I work as the Senior Development Manager at Rethink Priorities, where I'm in charge of communication with major donors and some key stakeholders of our work.
Thanks so much for the appreciation, Joanna! My colleague Hannah can send you some more details about our invertebrate research program. We have some additional exciting plans we can share with you.
Lovely to hear that you are considering RP for your donations next year. I work there in the development team. What convinced you that RP might be a good option for your donations, if you want to share?
Also, we are looking for board members to improve financial and legal oversight of our organization and increase accountability for our leadership: https://careers.rethinkpriorities.org/en/jobs/78036 (apply by Jan 13, 2023)
Very cool, thanks, Austin! We will publish another post on the Forum with updated funding goals by mid-November at the latest. I'm curious to see how our plans and ambitions might have changed by then. [Note: I'm working as Rethink Priorities' Director of Development.]
Yes, we were referring to several instances in which a major grantmaker either gave us only 25% or only 50% of the amount we requested in a specific grant application. Thanks for helping us clarify!
One thing the EA community can help us with is by encouraging suitable candidates to apply to our jobs. (New ones will be posted here and announced in our newsletter.) Some of our most recent hires have transitioned from fields which, at first sight, would seem unlikely to produce typical applicants. But we're open to anyone proving us they can do the job during the application process (we do blinded skills assessments). I think we're really not credentialist (i.e. we don't care much about formal degress if people have gained the skills that we're looking for). So whenever you read a job ad and think "Oh, this friend could actually do that job!", do tell them to apply if they're interested.
More importantly, I think EA community builders in all geographies and fields can greatly help us by training people to become good at the type of reasoning that's important in EA jobs. I particularly think of reasoning transparency, expressing degrees of (un)certainty and clarifying the epistemic status of what you write. Furthermore, probabilistic thinking and Bayesian updating. Also learning to build models and getting familiar with tools like Guesstimate and Causal. Forecasting also seems to be a valuable skill to train (e.g. on Metaculus). I think EAs anywhere in the world can set up groups where people train such skills together.
Thanks so much for the appreciation, Joanna!
My colleague Hannah can send you some more details about our invertebrate research program. We have some additional exciting plans we can share with you.
Lovely to hear that you are considering RP for your donations next year. I work there in the development team.
What convinced you that RP might be a good option for your donations, if you want to share?
Also, we are looking for board members to improve financial and legal oversight of our organization and increase accountability for our leadership: https://careers.rethinkpriorities.org/en/jobs/78036 (apply by Jan 13, 2023)
We have now also published a post about our impact, our strategy and our funding needs for 2023.
[I work as RP's director of development.]
Very cool, thanks, Austin!
We will publish another post on the Forum with updated funding goals by mid-November at the latest. I'm curious to see how our plans and ambitions might have changed by then.
[Note: I'm working as Rethink Priorities' Director of Development.]
It should link to the section above, we'll fix it. Thanks!
Maybe Lynette Bye would be interested in doing this type of research (or has already started doing it)?
I've seen Peter, our Co-CEO, highlight Netflix culture as something that inspired him: https://jobs.netflix.com/culture
Yes, we were referring to several instances in which a major grantmaker either gave us only 25% or only 50% of the amount we requested in a specific grant application.
Thanks for helping us clarify!
One thing the EA community can help us with is by encouraging suitable candidates to apply to our jobs. (New ones will be posted here and announced in our newsletter.) Some of our most recent hires have transitioned from fields which, at first sight, would seem unlikely to produce typical applicants. But we're open to anyone proving us they can do the job during the application process (we do blinded skills assessments). I think we're really not credentialist (i.e. we don't care much about formal degress if people have gained the skills that we're looking for). So whenever you read a job ad and think "Oh, this friend could actually do that job!", do tell them to apply if they're interested.
More importantly, I think EA community builders in all geographies and fields can greatly help us by training people to become good at the type of reasoning that's important in EA jobs. I particularly think of reasoning transparency, expressing degrees of (un)certainty and clarifying the epistemic status of what you write. Furthermore, probabilistic thinking and Bayesian updating. Also learning to build models and getting familiar with tools like Guesstimate and Causal. Forecasting also seems to be a valuable skill to train (e.g. on Metaculus). I think EAs anywhere in the world can set up groups where people train such skills together.