective truth, it makes sense to discuss cause prioritization as an objective question.

The outline structure makes this easy to skim. Thank you!

I like this. The actionable points are a bit buried in the prose, but you describe two ways of going astray that I hadn't thought about. Thank you!

One thing I would always mention is that false negatives are less costly in hiring than false positives. But I guess the article is written for an intermediate level of hiring skill, so that point is taken for granted.

It's long, but it looks like Rethink Priorities have put a lot of thought into this job posting: https://careers.rethinkpriorities.org/en/postings/8588ecc5-3e26-4086-bdb2-fe9a2eb43252

Sounds good!

By the way, another thing one might try: Adding salt during the soaking and again during the cooking. Perhaps one teaspoon per kg of beans. In my experience, it also reduces cooking times. I haven't evaluated it rigorously, though.

Perhaps it's because of farts? I hope I don't get downvoted for bringing this up – it's serious and, I suspect, a major inconvenience for people who cook beans from scratch.

It could be that cooking beans for a long time (maybe combined with regular skimming or whatever other techniques we don't know about) makes them cause way less flatulence than soaking them in little water and cooking for a short time. People recommend soaking for reducing beans' gas-generation potential, but in my experience (yes, I've used a tally counter to count my farts under diffe... (read more)

Thanks for writing this analysis! I agree with a most of it. One other argument I've heard for not providing feedback after job applications is that it carries legal risk. What the risk is specifically, I don't know – perhaps a candidate could sue you for discrimination if you inadvertently choose the wrong words? A way to mitigate this risk is the phrase ‘You didn't demonstrate… [mastery of Python, facility in calming down angry customers, whatever]’. It avoids making statements about the candidate in general and instead focuses on their behaviour during ... (read more)

Another important skill for supervising translators:

• Management of production processes. (In contrast to classic project management.)

And if the translators are semi-professionals drawn from the community:

• Leadership/management

I've seen problems from a lack of these in one translation project.

Thanks for taking the initiative on this!

Thanks! I appreciate your comment. (Not so sure about the magnanimity. I spent a lot of time thinking about how to get my revenge.) But Harold Godsoe gave me some good advice.)

It happens often on this forum. 🤷‍♂️ (This is meant seriously, not as a reference to the mass-downvoting my article experienced.)

This whole affair has cost me way more time than anyone else, I suspect. I just wanted to have some closure. And it's not like I ‘pressured’ someone to engage on the front page. (Although for some reason, more people appear to be looking at this than I expected.)

Thanks for not deleting my comment outright, though.

I'm glad it's helping!

Great reminder! This podcast episode has some actionable ideas for how to reach out to people who were laid off: https://www.manager-tools.com/2009/02/bench-development-downturn

I see. Thanks!

Good to know, thanks!

For completeness, my idea of a rejection phone call (derived from https://www.manager-tools.com/2014/11/how-turn-down-job-candidate-part-1) is:

• You call, greet the person, say in the first sentence that you won't be making an offer, say a few more short sentences, react to any responses, then hang up. You don't make it a conversation. The important thing is that they hear your voice.
• It's fine to speak on voicemail and for the other person not to call back. This avoids phone tag.

Note that Manager Tools doesn't always have to most ai... (read more)

What share of people took you up on that?/Did anyone comment on the offer?

Because with email it's easy to read in a tone of ‘you suck, we're sending you boilerplate niceties to get rid of you’, which is not possible with a phone call. (Unless the caller makes it sound like boilerplate niceties. I'm not saying such calls are easy. Email is the easy cop-out.) Something like that. Have you had the experience where you keep communicating with someone by text and get more and more annoyed with them, then you get on a call and all annoyance melts away because hearing a voice reminds you of the other person's humanity? Perhaps it's just me who thinks strange things.

Ultimately it's an empirical question and my prediction is that on balance, a phone call has more value.

I agree that a rejection email isn't evidence that GiveWell is worse than other places. At the same time, even though it's standard practice, an organization can do better. A two-minute phone call to each of the few remaining candidates at later stages isn't that burdensome and has several benefits:

• It makes the organization stand out as one that cares about applicants. Which is good because organizations compete for talent.
• It maintains the relationship with the rejected candidate. Which is good because a candidate who got to the later stages might be fi

What would you find off-putting about it?

Thanks for explaining your vote! I agree, more promptness in the process is a good takeaway. Also, looking into how applications are rejected: At the later stages, a phone call is a much better choice than an email, I would say. (NB again: I didn't write the original post, but I'm interested in hiring processes and in keeping the forum civil.)

Thanks for explaining! (NB. I didn't write the original post, but I'm interested in hiring processes and in keeping the forum civil.)

Meta comment: There are many downvotes, but barely any comments. Feels a little uncivil. Certainly, the post has disagreeable points. But it's useful input, too.

People and organizations figure out things much harder than hiring well. Compare running one of the most used search engines on the planet with laying out a couple of assessments, a couple of people looking at them, a bit of communication by email and phone, and all run with reasonable promptness, much less than what one would expect from everyday postal services.

My experience: I’ve been living in the south of Japan for six years. It’s far from the most effective place to be. I gave up on being an independent researcher. I wanted financial stability and got a permanent work contract. If things go well, I’m going to have children soon. (Will MacAskill encourages people to have children in What We Owe the Future, by the way.) I don’t feel that guilty because I’m still a lot more effectively altruistic than the vast majority of people who would have the means.

According to https://finance.yahoo.com/news/ftx-japan-unit-drafts-plan-124544036.html, FTX Japan has about $150 M in assets, which isn't much compared to what the whole FTX conglomerate owes.

I just came across this. Same article, different voting behaviour.

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/6aXfG57FvbcrKf9Qd/make-the-drought-evaporate – 8 karma from 10 votes (no critical comments) https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wttyWyKqkPyncuoCm/make-the-drought-evaporate – 32 karma from 24 votes

Nitpick: Localizing a largish number of texts looks more like a manufacturing or product development process to me. A classic ‘project manager’, as you mention in Roles, would have to keep this in mind and manage things differently (thinking about queues, batch size, work-in-process constraints, cycle time, throughput etc.).

Thank you, moderators! I didn't notice any trolls or spam, which I guess is evidence of your good work. :-)

Thanks for your concern about my karma! ;-) The difference between my comment and the reply is indeed surprising. I wouldn't have noticed it if you hadn't pointed it out. Here are other, more or less plausible, explanations:

• Most likely: My comment was a quick, abstract throwaway. I even avoided the word ‘suicide’ because I didn't feel good about bringing it up explicitly. NeoMohist's reply is more concrete, emotional and caring. I guess people resonate with that more and want to say with their upvote: ‘Yes, me worried too. Please keep an eye on him.’
• It

Some corrections of the Sequoia info:

• I've never been a grad student.
• I'm neither Japanese nor a Japanese citizen.
• I ‘volunteered’ in the sense that people at Alameda reached out to me, I said ok and then got paid by the hour for my help.
• ‘(obscure, rural)’ is an exaggeration. ‘provincial’ would be a more apt adjective for the location. The main bank we used was SMBC, the second-largest bank in Japan.
• ‘for a fee’ sounds as if it was some sort of bribe to get them to do what we wanted. But we only paid the usual transaction fees and margin that any bank wo

I have 2 weeks to raise $8b

that's basically all that matters for the rest of my life

Two weeks to live? I'm slightly worried. But only slightly.

[To clarify: I wrote ‘slightly’ because it appears that Sam writes a lot of things that aren't very reliable and well thought-out. So I didn't want to put too much stock in a particular phrasing.]

Thanks for explaining! I'm happy to read that you're discussing this with other people, too.

Please forgive the insensitivity of the following question. I've been wondering about this for a while and now I'm (ab)using your post about your troubles and ambitions as a place to ask it: What is your thinking on charging money for the tech support part of your work?

The EA ecosystem appears to consist of organizations supporting each other for free, while being funded by a third party. How about third-parties funding only those organizations that do direct work and can't have paying customers, and having the rest be semi-commercial, organized by market... (read more)

Thanks for including my post here. Your summary is shockingly good! It captures the essence of my article very well.

For the record I'll note that not all the ‘bad’ things the hiring consultants had planned actually happened. Because the manager at the org that was hiring did some reading and then took over the process.

Thanks for taking the time to write up balanced feedback! I was surprised.

I'm starting to understand the message from your and other comments that the tone of the article is distracting from the content and even causing people to misunderstand it. When I write another article, I will take more time to work on the tone.

I knew that the introduction is written in a choppy way, but I didn't expect that it would be hard to read. Thanks for telling me that. Good point also that I should introduce key terms more explicitly. You pointing this out made me see it as... (read more)

I appreciate your questions and can't comment on them right now, I'm afraid. Sorry. I hope to be able to answer in a few weeks' or months' time. Please have patience.

(Thanks also for your other comment. I'll respond to that later today or tomorrow.)

It turns out that the article was mass-downvoted by throwaway accounts. So there weren't many downvotes to find a reason for after all. Thanks for your comment anyway. It allowed me to partially address some weaknesses of my article.

It turns out that the article was mass-downvoted by throwaway accounts. So there weren't many downvotes to find a reason for after all. Your comment helped me clarify some points, though.

Okay, you convince me. I've rewritten that item.

The reason why I wasn't noting that the table is inconsistent with ‘not predictive’ is that I was unconsciously equating ‘not predictive’ with ‘not sufficiently predictive to be worth the candidate's time’. Only your insisting made me think about it more carefully. Given that unconscious semantics, it's not a strong misrepresentation of the source either. But of course it's sloppy and you were right to point it out.

I hope this somewhat restores your expectation of my epistemic integrity. Also, I think there i... (read more)

It would be nice if you moved your last paragraph first. Recommending (in bold) based on a casual listening not to read a post feels unfair. (Speaking about fairness, there are other posts about hiring (eg. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/XpnJKvr5BKEKcgvdD/perhaps-the-highest-leverage-meta-skill-an-ea-guide-to#comments) that are argued more thinly than my post and have gotten much less criticism.) I agree with your alternative recommendation to read the post with skepticism. That's the case with any post.

I agree with some of your points. Especia... (read more)

They are the third and fourth row in the table, but the rows aren't ordered by the validity column. When you order by the validity column, integrity tests are 8th and conscientiousness tests are 12th unless I've miscounted.

I admit that I cherry-picked this article, basically only looked at the validity numbers in the table, and don't know anything else from that literature. This post has a wider view for those interested: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/j9JnmEZtgKcpPj8kz/hiring-how-to-do-it-better On the other hand, the validity table was excerpt... (read more)

Thanks! I'm glad you liked it!

Thanks for pointing that out. I had only looked at the validity of each method on its own and not at the validity gain numbers. Don't the results indicate, though, that you would have to also subject the candidate to a GMA test if you want to get validity from conscientiousness and integrity tests? And GMA tests are rarely performed in hiring processes.

Pulling up an addendum from below (added 2022-10-19):

I would explain the high incremental validity by the fact that a GMA test barely measures conscientiousness and integrity. In fact, footnote ‘c,d’ menti

I agree. Thanks for taking the time to hash this out with me!

Addendum – from https://www.manager-tools.com/2019/01/manager-tools-data-one-ones-part-1-hall-fame-guidance:

Going back to company size, we've done 3 studies comparing the effect of WO3s in small, medium, and large organizations. We have never been able to find any significant difference in R&R improvements based on organization size. We have measured statistically similar improvements in companies of less than 50, and companies greater than 100,000 employees.

WO3s … weekly one-on-ones, R&R … results and retention

This is not directly relevant to ... (read more)

Makes sense. I'm a bit worried that people reading this will take away: ‘We're a small shop, therefore MT doesn't apply at all.’ This is not the case and I think Howie would agree. I've never worked at a big organization and MT still has helped me a lot. I've also read and listened to a ton of non-MT material on leadership, doing work, business, processes etc. So I could well be putting MT guidance in its proper context without being aware of it.

Good point, thanks! Manager Tools usually explain their guidance in detail, which makes it adaptable to all kinds of organizations. And since MT itself is a small company with, I guess, an unusual amount of trust among staff, I don't think they would put out material that fails to apply to them.

But I do agree that wider reading is necessary. Paul Graham's essays, for example, are a good counterpoint to MT's corporate emphasis, too.

Thank you, too, for explaining your reservations! And sorry about the word ‘stud’ – I didn't know the connotations. I've now replaced it with ‘ace’.

I'll try to explain the general assertions and my disdain for scenario questions. This is not arguing against the points you made. It's just a clarification, which I should work into the article.

• General assertions – I wasn't aware of this as a problem of my article. Thanks for pointing it out! – There are so many claims in the article that I don't have space and time to argue them all properly. That's why I