All of Rob Mitchell's Comments + Replies

One potential solution could involve explicitly funding such public goods. For example, funders could give an organisation additional funding to allow their staff to contribute more to effective altruism public goods, despite competing priorities.

I was thinking something similar reading some comments around funds giving (or not giving) feedback. There does seem to be a missed equilibrium:

• It's in everyone's efforts if there is more feedback, support, coordination etc.
• It's not in the interests or capability of any one organisation to take this on themselves.

This should recognise that more reliable motivation comes from norm-following rather than from individual willpower

I think this is right and is more true and important when the positive impacts you might have are distant in time, space or both. If you're doing something to help your local community then you should be able to see the impact yourself fairly quickly and willpower could well be the best thing to get you out picking litter or whatever. This falls down a bit if your beneficiaries are halfway round the world, in the future, or both.

It seems like there are certain principles that have a 'soft' and a 'hard' version - you list a few here. The soft ones are slightly fuzzy concepts that aren't objectionable, and the hard ones are some of the tricky outcomes you come to if you push them. Taking a couple of your examples:

Soft: We should try to do as much good with donations as possible

Hard: We will sometimes guide time and money away from things that are really quite important, because they're not the most important

Soft:  Long-term impacts are more important than short-term impac... (read more)

Yes, in practice interview questions should vary a lot between different roles, even if on paper the roles are fairly similar, so I'm not sure they could be coordinated, beyond possibly some entry level roles.

In a situation where someone is good but doesn't quite fit in a role the referral element might be useful. Often I've interviewed someone thinking 'they're great but not as good a fit for the role' even if they match on paper, and being able to refer that person on to another organisation would be a mutual benefit.

I'd heard of Peter Singer in an animal rights context years before I knew anything around his EA association or human philosophy in general. I wonder if a lot of people who have heard of him are in the same place I was.

I don't think approaching this as 'why not to pursue a path' is helpful. I think it's more about helping people be aware of things they may not know so they can make an educated decision. That decision may then be 'it's not for me'. Think of the numbers showing how few people become professional athletes. The framing isn't 'don't do it because you won't make it'. It's 'few people make it, decide in full knowledge.'

Celebrate all the good actions^[that people are taking (not diminish people when they don't go from 0 to 100 in under 10 seconds flat).

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I'm uncomfortable doing too much celebrating of actions that are much lower impact than other actions

I think the following things can both be true:

• The best actions are much higher impact than others and should be heavily encouraged.
• Most people will come in on easier but lower impact actions and if there isn't an obvious and stepped progression to get to higher impact actions and support to facilitate this then many will fa

[Policymakers]
They said that computers would never beat our best chess player; suddenly they did. They said they would never beat our best Go player; suddenly they did. Now they say AI safety is a future problem that can be left to the labs. Would you sit down with Garry Kasparov and Lee Se-dol and take that bet?

Thanks Jordan. I wanted to pick up on the Turo element. You mention that this is something you only recently stumbled across, and it doesn't sound like you have prior experience or training in this area, and that you aren't especially passionate about it. You also say that you could make $200k a year on it working a 40 hour week. Where did you get these figures? There aren't many opportunities you can go into without experience and start earning $200k a year.

It may be possible, but I'd suggest it's a high bar to reach as such opportunities are rare, so I'd... (read more)

'why seeing options other than the expected one would make me less likely to follow through'

I think the key is that 'following through' can mean several things that are similar from the perspective of GWWC but quite different from the perspective of the person pledging.

In my case I'd already been giving >10% for quite a while but thought it might be nice to formalise it. If I hadn't filled in the pledge it wouldn't have made any difference to my giving. So the value of the pledge to me was relatively low. If the website had been confusing or offputting ... (read more)

Well, it looks like I'm hijacking a thread about organisational scaling with some anxieties around referring to people in overly utilitarian ways that I've talked about elsewhere. Which is fair enough; interestingly I've done the opposite and talked about org scaling on threads that were fairly tangentially related and got quite a few upvotes for it. All very intriguing and if you're not occasionally getting blasted, you're not learning as much as you might, getting enough information about e.g. limits, etc...

Every person in your company is a vector. Your progress is determined by the sum of all vectors.

'Hey! I'm not a vector!' I cried out to myself internally as I read this. I mean, I get it and there's a nice tool / thought process in there, but this feels somewhat dehumanising without something to contextualise it. There are loads of tools you might employ to make good decisions that might involve placing someone in a matrix or similar, but hopefully it's obvious that it's a modelled exercise for a particular goal and you don't literally say 'people are math... (read more)

Thanks everyone, this is very interesting and well worth having a look through the attached Gitbook.

Around the intuitive interpretation:

Perhaps giving people more options makes them indecisive. They may be particularly reluctant to choose a “relatively ambitious giving pledge” if a less ambitious option is highlighted.

It's possible that this is the reason, but there's an alternative interpretation based around the fact that GWWC is already quite well-known and referenced as 'the place you go to donate 10% of your income'. So if a lot of people are coming o... (read more)

This is good advice and can be expanded outside software developers as you say. It's also great to see you offering CV help!

As someone who's hired a decent number of people, the one caveat I would add is that this will be really useful to follow as above if you are applying for a job where there is a degree of discretion among decision-makers around what they're assessing.  It's less immediately applicable, but still potentially valuable, if the initial selection is based solely on scoring against predefined criteria. Sometimes this will be explicit (... (read more)

For all that I've read and done with ToCs and critical path analysis, the first thing that comes to my mind is still 'avoiding this':

(I genuinely find thinking 'make sure you don't do this' at all stages is more effective than any theory I've read.)

Also, anything that has 2-3 paths to a potential goal that are at least partially independent will usually leave you in a better place than one linear path.  Then it's not so much 'backchaining' as switching emphasis ('lobbying seems to have stalled, so let's try publicity/behaviour change... then who knows... (read more)

Thanks for the detailed response and for linking to that other post. I've been dealing with chickenpox in the house so this is probably later and briefer than the analysis deserves.

+1 to 'Command and Control' and 'Nuclear Folly' as well worth reading - between them, enough to dispel any illusions that the destructive power of nuclear weapons was matched with processes to avoid going wrong, whether by accident or human folly. I'll check out 'The Bomb'.

The worrying aspect for me is the combination of leeway for particular commanding officers combined with en... (read more)

there were no American war plans for instance that escalated from the use of tactical nuclear weapons by the Soviets to firing nuclear missiles

What's your source for this?

I'd also comment that this misses the wider global context. There were tensions over Berlin, and China and India briefly went to war alongside the Cuban missile crisis; potential overlaps between these conflicts raised the risk of nuclear exchange considerably, possibly not even beginning around Cuba, and at any rate expanding beyond it if it got going. 

I haven't come across this yet... is it what I think it is?

Hi Eli! I'm glad those orgs are using Salesforce. It's powerful and scales very well. Annoyingly Salesforce themselves can be a massive sales and hype machine though, so it's not always easy to get the best advice from them directly. So freelance can be doubly useful.

Very interesting. I haven't come into contact with any student groups, so can't comment on that. But here's my experiences of what's worked well and less well coming in as a longtime EA-ish giver in my late 30s looking for a more effective career:

Good

(Free) books:  I love books - articles and TED talks are fine for getting a quick and simple understanding of something, but nothing beats the full understanding from a good book. And some of the key ones are being given away free! Picking out a few, the Alignment Problem, The Precipice and Scout Mindset ... (read more)

Definitely agree that networks will become worse predictors and ultimately grants, job offers etc. will become more impersonal. This isn't entirely a bad thing. For example personal and network-oriented approaches have significant issues around inclusivity that well-designed systems can avoid, especially if the original network is pretty concentrated and similar (see: the pic in the original post...)

As this happens this may also mean that over time people who have been in EA for a while may feel that 'over time the average person in the movement feels less... (read more)

The White Paper is fascinating as an example of some smart people trying to identify and crack problems around global UBI - it is worth a look whatever your position on this post and/or solution.

For what it's worth the $2.8tn figure that much of this hangs off seems 'blithely optimistic' as already commented and the link to M0 plucked out of thin air, and the verification system cumbersome and doubtfully viable. There is the germ of something here though and I'm glad though to see so many different organisations and approaches trying to deal with the issue. 

For many months, they will sit down many days a week and ask themselves the question "how can I write this grant proposal in a way that person X will approve of" or "how can I impress these people at organization Y so that I can get a job there?"

I would flip this and say, it's inevitable that this will happen, so what do we do about it? There are areas we can learn from:

• Academia, as you mention - what do we want to avoid here? Which bits actually work well?
• Organisations that have grown very rapidly and/or grown in a way that changes their nature. On a for-

It's useful to separate out consultancy/advice-giving versus the actual doing. I would say though that a successful management/operations setup should be able to at least ameliorate the feedback issue you mention (e.g. by identifying leading and/or more quickly changing metrics that are aligned and gaining value from these). 

I agree (and have formerly resembled this type...)  This is quite embedded in a lot of nonprofit culture. Part of it is what motivates the individual and their personality, part of it is the concept of supporters' money. 'Would the person who gave you £5 a month want you to be spending your money on that?' In practice this leads to counterproductive underspending. I remember waiting weeks to get maybe £100 worth of extra memory so I could crunch numbers at a reasonable speed without crashing the computer. The concept of taxpayers' money works similarly. 

There's probably a good forum post in there somewhere about how the psychology of charity affects perceptions of EA...

Really interesting, and something I'll need to come back to. Just to pick out one bit:

Often, it’ll involve people doing things that just aren’t that enjoyable: management and scaling organisations to large sizes are rarely people’s favourite activities; and, it will be challenging to incentivise enough people to do these things effectively.

I've seen variations on this theme in a few posts, and it doesn't resonate with my own experience. In a genuinely influential management/ops role, there's a great deal of satisfaction to be had in seeing your organisatio... (read more)

Liked 'the big picture' bit, the tone change makes this.

I do feel though that this and other posts are less focussed on one of the key aspects beyond the effect on parents and the instrumental value of kids when they're grown up, namely the inherent value of a new, independent consciousness. Whether that's a positive experience of the world is a huge consideration, which you do mention; personally I would err on the side of optimism given human progress.

I'm also concerned around valuing children based on their chance of having a big impact when adult. This... (read more)

As a fellow mid-career person looking at moving into EA, and agreeing that ‘EA career advice for mid-career people is undersupplied at the moment’, I found this post and the comments below really valuable - thanks for taking the time to write it up!

I wanted to pick up on Patrick’s point around specialist vs generalist, as to me this seems a key part of the issue. Much as it is the case that EA tends younger, but seems inclusive of older people, it does also seem to skew specialist. This is understandable, given there are a lot of practitioner roles t... (read more)