Vaidehi Agarwalla
Bio
Participation1
I help lead Product at Momentum, and care about making funding for high impact causes more robust & diversified. I live in the Bay Area, advise Asia-based community builders and run Pineapple Operations. I previously worked in consulting, recruiting and marketing, with a BA in Sociology and focused on social movements. (A little on my journey to EA)
I'm always keen to hear feedback through any means. Here's an anonymous way to share: admonymous.co/vaidehiagarwalla
Unless otherwise stated, I always write in a personal capacity.
/'vɛðehi/ or VEH-the-hee
Some posts I've written and particuarly like:
- Ideas from network science about EA community building
- The funnel or the individual: Two approaches to understanding EA engagement
- The availability bias in job hunting
- What comes after the intro fellowship?
Advice I frequently give:
- When in doubt, apply*
- What Ops in EA is like
- If you're running a retreat, nail the vibes and venue
- Add randomness to your conferences
How others can help me
If you feel I can do something (anything) better, please let me know. I want to be warm, welcoming & supportive - and I know I can fail to live up to those standards sometimes. Have a low bar for reaching out - (anonymous form here).
If you think you have different views to me (on anything!), reach out -I want to hear more from folks with different views to me. If you have deep domain expertise in a very specific area (especially non-EA) I'd love to learn about it!
Connect me to product designers, people with ops & recruiting backgrounds and potential PA/ops folks!
How I can help others
I can give specific feedback on movement building & meta EA project plans and career advising.
I can also give feedback on posts and grant applications.
Posts 66
Comments643
Topic Contributions62
I'm not on LW very often, how frequently do you see these emojis being used?
From a UX perspective, I agree with Akash - it seems like there are way too many options and my prior is that people wouldn't use >80% of them.
I think this might be a good top level post - would be keen for you more people to see and discuss this point
Thanks for this! A few questions:
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Of the 100 strategic pairings you did, how would you break down the impact / what was the outcome of the pairings?
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how do you think the AI for animals group will benefit animals? E.g. what kind of concrete outcomes do you expect to see?
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do you have a user survey or feedback on the relative value of the different services you provide? How do you prioritize between different initiatives?
These are all great points. I was planning to add this into the main post, but I don't think it ended up in the final draft - so thanks for raising this!
Update: It's posted! https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/SWfwmqnCPid8PuTBo/monetary-and-social-incentives-in-longtermist-careers
"Less than half of this round of MATS scholars were funded for independent research."
-> Its not clear to me what exactly the bar for independent research should be. It seems like it's not a great fit for a lot of people, and I expect it to be incredibly hard to do it well as a relatively junior person. So it doesn't have to be a bad thing that some MATS scholars didn't get funding.
Also, I don't necessarily think that orgs being unable to hire is in and of itself a sign of a funding bottleneck. I think you'd first need to make the case that these organisations are crossing a certain impact threshold.
(I do believe AIS lacks diversify of funders and agree with your overall point).
My understanding is that the main reason people wouldn't want to publicize their involvement is to minimize reputation risk(most likely because of FTX). For those doing direct work it could hurt their ability to engage with non-EA actors. I think this is a pretty compelling reason not to publicize your involvement.
I'm not sure (my active intro cb days were ~2019), but I think it is possibly still in the intro syllabus ? You could add a disclaimer at the top.