Unfortunately, I think the comments in the post (including one from a former volunteer) make a really compelling case that it takes a lot more than 5 hours to prevent a suicide. I think it takes at least hundreds and probably thousands of hours of calls.
"People who don't like being criticized are often going to be open about that fact"
[Just responding to this narrow point and not the comment as a whole, which contains plenty of things I agree with.]
Fwiw, I don't think this is true in this community. Disliking criticism is a bad look and seeming responsive to criticism is highly valued. I've seen lots of situations up close where it would have been very aversive/costly for someone to say "I totally disagree with this criticism and think it wasn't useful" and very tempting for someone to express lots of gratitude for criticism and change in response to it whether or not it was right. I think it's not uncommon for the former to take more bravery than the latter and I personally feel unsure whether I've felt more bias towards agreeing with criticism that was wrong or disagreeing with criticism that was right.
Agree with Ben that this makes it harder to find folks for leadership positions.
In addition to excluding shy awkward nerds, you're also actively selecting for a bunch of personality traits, not all of which are unalloyed positives.
By analogy, I think there's a very strong argument that very high levels of scrutiny are fair game for politicians but I'm not particularly thrilled with what that does to our candidate pool.
(I don't know of a great way to resolve this tension.)
This is correct. We ended up needing to resolve a couple issues related to the inquiry before we can file. We’ve stayed in touch with the Charity Commission about the delay.
People interested in this might be interested in @Peter McIntyre's project which lists 52 useful concepts. https://mcntyr.com/blog/52-concepts-cognitive-toolkit
Back in April 2020, I asked Greg Lewis for his take on the EA community's response to COVID on the 80k podcast. I can't remember anything about what we said but folks might find it interesting. https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/greg-lewis-covid-19-global-catastrophic-biological-risks/#the-response-of-the-effective-altruism-community-to-covid-19-021142
Congratulations!
Hey! You might be interested in this forum post on suicide hotlines from a while back. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Xh5oyGkngGjCmNhcP/how-impactful-is-being-a-suicide-hotline-volunteer
Unfortunately, I think the comments in the post (including one from a former volunteer) make a really compelling case that it takes a lot more than 5 hours to prevent a suicide. I think it takes at least hundreds and probably thousands of hours of calls.
"People who don't like being criticized are often going to be open about that fact"
[Just responding to this narrow point and not the comment as a whole, which contains plenty of things I agree with.]
Fwiw, I don't think this is true in this community. Disliking criticism is a bad look and seeming responsive to criticism is highly valued. I've seen lots of situations up close where it would have been very aversive/costly for someone to say "I totally disagree with this criticism and think it wasn't useful" and very tempting for someone to express lots of gratitude for criticism and change in response to it whether or not it was right. I think it's not uncommon for the former to take more bravery than the latter and I personally feel unsure whether I've felt more bias towards agreeing with criticism that was wrong or disagreeing with criticism that was right.
Agree with Ben that this makes it harder to find folks for leadership positions.
In addition to excluding shy awkward nerds, you're also actively selecting for a bunch of personality traits, not all of which are unalloyed positives.
By analogy, I think there's a very strong argument that very high levels of scrutiny are fair game for politicians but I'm not particularly thrilled with what that does to our candidate pool.
(I don't know of a great way to resolve this tension.)
Anybody else in addition to Fukuyama, Friedman, and Cummings who you think is good at doing the kind of thinking you're pointing to here?
Are there alternatives to your two factor model that seem particularly plausible to you?
No worries! It takes a couple clicks to get there.
Hey Larks,
[For transparency - I no longer work at EV.]
Yep - this was followed up on. Here are links to the pages for EV UK and EV US.
This is correct. We ended up needing to resolve a couple issues related to the inquiry before we can file. We’ve stayed in touch with the Charity Commission about the delay.