A very tiny, very informal announcement: if you want someone to review your resume and give you some feedback or advice, send me your resume and I'll help. If we have never met before, that is okay. I'm happy to help you, even if we are total strangers.

For the past few months I've been active with a community of  Human Resources professionals and I've found it quite nice to help people improve their resumes. I think there are a lot of people in EA that are looking for a job as part of a path to greater impact, but many people feel somewhat awkward or ashamed to ask for help. There is also a lot of 'low-hanging fruit' for making a resume look better, from simply formatting changes that make a resume easier to understand to wordsmithing the phrasings.

To be clear: this is not a paid service, I'm not trying to drum up business for some kind of a side-hustle, and I'm not going to ask you to subscribe to a newsletter. I am just a person who is offering some free low-key help.

TLDR: Is it good that the EA 'bootcamps' tends to spend resources on thinking about career paths rather than developing useful skills?

I have a vague impression that the various 'bootcamps' around effective altruism tend to focus on  something like "motivation, encouragement, and peer support for thinking about (and planning for) impactful career paths" rather than "gaining skills." I keep thinking that we have plenty of people involved in EA who are onboard with the general ideas and who want to contribute, but who lack specific skills. Is this a good thing?

This is all pretty low confidence/exploratory, as I haven't participated in High Impact Professionals, or CEA's Bootcamps, only read about and heard about them.

I'm mainly thinking about people management, budgeting, project management, and similar general professional skills; of course there is also broadly a need for more specific skills, like AI safety researcher.

Note: I'm sharing this an undisclosed period of time after the conference has occurred, because I don't want to inadvertently reveal who this individual is, and I don't want to embarrass this person.

I'm preparing to attend a conference, and I've been looking at the Swapcard profile of someone who lists many areas of expertise that I think I'd be interested in speaking with them about: consulting, people management, operations, policymaking, project management/program management, global health & development... wow, this person knows about a lot of different areas. Wow, this person even lists Global coordination & peace-building as an area of expertise! And Ai strategy & policy! Then I look at this person's LinkedIn. They graduated from their bachelor's degree one month ago. So many things arise in my mind.

• One is about how this typifies a particular subtype of person who talks big about what they can do (which I think has some overlap with "grifter" or "slick salesman," and has a lot of overlap with people who promote themselves on social media).
• Another is that I notice that this person attended Yale, and it makes me want to think about elitism and privilidge and humility and "fake it till you make it" and the Matthew effect.
• Another is that I shouldn't judge people too harshly, because I also certainly try to put my best foot forward when job hunting. I am certainly guilty of being overconfident at times.

I'll also acknowledge that while it isn't probable that this person's listed areas of expertise are accurate and realistic, it is possible. A fresh college grad could have read a dozen books about each of these distinct areas, and attended some sort of training program, and had multiple informational interviews. I could imagine an industrious student with enough free time gaining some competency in a variety of areas. Is that enough to count as "expertise?" I'm not sure, and it certainly seems context-dependent: at an EAGx conference I feel okay claiming competence in certain skills, but at a conference with lots of people highly trained in those skills (such as at a PMI Global Summit) I would not describe myself as so competent, simply because the reference group is different. Compared to laypeople I know a bunch about project management; compared to a professional project manager I know hardly anything.^[1]

I suppose I shouldn't be too surprised. Although I'm not a big fan of the "there are lots of grifters in EA" narrative, it isn't unheard of for people to vastly^[2] exaggerate their skills/competencies/experiences or to imply that they have more than they really do.

• At a separate EA conference a person listed many areas under "Area(s) of expertise," including one particular skill that I reached out to them to chat about, after which they replied to tell me that they actually didn't do that kind of work and aren't knowledgeable about it.^[3]
• One EA Forum poster shared strong opinions about how cumbersome regular working hours, offices in normal cities, and work/life boundaries can be. When I looked, this person also has only about five years of post-graduate work experience, all of which has either been freelance, self-employed, or running his own organization.^[4] This isn't to say that you aren't allowed to have an opinion about "standard" offices if you haven't spent X years in offices, but I'm skeptical of any broad and sweeping claim about a particular working style (such as "I don't know anyone who is highly effective and gets everything done between 9 and 5 from Mon-Fri") while having sampled that working style very little. Some offices are horribly unproductive, but that doesn't mean that all of them are.
• At least one person active on the EA Forum has an entry under Licenses & certifications on his LinkedIn profile listing Pareto Productivity Pro as license/certification from Charity Entrepreneurship, with a link to the Amazon page for the book How to Launch a High-Impact Nonprofit. This seems pretty deceptive to me, to list an official training or association with an organization when all you did is read their book.^[5] EDIT: see this comment from Tyler Johnston for additional context.
• Someone made a forum post about taking several months off work to hike, claiming that it was a great career decision and that they gained lots of transferable skills. I see this as LinkedIn-style clout-seeking behavior.
• I saw another person list a job of Social Media Manager for Effective Altruism on their LinkedIn. (EDIT: it turns out that this is legitimate. I was completely wrong to look at this and conclude that a person was exaggerating their experiences.)
• There are multiple people who have job titles of "senior [SOMETHING]", or "president," or "director of [SOMETHING]" even though they have no previous work experience in that area. Maybe that really is their official job title, but it strikes me as a bit fishy to have a title of Vice President or CEO when you are only two or three years into your career.

1. ^{^}

   Related to the idea of how expertise is dependent on who you compare yourself to, there is a kind of a narrative among sinologists and China-watchers that a "westerner" who spends a week in China knows enough to write a book, and if they spend a month in China they can write an article, and if they spend a year in China they can't even write a paragraph because they realize how little they know.

2. ^{^}

   EDIT: I think this reads as too combative/aggressive, so I'm taking this word out.

3. ^{^}

   Although it could just be a less rude way to say "I don't want to talk to you," much like the little white lies people tell to turn down an invitation or to withdraw from a conversation.

^{^}

This is just from a cursory view of his LinkedIn, so maybe he has much more relevant experience that I am unaware of. This would largely or completely invalidate this critique.

^{^}

But I could be totally wrong. Maybe this person received some kind of specialized/individualized training from Charity Entrepreneurship and has their permission/blessing to put this on his LinkedIn profile, so I am simply making a bad assumption based in incomplete information.

Show all footnotes

A semi-regular reminder that anybody who wants to join EA (or EA adjacent) online book clubs, I'm your guy.

Copying from a previous post:

I run some online book clubs, some of which are explicitly EA and some of which are EA-adjacent: one on China as it relates to EA, one on professional development for EAs, and one on animal rights/welfare/advocacy. I don't like self-promoting, but I figure I should post this at least once on the EA Forum so that people can find it if they search for "book club" or "reading group." Details, including links for joining each of the book clubs, are in this Google Doc.

I want to emphasize that this isn't funded through an organization, I'm not trying to get emails to put on a newsletter, and I'm not selling an online course or push people to buy a product. This is literally just online book clubs: we vote on books and have video chats to talk about books.

One of the best experiences I've had at a conference was when I went out to dinner with three people that I had never met before. I simply walked up to a small group of people at the conference and asked "mind if I join you?" Seeing the popularity of matching systems like Donut in Slack workspaces, I wonder if something analogous could be useful for conferences. I'm imagining a system in which you sign up for a timeslot (breakfast, lunch, or dinner), and are put into a group with between two and four other people. You are assigned a location/restaurant that is within walking distance of the conference venue, so the administrative work of figuring out where to go is more-or-less handled for you. I'm no sociologist, but I think that having a small group is better for conversation than a large group, and generally also better than a two-person pairing. An MVP version of this could perhaps just be a Google Sheet with some RANDBETWEEN formulas.

The topics of conversation were pretty much what you would expect for people attending an EA conference: we sought advice about interpersonal relationships, spoke about careers, discussed moral philosophy, meandered through miscellaneous interests, shared general life advice, and so on. None of us were taking any notes. None of us sent any follow up emails. We weren't seeking advice on projects or trying to get the most value possible. We were simply eating dinner and  having casual conversation.

When I claim this was one of the best experiences, I don't mean "best" in the sense of "most impactful," but rather as as 1) fairly enjoyable/comfortable, 2) distinct from the talks and the one-on-ones (which often tend to blur together in my memory), and 3) I felt like I was actually interacting with people rather than engaging in "the EA game."^[1] I think that third aspect felt like the most important for me.

Of course, if could simply be that this particular group of individuals just happened to mesh well, and that this specific situation it isn't something which can be easily replicated.

1. ^{^}

   "The EA game" is very poorly conceptualized on my part. I apologize for the sloppiness of it, but I'll emphasize that this is a loose concept that I've just started thinking about, rather than something rigorous. I think of it as something along the lines of "trying to extract value or trying to produce value." Exploring job opportunities, sensing if someone is open to a collaboration of some type, getting advice on career plans, picking someone's brain on their area of expertise, getting intel on new funders and grants, and so on. It is a certain type of professional and para-professional networking. You have your game face on, because there is some outcome that is dependent on your actions and on how people perceive you. This is in contrast to something like interacting without an agenda, or being authentic and present. 

I'm currently reading a lot of content to prepare for HR certification exams (from HRCI and SHRM), and in a section about staffing I came across this:

some disadvantages are associated with relying solely on promotion from within to fill positions of increasing responsibility:
■ There is the danger that employees with little experience outside the organization will 
have a myopic view of the industry

Just the other day I had a conversation about the tendency of EA organizations to over-weight how "EA" a job candidate is,^[1] so it particularly stuck me to come across this today. We had joked about how a recent grad with no work experience would try figuring out how to do accounting from first principles (the unspoken alternative was to hire an accountant). So perhaps I would interpret the above quotation in the context of EA as "employees with little experience outside of EA are more likely to have a myopic view of the non-EA world." In a very simplistic sense, if we imagine EA as one large organization with many independent divisions/departments, a lot of the hiring (although certainly not all) is internal hiring.^[2]

And I'm wondering how much expertise, skill, or experience is not utilized within EA as a result of favoring "internal" hires. I think that I have learned a lot about EA over the past three years or so, but I suspect that I would perform better in most EA jobs if I had instead spent 10% of that time learning about EA and 90% of it learning about [project management, accounting, bookkeeping, EEO laws, immigration law, workflow automation tools, product management, etc.]. Nonetheless, I also suspect that if I had spent less time delving into EA, I would be a less appealing job candidate for EA orgs, who heavily weigh EA-relevant experience.^[3]

It does seem almost comical how we (people involved in EA) try to invent many things for ourselves rather than simply using the practices and tools that exist. We don't need to constantly re-invent the wheel. It is easy to joke about hiring for a position that doesn't require someone to be highly EA, and then using "be very EA" as an selection criteria (which eliminates qualified candidates). I'll return to my mainstay: make sure the criteria you are using for selection are actually related to ability to perform the job. If you are hiring a head of communications to manage public relations for EA, then I think it makes sense that this role needs to understand a lot of EA. If you are hiring an office manager or a data analyst, I think that it makes less sense (although I can certainly imagine exceptions).

I'm imagining a 0-10 scale for "how EA someone is," and I think right now most roles require candidates to be a 7 or 8 or 9 on the scale. I think there are some roles where someone being a 3 or a 4 on the scale would be fine, and would actually allow a more competitive candidate pool to be considered. This is all quite fuzzy, and I think there is a decent chance that I could be wrong.^[4]

1. ^{^}

   "How EA someone is" is a very sloppy term for a variety of interconnected things: mission-alignment, demonstrated interaction with the EA community, reads lots of EA content, ability to use frequently used terms like "counterfactual" and "marginal," up-to-date with trends and happenings within EA, social connections with EAs... 

2. ^{^}

   Actually, I wonder if there are stats on this. It would be curious to get some actual estimates regarding what percent of hires made are from people who are within EA. There would certainly be some subjective judgement calls, but I would view being "within EA" as having worked/interned/volunteered for an EA org, or having run or having been heavily involved in an EA club/group.

3. ^{^}

   I have a vague feeling that heavily weighing EA-relevant experience over non-EA experience is fairly common. I did have one person in a influential position at a central EA org mention that a candidate with a graduate degree (or maybe the words spoken were "MBA"? I don't recall exactly) gets a bit less consideration. Nonetheless, I don't know how much this actually happens, but I hope not often.

^{^}

Especially since "how EA someone is" conflates several things: belief in a mission, communication styles, working preferences, and several other things that are actually independent/distinct. People have told me that non EAs have had trouble understanding the context of meetings and trouble communicating with team members. Could we take a generic project manager with 10 years of work experience, have them do two virtual programs, and then toss them into an EA org?

Show all footnotes

Best books I've read in 2023

(I want to share, but this doesn't seem relevant enough to EA to justify making a standard forum post. So I'll do it as a quick take instead.)

People who know me know that I read a lot.^[1] Although I don’t tend to have a huge range, I do think there is a decent variety in the interests I pursue: business/productivity, global development, pop science, sociology/culture, history. Of all the books I read in 2023, here is my best guess as to the ones that would be of most interest to an effective altruist.

For people who haven’t explored much yet

• Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time. If you haven’t worked in 'startupy' or lean organizations, this books may introduce you to some new ideas. I first worked for a startup in my late 20s, and I wish that I had read this book at that point.
• Developing Cultural Adaptability: How to Work Across Differences. This 32 page PDF is a good introduction to ideas of working with people from other cultures. This will be particularly useful if you are going to work in a different country (although there are cultural variations within a single country). This is fairly light introduction, so don't stop here if you want to learn more about cross-cultural communication and cross-cultural psychology.
• How to Be Perfect: The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question. Less focused on productivity /professional skills, this is a fun and lighthearted exploration of different ethical theories. This book made me smile more than any other I read this year, and also introduced me to some new moral philosophers. This is probably the most easily 'digestible' book ever written on moral philosophy. If you enjoyed the TV Show The Good Place, you should listen to the audiobook version of this book, as it features the cast from The Good Place.
• Science Fictions: How Fraud, Bias, Negligence, and Hype Undermine the Search for Truth. If you aren’t familiar with the problems of the scientific process as it actually exists, or with the ‘industry’ of science, then this book will probably introduce you to some of these ideas, as well as make you a bit more skeptical of scientific publication in general. I think it would be great if we all slightly increased our incredulousness toward any any all new publications. It strikes me as a bit of a kindred spirit to the essay Beware the Man of One Study.
• Conscious: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind and Free Will. I started to think more about consciousness in animals this year, and these two short books were the start of my exploration. You probably won’t learn anything new if you have already done some thinking or reading about this topic, but I’m guessing that the average twenty-something interested in EA would gain a bit from reading these.

For people who have already explored a lot and know the basics

• The Idealist: Jeffrey Sachs and the Quest to End Poverty. A nicely written portrait that doesn’t pull any punches, highlighting both the good and the bad. I loved how neutral the author's tone felt; there wasn't idolizing or vilifying. I view reading this as a good way to a) inoculate oneself a bit against hero worship, and b) understand some of the complications that come with global development work, even when you are relatively well-resourced.
• Crucial Conversations Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High. It is rare for me to re-read books, but I think I will revisit this one in a few years. This are useful skills that should be practiced, both in a professional environment and in personal relationships.
• How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of Intangibles in Business. If you are already familiar with the basics of expected value and trying to quantity things via fermi estimates, then this book will help take you to the next level. I enjoyed the balance between examples and explanation, and I could see myself taking this book out and referring to it in the future to figure out the value of an estimate.
• What a Fish Knows: The Inner Lives of Our Underwater Cousins. I don’t think that I gained anything specific and concrete from this book, but in a broad sense I got a much greater appreciation for non-human life, and a strong reminder of how little I know of the world. I’m trying to read more about animals as a way of building greater understanding, and there were dozens of fascinating tidbits in this book that I view as pixels in a picture or pieces in a jigsaw puzzle (in the sense that after I gather enough of them I will start to be able to understand something larger).

Maybe not so closely related to effective altruist ideas, but still worth reading for (some people)

• Simply Managing: What Managers Do–and Can Do Better, and Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling. If you are interested in being a manager in the future (or if you already are a manager of people) then you should learn how to manage. While there are a lot of aspects to it, this is a good start. Henry Mintzberg is very famous and well respected when it comes to management education, and Edgar H. Schein is one of the foremost experts on organizational culture. These two books are short, simple samplings of their ideas. If you are already a skilled and experienced people manager, reading these might be a bit of a refresher, but you likely won't encounter new concepts.
• I Hate the Ivy League: Riffs and Rants on Elite Education^[2] and Where You Go Is Not Who You'll Be: An Antidote to the College Admissions Mania. If you aren't interested in how higher education functions in American society, then skip these books. I’m interested in how higher education functions in American society, and these two books were enjoyable and educational explorations. But if you are interested in ideas of justice, gatekeeping, access, inclusion, equality, etc., then you might enjoy these two. These really got me thinking about what admissions criteria ought to be for a university education. Simplistic answers (admit everyone and have resources stretched so thin that quality is bad, or admit only those that are already very well-resourced and then give them lots more resources) don’t seem great paths to building a better society.  This is an area that I want to learn more about, and I intend to read more books about this. But there is one quote that has stuck with me: “The prestige associated with going to, say, Yale, was a function of at least in part how many people wanted to get in and couldn’t. It was the logic of the nightclub, it had never occurred to me that a university was a nightclub. I thought it was more like a hospital, an institution judged by how many patients it took in and how many of those later emerged fully healed.”
• Hand to Mouth: Living in Bootstrap America. If you have never been poor, read this to try and get a bit of an understanding of what it is like to live in a first world country without having much money or career stability. It isn’t brilliant literature, but it is a decently good whirlwind tour of poverty. I grew up… kind of poor, I guess? For most of my childhood my parents both had jobs, and I think that we were consistently beneath the US median household income. I never noticed it much as a kid, but looking back I can see various indications that my family didn’t have much money. If you know what it is like to be poor in America, then you probably won’t learn anything from this (although you may feel emotionally "seen" and validated).^[3]  A quote from a different book that seems relevant here: “That's the difference between being privileged and being poor in America. It's how many chances you get. If you're wealthy, all kinds of things can happen and you'll be okay. You can drop out of school for a year, you can get addicted to pain killers, you can have a bad car accident. No one ever says, of the upper-middle class high school kid whose parents get a terrible divorce, "I wonder if she'll ever go to college." She's going to college; disruption is not fatal to life chances.”

Mixed feelings

• Animal Liberation Now: The Definitive Classic Renewed. Yes, I know that it is an influential classic. But I didn’t really gain anything from it (other than the credibility to be able to say “yes, I’ve read it.”) I think that from a few conversations, a few documentaries, and a few online articles over the years I had already picked up the core messages that this book attempted to portray. I already knew that [insert animal here] are treated horribly. It is kind of like watching Dominion after you already have watched three or four other documentaries about farm animal welfare: it is just telling you what you already know.
• Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World. It was… fine. I wanted to like it, and I like the idea of it. I’m not sure why this book didn’t resonate more with me; it really should have. I could go through it with a fine-toothed comb and justify, caveat, and explain all my reactions. But it doesn’t seem worth it, so I’ll just be satisfied with a vague shrug and move on to reading other books.
• Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones. This seemed so incredibly simple that I am amazed people rave about it. But maybe this is just a matter of perspective and age. If I had read this book prior to age ≈24 I likely would have learned a lot from it.
• Moral Mazes: The World of Corporate Managers. I thought that I would gain something from this, but it was all kind of... straightforward. Of course people are going to act on incentives, and when those incentives incentivize behavior that is damaging, I am not surprised that damage results. This all struck me as kind of blandly obvious. Maybe if I hadn’t previously read a bunch about behavioral economics and social psychology then maybe I would have learned new things and found this book worthwhile, but I've read almost all of the books on these subjects already at this point.^[4]
• A few books on diversity
  • DEI Deconstructed: Your No-Nonsense Guide to Doing the Work and Doing It Right. If you are interested in the DEI industry, what is wrong with it, and how it can be better, read this. It focuses a lot on the DEI industry, but it has a really good chapter on practical applications and on what an organization can do.
  • Getting to Diversity: What Works and What Doesn’t. If you just want to know what does and doesn’t work in a business/organizational environment to improve diversity, read this.
  • Read This to Get Smarter: About Race, Class, Gender, Disability, and More. If you are brand new to ideas about diversity and inclusion, or if you are intimidated by the terminology, or if you just want a light introduction, then read this book. It you already are familiar with the terminology and the basic ideas, then you won't learn anything.

1. ^{^}

   A majority via audiobook, so we could quibble on whether or not it really counts as reading, but it is accurate to say that I have ‘consumed’ a lot of books.

2. ^{^}

   I Hate the Ivy League was basically just an audiobook of thematically related podcasts, so not a book in the traditional sense.

3. ^{^}

   One thing that I feel odd about the EA community is the easy confidence I observe. It is very different from the feeling of financial precariousness (I guess the term would be precariat?). Not knowing if your job will be terminated, if you will be able to afford rent, if you will be okay skipping the doctor's appointment, etc. Existing without stability or predictability or security causes a lot of stress. I’m stunned to meet people who are in the top decile of American income earners (somebody talked about earning nearly a million dollars in a year so casually, as if it was a normal thing), or who have donated more money in the past five years than I have earned in the past ten, or who owned a house in a high cost of living city in their mid-20s. I’m amazed at people who graduate from school and earn more than the average American income by the age of 24, and who then create/found their own organization so that they can pursue their interests and get paid for it. But there is a lot of selection bias at play here: maybe people simply don't talk about their upbringing and I make shallow and incorrect assumptions. This should be interpreted as musings that are very low-confidence.

^{^}

No, not literally all of them. I mean that if you compile a list of the most recommended or most read books in behavioral economics and social psychology, I think that I have already read between 40% and 80% of them. Just popular press books, not academic books. So I'd consider myself a fairly well-read layperson.

Show all footnotes

Best books I've read in 2024

(I want to share, but this doesn't seem relevant enough to EA to justify making a standard forum post. So I'll do it as a quick take instead.)

People who know me know that I read a lot, and this is the time of year for retrospectives.^[1] Of all the books I read in 2024, I’m sharing the ones that I think an EA-type person would be most interested in, would benefit the most from, etc. 

Animal-Focused 

There were several animal-focused books I read in 2024. This is the direct result of being a part of an online Animal Advocacy Book Club. I created the book club about a year ago, and it has been helpful in nudging me to read books that I otherwise probably wouldn’t have gotten around to.^[2]

• Reading Compassion, by the Pound: The Economics of Farm Animal Welfare was a bit of a slog, but I loved that there were actual data and frameworks and measurements, rather than handwavy references to suffering. The authors provided formulas, the provided estimates and back-of-the-envelope calculations, and did an excellent job looking at farm animal welfare like economists and considering tradeoffs, with far less bias than anything else I’ve ever read on animals. They created and references measurements for pig welfare, cow welfare, and chicken welfare that I hadn’t encountered anywhere else. I haven’t even seen other people attempt to put together measurements to evaluate what the overall cost and benefit would be to enact a particular change in how farm animals are treated.
• Every couple of pages in An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us I felt myself thinking “whoa, that is so cool.” Part of the awe and pleasure in reading this book was a bunch of factoids about how different species of animals perceive the world in incredibly different ways, ranging from the familiar (sight, hearing, touch) to the exotic (vibration detection, taste buds all over the body, electrolocation, and more). The author does a great job of weaving it all together, and it really was fun to read. Almost every day I read this book I wanted to walk up to people like an annoying kid who won’t stop feeding you facts about their favorite thing: “Did you know that [X]? Isn’t it cool that some animals can [Y]. I just learned that [Z].” I almost felt giddy reading this book. Highly recommended.
• I often enjoy reading things that make me feel humble (either as an individual or as a member of a broader civilization/culture), and reading Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? did that. I’m interested in measurement and assessment broadly, and this describes a variety of ways in which our attempts to measure and assess intelligence in other species have failed. Sometimes these were very simplistic anthropocentric failures, such as testing monkeys on their ability to differentiate human faces rather than on monkey faces, or showing elephants a mirror that was too small for the elephant to see itself fully. A lot of the research into animal intelligence seems to have come from a stance in which starting assumptions are believed true, rather than a more exploratory stance.

Sociological

Many of the books I read are what I would roughly categorize as sociology focused on injustice (or inequality, or unfairness, or lack of equal opportunity, or something along those lines).

• The short summary of The Algorithm: How AI Decides Who Gets Hired, Monitored, Promoted, and Fired and Why We Need to Fight Back Now would be that tools with serious flaws are being used improperly to make decisions that affect people’s livelihoods. The author did interviews and also did test runs with a wide variety of algorithms and “AI” tools involved in the world of work, and exposed flaws that would make me embarrassed if I was on a sales team for any of these products. An algorithmically assessed video interview tool gave her a fairly good score when she spoke in a foreign language. People got fired based on technical errors in the assessment systems rather than based on any problem with their work. Tools are implemented without any oversight by under trained staff, who have been specifically instructed that this tool should inform one aspect of their broader decision, and who instead simply “outsource” their decision to the tool. People are discriminated against for a variety of unjust reasons. I’m interested in decision-making, measurement, and selection in general, as well as hiring broadly; I’m an easy sell for this book. I recommend this not just to people involved in hiring or performance management, not just to people who make career-impacting decisions about other people, but to anyone who is interested in how technology is misused/misapplied, and anyone interested broadly in how decisions are made.
• If you want to read about challenges faced by poor students at fancy schools, read The Privileged Poor: How Elite Colleges Are Failing Disadvantaged Students. I’ve read several books about higher education in America, but this book had the most micro perspective and the most specific details. Other books focused on broad strokes, while this book was based on a few dozen interviews the authors did with students at Harvard College.^[3] Some aspects relate to institutional policies (such as closing the cafeteria for spring break, which is negligible to wealthy students but incredibly challenging for poor students), and some relate to culture more generally (many wealthy students have no idea what it is like to be poor, and demonstrate a blasé lack of empathy and awareness). I know that I was pretty blasé when I was 20 years old, but it still stings to see a wealthy heiress casually mention buying all-new designer furniture for her dorm room while the student sitting next to her doesn’t even have a warm coat for the winter.
• The Stigma Trap: College-Educated, Experienced, and Long-Term Unemployed is one of the best books I’ve read about sociological unfairness stuff, and I’m surprised that it hasn’t gotten more publicity. If I had to boil it down to a few ideas it would be that people who evaluate you for employment assume that any gap is because you are a bad employee, so if you had a misfortune (illness, family issue, industry downturn/downsizing) people will stigmatize you as an individual rather than attributing the cause to a broader, non-personalized issue. This book isn’t about your cousin who never finished high school and whose main hobby is smoking weed; this book is about people who have degrees from good schools, who have had white collar and managerial job titles, and who are able and willing to work. This also isn’t a book of practical tips and tricks. Instead, it is a sociologist highlighting the biases that people have and highlighting the systematic issues preventing people from getting good work. The “myth of meritocracy” is pervasive, which leads many people to assume that if someone is facing hardship it is because they are somehow deserving of it. Even friendships and romantic relationships suffer because people make the assumption that someone who is out of work is somehow broken, flawed, or toxic. Networking is hard, too, because people ask “what do you do” and if your response is “I used to be a director of finance, but for the past eight years I’ve worked in retail at Walmart to pay bills” people will make all kinds of assumptions about what you are capable of doing. The book also highlights many of the frustrations of being the victim of (what they perceive as) a fundamentally unjust system, and how the recognition or acknowledgement of those frustrations is in itself penalized. I’ve been involved in hiring and I read a lot about personnel selection, and many aspects of this book resonated with me: people are selected or rejected on things that are often trivial, which have very little to do with how well they would perform, or things that are falsely assumed to be predictive.^[4] The other point the author drives home is that this could happen to any of us (although this is somewhat limited to an American context). Much like disability advocates say that many of us are temporarily able-bodied, any of us who are working and earning an income now could be laid off or downsized at any point, and all except for the very elite could very easily struggle to find a next job.^[5]

Fiction

A few works of fiction that I think EAs might appreciate, related to civilizational resilience, artificial intelligence, and immoral actions.

• Service Model is about artificial intelligence (a robot) seeking meaning and purpose after the collapse of human civilization. The author pokes satirical fun at broad swaths of current society, mainly through the various robots continuing their jobs long after it makes any sense to do so (such as a robot who rings a doorbell, and then stands there for twenty years waiting for someone to open the door). It feels fairly lighthearted and silly, while still maintaining a sense of authenticity and genuineness over the whole story.
• Children of Time is about civilizational resilience, about a future in which humanity is attempting to seed and terraform exoplanets. Without major spoilers, while the terraforming missions are part-way through, bad stuff goes down on earth, and suddenly the remnants of earth life need to start from scratch on a new planet, while different remnants of earth life try to find a home and salvage what they have left. Lots of new ideas, and some of the best speculative fiction I’ve read in years. It also won the Arthur C. Clarke Award.
• Yellowface is not particularly related to EA in terms of cause areas or topics, but I think that there are some themes that can serve as great fodder for thought experiments and considerations of morality. It is also really fun. It is something of a satire, something of a thriller, and also slightly autobiographical (although in a highly fictionalized sense). EAs who read it might enjoy considering the nature of truth/honesty, the idea of what harm is actually caused or who is actually hurt by our actions, what we owe each other, self-interest and justifying our actions to ourselves, and how power relations (and especially reputational power) influences behavior.

Generic

These are books that I would expect to see on a list of bestsellers, or perhaps on a list of books that got a lot of publicity/press.

• Reading Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will was kind of a slog. It was interesting, but it was still hard to work through due simply to how much of it there is. If you think that you have free will, I recommend you read this book. The idea that we can make choices free from any impact of what has transpired previously is very tempting, and it simply doesn’t seem realistic on the societal level nor on the neurological level. But this has plenty of uncomfortable implications related to how we treat people, especially in regards to rewarding or punishing people’s actions if people didn’t really ‘choose’ to take those actions.^[6] It is easy to look at people doing things and make some sort of moral judgement about the person, but considering the broader influences we should question to what extent that makes sense.
• Conversely, reading Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention- and How to Think Deeply Again was easy. It is written by a journalist,^[7] and the smoothness of the narrative is noticeable. It is very easy to digest. Nothing in the book is particularly novel if you are familiar with the broad strokes of how people get addicted to news feeds and similar tools, but since people are still getting addicted to news feeds and similar tools it feels justified to repeat. It was nice to get a bit more context and detail about some of the effort that goes into grabbing your attention. There are a few tidbits on how to focus better, but they are things that I’ve picked up from here and there over the years from blog posts, journalistic long-form pieces, LifeHacker, and whatever other miscellaneous resources. The thing is, I can’t be angry at him for sharing true, accurate, and useful information. But I’d view this book sort of as ‘beginner-level’ or as ‘introductory’ content. My impression is that my peers know that social media algorithms show us content designed to keep us engaged. People know that working while distracted is suboptimal. People know that you shouldn’t lay in bed playing with your phone for an hour before falling asleep. People know that kids who get access to social media tend to form warped views of reality. But overall, it is really smoothly written, and the information is true and useful to people who haven’t explored these kinds of topics previously. I cannot understate how much I think this author is a very good writer. He crafts the narratives so well. His authorial tone/voice is excellent. It was literally a pleasure to read this book. Even the parts where I was annoyed by the author^[8], I really wanted to keep reading because reading this book was such a great experience.
• If you are interested in project management, you should read How Big Things Get Done: The Surprising Factors That Determine the Fate of Every Project, from Home Renovations to Space Exploration and Everything In Between. Most of us will never manage the type of mega-projects this author describes, but the lessons are applicable to smaller projects as well. The usual suspects show up: planning fallacy, ego, organizational culture, sales people over promising, etc. The author researched project management practices, and has assembled a big dataset. This book is full of good recommendations, so even if your projects are simply running a performance review for an organization or updating a website’s design, you should still find useful principals in here. For most people, I think this is helpful to remind you of all the ways things could go wrong, sort of similar to doing a pre mortem, and that awareness serves as a vague kind of “tips and tricks” in itself.^[9]

Miscellaneous

These books don’t quite fit into any of the above categories, nor do they have anything clearly in common that would justify a group, so I’m just clumping them together under the heading of “miscellaneous.”

• Although I might be stretching the definition of “book,” reading Two Arms and a Head: The Death of a Newly Paraplegic Philosopher was a challenging book to read. In brief, a young man has a motorcycle accident and becomes Paraplegic, he details the many ways that his existence is now full of frustration and annoyance and pain, and he then decides to kill himself. There was a lot of frustration and suffering in this, and I couldn’t bring myself to read more than a few pages at a time. The author is understandably bitter, and it is hard to read about so much bitterness. I'm sure that I would also feel very bitter if I was in his situation. There are so many things that he can no longer do, which he so desperately desires to do. Not just climbing trees or riding bikes, but very basic things, such as eating dinner without falling over, or being able to get ready in the morning in under two hours. In a certain sense, it feels morally beneficial to see the details of an existence full of suffering, almost as if I am training my empathy muscles. It is so easy to wave a hand and refer to malaria,^[10] but so few of us really delve into the details. I also found it notable that the author seemed like such an obnoxious person: while being reflective and intelligent, he was also a prototypical highly confident young American man, obsessed with performative displays of masculinity^[11], writing about how he is so much more wise and intellectually developed than normal people. He was a total bro, in all the worst connotations of that term. I would probably really dislike this guy if I met him. And, at the same time, that does nothing to diminish how miserable his existence was. Indeed, it make me wonder if he would have thought about his disability differently if it had happened to him at a later stage of his life, maybe in 2025, if he were middle aged with a loving spouse and a decade of having been a well-compensated lawyer and a part-time home health aide, maybe his situation would have had less suffering and he would have viewed it as more manageable.
• An EA friend recommended that I read Wild Problems: A Guide to the Decisions That Define Us, and I found it very enjoyable. It was a nice contrast from the online rationalist forum discourse that starts with the assumption that with sufficient data any problem is solvable. I enjoyed being reminded that sometimes we simply cannot know in advance, and there isn’t any roadmap or algorithm to lead to success. I’ll share an excerpt that gives the author’s definition: “Whether to have a child is what I call a wild problem—a fork in the road of life where knowing which path is the right one isn’t obvious, where the pleasure and pain from choosing one path over another are ultimately hidden from us, where the path we choose defines who we are and who we might become. Wild problems are the big decisions all of us have to deal with as we go through life… the big decisions we face in life, the wild problems—whether to marry, who to marry, whether to have children, what career path to follow, how much time to devote to friends and family, how to resolve daily ethical dilemmas—these big decisions can’t be made with data, or science, or the usual rational approaches.” This book felt very practical in the sense of how to approach life. It isn't practical in the sense of teaching you a specific, isolated skill, but it is practical in that it helps nurture a mindset, an approach, a perspective that will ultimately lead to better choices, better relationships, and (I suspect) a better life. It is uncommon that I encounter a book that actually gives advice on a life well-lived.
• I was pleasantly surprised by the essays in Horizontal Vertigo: A City Called Mexico. It felt like it was a mixture of memoir and love letter to Mexico City. Lots of tidbits were lost on me,^[12] simply because I haven’t lived in Mexico City, and I don’t understand many of the allusions or references that I am sure were embedded. But it was pleasure to allow those unknown tidbits to wash over me. It doesn’t have advice for visitors, nor even advice for people who live in Mexico City. This is not a book to give you a better experience when you visit Mexico City; it is a book to give you a better sense of Mexico City. The essays were beautifully crafted and beautifully translated (I read it in English, my Spanish isn’t good enough to read a book this complex), and it gives a sense of the atmosphere of the city.

1. ^{^}

   Although maybe I’m a week or two late.

2. ^{^}

   If you are curious of the other books we read, I put them all here.

3. ^{^}

   The author doesn’t state that it is Harvard, but it is pretty easy to deduce.

^{^}

I’m sure you’ve all heard advice about doing video interviews that mentions having good lighting and having an uncluttered background; but that has nothing to do with your ability to perform on the job.

^{^}

If you think to yourself that it couldn’t happen to you, imagine that you shift from whatever you are currently doing to a new job. Maybe it is in a new city, so you don’t have a network there. Then after three months something bad happens. Maybe your spouse tells you that they want a divorce, which causes your work performance to fall. Maybe you get hit by a car and are in the hospital for a few months. Maybe you get a cancer diagnosis, and treatment prevents you from doing your work. Maybe your CEO mismanaged the company and it closes down. Maybe your manager threatens or assaults you. Maybe your parent is dying and needs you nearby. Or maybe you just make a mistake in your job and your boss fires you. So you loose your new job and your good income, spend a few months dealing with whatever issue you encountered and emotionally picking yourself up. You start job hunting, but your resume now shows that you’ve been out of work for six months and that your most recent job lasted only for three months, so people who look at your resume or meet you at networking events assume that you are not a good employee.

^{^}

If you borrow a shirt from me, and then you are assaulted and the shirt gets damaged, can I really blame you for damaging the shirt? What if borrow your car, and while responsibly driving it some damage occurs that I didn’t cause and am not responsible for (such as a screw that had been loose for weeks finally falls out, which causes a side mirror to fall off). Or if you want something more personalizable, what if John Doe vomits on some possession of mine? He didn’t choose to vomit, his body did it without him willing it. We certainly can’t assume that people have complete control over their bodies.

^{^}

A journalist who has had issues with plagiarism.

^{^}

During specific anecdotes I did find the author’s tone somewhat obnoxious, as if he were trying to say “I am so much better than these peons. I appreciate gazing deeply at the Mona Lisa for hours while these buffoons simply snap a pic and move on.” Those are not his exact words, but he really does write about gazing at the Mona Lisa while other people just take a picture and move on. He tells a story about lashing out at people who are looking at an iPad rather than looking at the world around them, and that story doesn’t make the author look great. But overall he strikes a great balance between citing facts, interviews with experts, and anecdotes of his own experiences.

^{^}

Along the lines of “Oh, maybe we have a planning fallacy here, so we should set aside 15% of the budget as a management reserve” or "we should be aware of cultural pressure within the organization to respond positively to requests, even if the request is unrealistic."

^{^}

Or factory farming, or severe depression, or whatever other situation that we use as a common shorthand for bad things happening in the world.

^{^}

He boasts more than once about how how popular he was with women, and how many fistfights he has won, how excellent his athletic prowess was, how his peers looked up to him.

^{^}

I don't remember any specific examples, which is to be expected for things that I didn't  have the contextual knowledge to understand. But they were things such as the author stating that a particular person looked a person from Neighborhood_A of Mexico city, but acted like a person from Neighborhood_B. If you are local and you know the feel and style and reputation of those neighborhoods, then you understand what the author is saying. But if you don't have that knowledge, you know that the author is pointing to a concept but you don't know what that concept is. I often only get that when I read things that aren't intended for me, but intended for a different audience (an audience that all has some tacit knowledge in common). Again, it is kind of a humbling experience.

Show all footnotes

I just looked at [ANONYMOUS PERSON]'s donations. The amount that this person has donated in their life is more than double the amount that I have ever earned in my life. This person appears to be roughly the same age as I am (we graduated from college ± one year of each other). Oof. It makes me wish that I had taken steps to become a software developer back when I was 15 or 18 or 22.

Oh, well. As they say, comparison is the thief of joy. I'll try to focus on doing the best I can with the hand I'm dealt.

I've found explanation freeze to be a useful concept, but I haven't found a definition or explanation of it on the EA Forum. So I thought I'd share a little description of explanation freeze here so that anyone searching the forum can find it, and so that I can easily link to it.

The short version is:

explanation freeze is the tendency to stick with the first explanation we come up with.

The slightly longer explanation is:

Situations that are impossible to conclusively explain can afflict us with explanation freeze, a condition in which we come up with just one possible explanation for an event that may have resulted from any of several different causes. Since we're only considering one explanation at a time, this condition leads us to make the available evidence fit that explanation, and then overestimate how likely that explanation is. We can consider it as a type of cognitive bias or flaw, because it hinders us in our attempts to form an accurate view of reality.

Is talk about vegan diets being more healthy is mostly just confirmation bias and tribal thinking? A vegan diet can be very healthy or very unhealthy, and a non-vegan diet can also be very healthy or very unhealthy. The simplistic comparisons that I tend to see are contrasting vegans who put a lot of care and attention toward their food choices and the health consequences, versus people who aren't really paying attention to what they eat (something like the standard American diet or some similar diet without much intentionality). I suppose in a statistics class we would talk about non representativeness.

Does the actual causal factor for health tend to be something more like cares about diet, or pays attention to what they eat, or socio-economic status? If we controlled for factors like these, would a vegan diet still be healthier than a non-vegan diet?

A very minor thought.

TLDR: Try to be more friendly and supportive, and to display/demonstrate that in a way the other person can see.

Slightly longer musings: if you attend an EA conference (or some other event that involves you listening to a speaker), I suggest that you:

• look at the speaker while they are speaking
• have some sort of smile, nodding, or otherwise encouraging/supportive body language or facial expression.

This is likely less relevant for people that are very experienced public speakers, but for people that are less comfortable and at ease speaking in front of a crowd^[1] it can be pretty disheartening to look out at an audience and see the majority of people looking at their phone and their laptops.

I was at EAGxNYC recently, and I found it a little disheartening at how many people in the audience were paying attention to their phones and laptops instead of paying attention to the speaker.^[2] I am guilty of doing this in at least one talk that I didn't find interesting, and I am moderately ashamed of my behavior. I know that I wouldn't want someone to do that to me if I was speaking in front of a crowd. One speaker mentioned to me later that they appreciated my non-verbal support/agreement.^[3] 

1. ^{^}

   I'm guessing this correlates pretty strongly with age and with professional status/seniority, so it would probably have a greater positive impact

2. ^{^}

   I do understand that taking notes can be really helpful, but from the point of view of the speaker they can't tell if an audience member is taking rigorous notes or is browsing cat videos on YouTube. We can talk about the optimum scenario for maximum global utility, but I want us (as a community) to also remember that there is a person standing in front of us.

3. ^{^}

   Although I think I may tend to be more expressive than many of the EAs I've interacted with, especially when it comes to friendliness, support, enthusiasm, etc.

I wish that people wouldn't use "rat" as shorthand for "rationalist."

For people who aren't already aware of the lingo/jargon it makes things a bit harder to read and understand. Unlike terms like "moral patienthood" or "mesa-optimizers" or "expected value," a person can't just search Google to easily find out what is meant by a "rat org" or a "rat house."^[1] This is a rough idea, but I'll put it out there: the minimum a community needs to do in order to be welcoming to newcomers is to allow newcomers to figure out what you are saying.

Of course, I don't expect that reality will change to meet my desires, and even writing my thoughts here makes me feel a little silly, like a linguistic prescriptivist tell people to avoid dangling participles.

1. ^{^}

   Try searching Google for what is rat in effective altruism and see how far down you have to go before you find something explaining that rat means rationalist. If you didn't know it already and a writer didn't make it clear from context that "rat" means "rationalist", it would be really hard to figure out what "rat" means.

The 80,000 Hours team just published that "We now rank factory farming among the top problems in the world." I wonder if this is a coincidence or if this planned to coincide with the EA Forum's debate week? Combined with the current debate week's votes on where an extra $100 should be spent, these seem like nice data points to show to anyone that claims EA doesn't care about animals.

I'm skimming through an academic paper^[1] that I'd roughly describe as cross-cultural psychology about morality, and the stark difference between what kinds of behaviors Americans and China view as immoral^[2] was surprising to me.

The American list has so much of what I could consider as causing harm to others, or malicious. The Chinese list has a lot of what I would consider as rude, crass, or ill-mannered. The differences here remind me of how I have occasionally pushed against the simplifying idea of words having easy equivalents between English and Chinese.^[3]

There are, of course, issues with taking this too seriously: issues like spitting, cutting in line, or urinating publicly are much more salient issues in Chinese society than in American society. I'm also guessing that news stories about murders and thefts are more commonly seen in American media than in China's domestic media. But overall I found it interesting, and a nice nudge/reminder against the simplifying idea that "we are all the same."

1. ^{^}

   Dranseika, V., Berniūnas, R., & Silius, V. (2018). Immorality and bu daode, unculturedness and bu wenming. Journal of Cultural Cognitive Science, 2, 71-84.

2. ^{^}

   Note that there are issues here relating to meaning of the words in English and Chinese (immoral and bu daode) not being quite the same, which is a big part of the paper. In fact, the authors even claim that daode is not a reasonable translation for morality (a claim that I roughly agree with).

3. ^{^}

   Similarly to morality, words like friend, cousin, to be open, or hair have different connotations and are used in different ways, and shouldn't be viewed as exact translations, but rather as rough analogues. My naïve assumption is that the more closely related languages and culture are, the easier it is to translate concepts directly.

A brief thought on 'operations' and how it is used in EA (a topic I find myself occasionally returning to).

It struck me that operations work and non-operations work (within the context of EA) maps very well onto the concept of staff and line functions. Line function are those that directly advances an organization's core work, while staff functions are those that do not. Staff functions have advisory and support functions; they help the line functions. Staff functions are generally things like accounting, finance, public relations/communication, legal, and HR. Line functions are generally things like sales, marketing, production, and distribution. The details will vary depending on the nature of the organization, but I find this to be a somewhat useful framework for bridging concepts between EA and the broader world.

It also helps illustrate how little information is conveyed if I tell someone I work in operations. Imagine 'translating' that into non-EA verbiage as I work in a staff function. Unless the person I am talking to already has a very good understanding of how my organization works, they won't know what I actually do.

A bit of nice discussion/exploration about longtermism over on the AskPhilosophy subreddit. The short summary might be something like 'don't conflate longtermism with caring about future generations.' Since the EA forum seems to be mostly focused on things other than helping people understand philosophy, I thought it might be nice to share some stuff focused on that.

https://www.reddit.com/r/askphilosophy/comments/1ktiqm8/i_dont_get_the_controversy_with_longtermism 

I want to provide an alternative to Ben West's post about the benefits of being rejected. This isn't related to CEA's online team specifically, but is just my general thoughts from my own experience doing hiring over the years.

While I agree that "the people grading applications will probably not remember people whose applications they reject," two scenarios^[1] come to mind for job applicants that I remember^[2]:

• The application is much worse than I expected. This would happen if somebody had a nice resume, a well-put together cover letter, and then showed up to an interview looking slovenly. Or if they said they were good at something, and then were unable to demonstrate it when prompted.^[3]
• Something about the application is noticeably abnormal (usually bad). This could be the MBA with 20 years of work experience who applied for an entry level part-time role in a different city & country than where he lived^[4]. This could be the French guy I interviewed years ago who claimed to speak unaccented American English, but clearly didn't.^[5] It could be the intern who came in for an interview and requested a daily stipend that was higher than the salary of anyone on my team. If you are rude, I'll probably remember it. I remember the cover letter that actually had the wrong company name at the top (I assume he had recently applied to that company and just attached the wrong file). I also remember the guy I almost hired who had started a bibimbap delivery service for students at his college, so impressive/good things can also get you remembered.

A big caveat here is that memories are fuzzy. If John Doe applies to a job and I reject him and three months later we meet somehow and he says "Hi, I'm John Doe" I probably wouldn't remember that John Doe applied, nor that I rejected him (unless his name was abnormally memorable, or there was something otherwise notable to spark my memory). But if he says "Hi, I'm John Doe. I do THING, and I used to ACCOMPLISHMENT," then maybe I'd remember looking at his resume or that he mentioned ACCOMPLISHMENT in a cover letter. But I would expect more than 90% of applications I look at fade completely from my mind within a few days.

I think that it is rare. I have memories of less than a dozen specific applications out of the 1000s I've looked at over the years, and if you are self-aware enough to be reading this type of content then you probably won't have an application bad enough for me to remember.

The other thing I would gently disagree with Ben West on is about how getting rejected can be substantially positive.^[6] My rough perspective (not based on data, just based on impressions) is that it is very rare that getting rejected from a job application is a good thing. I imagine that there are some scenarios in which a strong candidate doesn't get hired, and then the hiring manager refers the candidate to another position. That would be great, but I also think that it doesn't happen very often. I don't have data on "of candidates that reach the 3rd stage or further of a hiring process but are not hired, what percent have some specific positive result from the hiring process," but my guess is that it is a low percentage.

Nonetheless, my impression is that the hiring rounds Ben runs are better than most, and the fact that he is willing to give feedback or make referrals for some rejected candidates already puts his hiring rounds in the top quartile or decile by my judgement.

To the extent that the general claim is "if you think you are a reasonable candidate, please apply," I agree. You miss 100% of the shots you don't take. If you are nervous about applying to EA organizations because you think a rejection could damage your reputation at that and other organizations, if your application is better than the bottom 5-10%, you have nothing to worry about. Have a few different people check your resume to make sure you haven't got any low hanging fruit improvements, and go for it.

1. ^{^}

   Actually, it is just two variations of a single "application is bad" scenario.

2. ^{^}

   I'm thinking about real applications I've seen for each of these things that I mention. But they are all several years old, from before I became aware of EA.

3. ^{^}

   I remember interviewing somebody in 2017 or so who was talking about his machine learning project, but then when I poked and prodded he had just cobbled together templates from a tutorial. And I've had this linguistically a few times, when a resume /cover letter claims a high level of competence in a language (bilingual, fluency, "practically native"), or something similarly high, yet the person struggles to converse in that language.

^{^}

I'm 100% open to people taking part-time jobs if they want them, and I don't mind someone "overqualified" doing a job. But if the job is in-person and requires you to speak the local language, you'll have to at least convince me why you are a good fit.

^{^}

His English was very good, far better than my French, and I assume that he spent many hours practicing and studying. But it was noticeably not American English, and that particular job required incumbents to be native English speakers.

^{^}

There is the general idea getting rejected from MEDIOCRE_COMPANY enabled you to apply and get hired at GREAT_COMPANY. But that seems bland/obvious enough that I'll set it aside.

Show all footnotes

I'm going to repeat something that I did about a year ago:

A very small, informal announcement: if you want someone to review your resume and give you some feedback or advice, send me your resume and I'll help. If you would like to do a mock interview, send me a message and we can schedule a video call to practice. If we have never met before, that is okay. I'm happy to help you, even if we are total strangers.

To be clear: this is not a paid service, I'm not trying to drum up business for some kind of a side-hustle, and I'm not going to ask you to subscribe to a newsletter. I am just a person who is offering some free informal help. I enjoy helping people bounce ideas around, and people whom I've previously helped in this way seemed to have benefited from it and appreciated it.

A few related thoughts:

• There are a lot of people that are looking for a job as part of a path to greater impact, but many people feel somewhat awkward or ashamed to ask for help. If I am struggling in a job hunt, I don't want to ask friends or professional contacts for help due to shame; I worry that they will think less of me for not being competent. So asking a stranger that you've never met and that isn't connected to your life can be a nice option.
• There is a lot of 'low-hanging fruit' for making a resume look better, from simply formatting changes that make a resume easier to understand to wordsmithing the phrasings. Sometimes you just need a helpful person to look with a critical eye.
• There is also something about 'playing the game.' I think of this something like informal coaching. Some people don't know that when you are asked about a time you had an interpersonal conflict, instead of telling about a time you had an interpersonal conflict you should instead tell about a time you had an interpersonal conflict and you resolved it and it makes you look good.

To the extent that people here care about being better people, this seems somewhat relevant: The Bluetooth Test and other keyholes to the soul, written by Adam Mastroianni. It consists of a few reflections on ways to be a better person, presented in the form of 'tests.' Each test is a situation that you probably have been in, or have observed others in. I've definitly observed people in EA fail in some of these (the Circle of Hell Test comes to mind most prominently, but that is probably moderated by an individual's own confidence and social skill). I view it as a nice nudge; a small reminder to keep making progress.

If you aren't interested in virtue (in the ethical sense, like virtue ethics), then this may not appeal to you.

I'm very pleased to see that my writing on the EA Forum is now referenced in a job posting from Charity Entrepreneurship to explain to candidates what operations management is, described as "a great overview of Operations Management as a field." This gives me some warm fuzzy feelings.

Anyone can call themselves a part of the EA movement.

I sort of don't agree with this idea, and I'm trying to figure out why. It is so different from a formal membership (like being a part of a professional association like PMI), in which you have a list of members and maybe a card or payment.

Here is my current perspective, which I'm not sure that I fully endorse: on the 'ladder' or being an EA (or of any other informal identity) you don't have to be on the very top rung to be considered part of the group. You probably don't even have to be on the top handful of rungs. Is halfway up the ladder enough? I'm not sure. But I do think that you need to be higher than the bottom rung or two. You can't just read Doing Good Better and claim to be an EA without any additional action. Maybe you aren't able to change your career due to family and life circumstances. Maybe you don't earn very much money, and thus aren't donating. I think I could still consider you an EA if you read a lot of the content and are somehow engaged/active. But there has to be something. You can't just take one step up the ladder, then claim the identity and wander off.

My brain tends to jump to analogies, so I'll use these to try and illustrate my examples:

• If I visit your city and watch your local sports team for an hour, and then never watch them play again, I can't really claim that I'm a fan of your team, can I? The fans are people who watch the matches regularly, who know something about the team, who really feel a sense of connection.
• If I started lifting weights twice per week, and I started this week, is it too early for me to identify as a weight lifter? Nobody is going to police the use of the term "weight lifter," but it feels premature. I'd feel better waiting until I have a regular habit of this activity before I publicly claim the identity.
• If I go to yoga classes, which sometimes involve meditation, and I don't do any other meditation outside of ~5 every now and then, can I call myself a meditator? Meh... If a person never intentionally or actively does meditation, and they just happen to do it when it is part of a yoga class, I would lean toward "no."

I've noticed that a lot of the research papers related to artificial intelligence that I see folks citing are not peer reviewed. They tend to be research papers posted to arXiv, papers produced by a company/organization, or otherwise papers that haven't been reviewed and published in respected/mainstream academic journals.

Is this a concern? I know that there are plenty of problems with the system of academic publishing, but are non-peer reviewed papers fine?

Reasons my gut feeling might be wrong here:

• many I'm overly focusing with a sort of status quo bias, overly concerned about anything different from the standard system.
• maybe experts in the area find these papers to be of acceptable quality.
• maybe the handful of papers I've seen outside of traditional peer review aren't representative, suggesting a sort of availability bias, and actually the vast majority of new AI-relevant papers that people care about are really published in top journals. I'm just browsing the internet, so maybe if I were a researcher in this area speaking with other researchers I would have a better sense of what is actually meaningful.
• maybe artificial intelligence is an area where peer review doesn't matter as much, as results can be easily replicated (unlike, say, a history paper, where maybe you didn't have access to the same archive or field site as the paper's author did).

In a recent post on the EA forum (Why I Spoke to TIME Magazine, and My Experience as a Female AI Researcher in Silicon Valley), I couldn't help but notice that a comments from famous and/or well-known people got lots more upvotes than comments by less well-known people, even though the content of the comments was largely similar.

I'm wondering to what extent this serves as one small data point in support of the "too much hero worship/celebrity idolization in EA" hypothesis, and (if so) to what extent we should do something about it. I feel kind of conflicted, because in a very real sense reputation can be a result of hard work over time,^[1] and it seems unreasonable to say that people shouldn't benefit from that. But it also seems antithetical to the pursuit of truth, philosophy, and doing good to weigh to the messenger so heavily over the message.

I'm mulling this over, but it is a complex and interconnected enough issue that I doubt I will create any novel ideas with some casual thought.

Perhaps just changing the upvote buttons to something more like this content creates nurtures a discussion space that lines up with the principles of EA? I'm not confident that would change much.

1. ^{^}

   Although not always. Sometimes a person is just in the right place at the right time. Big issues of genetic lottery and class matter. But in a very simplistic example, my highest ranking post on the EA forum is not one of the posts that I spent hours and hours thinking about and writing, but instead is one where I simply linked to a article about EA in the popular press and basically said "hey guys, look how cool this is!"