Sure, we're just not hiring for the same role repeatedly or on a predictable schedule, especially not entry-level roles. Like other orgs, we do work tests and trial periods, which are the fit-testing part of the hiring procedure. We often hire for pretty specialized roles, usually not entry-level, and right now we don't necessarily know the next role we're going to hire for, so we don't know what we'd want to look for in an intern. Those trial periods are useful lead-ins for the specialized jobs we've recently filled, they're just not what I would call an internship. When I think of internships-as-work-training, I think of the model at consultant, financial, or engineering firms, which know they're going to bring in new staff each year to fill entry-level roles that are very similar to each other, because they have a steady stream of work that fits a pattern into which they can predictably slot new people over the course of a year. 

As David mentions below, 1Day also does periodically employ students or very early-career people for specific projects, which can look pretty similar to a paid internship in practice. But we can't know that we'll have a suitable full-time role available by the time those contracts are up. Basically, we sometimes do things that look like internships (and sometimes we even call them internships) and we also have a trial period for jobs, but there's not good overlap between what we have interns/student contractors do and what we've hired for lately.

I have colleagues in other organizations who are involved in ASHRAE; one contributed to the development of 241! 241 is great, and to be very clear, my job is not to promote far-UV, it is to promote indoor air cleaning. Far-UV gets a lot of attention in my social circles because it is exciting and new, and people have a lot of questions about that specifically--this post is meant for the very narrow case of answering questions I've directly gotten about far-UV.

Great to see your thinking laid out this way, and of course thank you for your interest in our (1Day Sooner/Rethink Priorities) report! 

It was useful to see the discussion of possible overhype from the funding side of the field, since I don't have insight into funding decisions. On the other hand, there are reasons funders might want to focus attention on far-UV, without disregarding the usefulness of conventional-wavelength GUV: since far-UV requires more research than conventional-wavelength systems at this time, but might ultimately be easier to install, the far-UV research payoff could be very large for increasing adoption of GUV in general. I expect that conventional-wavelength systems would benefit from investment into R&D for easier installation, but that's not obviously a place for philanthropic funding. The safety studies necessary for far-UV are too expensive for the current market size, so if far-UV research does not get more philanthropic funding than conventional-wavelength GUV, far-UV safety studies might not be performed in a rigorous way. However, I would agree that funders should be wavelength-agnostic if they are directly funding installations.

Because of the challenges facing comprehensive far-UV analysis, I was surprised that you didn't think it would be very impactful for philanthropists to fund studies--broadly speaking, I agree about the lack of expertise, but this is a small enough field that the informed voices are fairly well-known within the field and I think interested philanthropic bodies would be able to consult those informed opinions. Again, I don't have insight into the funding side of the process, so that may be optimistic. I am certainly biased, since 1Day Sooner does regularly apply/advocate for philanthropic funding for technical research! On the reverse side, personal experience has left me pessimistic about policy advocacy for GUV research, but your report has swayed me somewhat to at least consider the fact that there is not a concerted, heavyweight policy advocacy effort in this area.   

I appreciated the argument on capturing the bulk of the risk by later deployment; it was a very helpful presentation of the case. I do think that there is a learning-by-doing element to GUV rollout (for either type of GUV), where rollout and analysis in select environments is necessary for better understanding broader GUV use cases. Identifying those environments is an element of the current 1Day Sooner IAQ project. I also would love to see the cost of GUV installation fall sooner rather than later in order to address endemic disease burden worldwide, e.g. via widespread installation in TB clinics. (I'm fully aware that this use case might remain impractical, but it's nice to consider the potential to address global health! Of course if a funder is specifically trying to fight TB, I’d still recommend sinking their money into vaccine research or treatment.)

Finally, this report was extremely helpful for a current 1Day Sooner project! We're working on a report to assess the potential for market shaping techniques to accelerate the adoption of indoor air cleaning technology. This post, and writing up this comment, really helped clarify some of my thinking about the possible directions we'd been tossing around, so a huge thank you for that! 

I was originally not sure if I would donate this year, as my living expenses skyrocketed. I wound up donating to The Human League--the donation was much smaller than ones I've sent to charities in previous years, but THL was a new charity for me. I realized I have been underweighting animal welfare relative to my values, due to my discomfort thinking about it. I decided to donate to THL both because I was convinced by the cost-effectiveness argument, and as an expression of my ongoing effort to bring my actions more in line with my values. Here's hoping that each new year finds me more ethical and compassionate than the last. :)

There is heavy geographic concentration, but the secondary concentrations include Boston, DC, and NYC in my vague sense of things. It looks like organizations are self-added to the newsletter, so these are just the ones that have volunteered to provide updates. I can say that we're hiring for roles with a DC preference: 1daysooner.org/jobs. 

This is stellar advice! What's wild is, I have accidentally stumbled on each of these techniques at various points and just never really consciously identified the technique, which meant it wasn't repeatable at will. This post really crystallizes important options for me; definitely feeling some sheepish "shoulda figured that one out" combined with relief that you did it for me. THANK YOU.

Great theme idea. I'll aim to post (working title) "Impostor syndrome can be valuable information."

Personally I have also been skeptical of Nonlinear's work, BUT before anything else, I just want to say I have not carefully kept track of Nonlinear's work and this is a pretty uninformed vague impression. 

I'm not skeptical because of the prizes specifically, I just think they had ideas that sounded not particularly fruitful, or more costly than they were worth. I do think that there was a lot of theoretical discussion around that type of prize setup before Nonlinear tried it, and I respect the ethos of just try-it-and-see-what-happens for something like that, with minimal downside risk. (Notably, if nobody claims the prize, the money isn't spent and can just be used for other work.) The best-sounding concepts in the world still have to be tested before we should build lots of infrastructure on them, so I see the prize stuff as a fairly inexpensive experiment, and I think often good coordinators are undervalued. My skepticism is more that despite Nonlinear's high profile as coordinators, I have no evidence of Nonlinear's impact, and I'm unconvinced that they've found good pressure points for coordination in general. I have also judged them more harshly for this than I otherwise would, due to what I perceive as a gimmicky and overconfident style to some of their written materials. This style unavoidably puts up my guard, but its influence on my assessment may be unfair of me!