Joseph Lemien
Bio
Participation7
I have work experience in HR and Operations. I read a lot, I enjoy taking online courses, and I do some yoga and some rock climbing. I enjoy learning languages, and I think that I tend to have a fairly international/cross-cultural focus or awareness in my life. I was born and raised in a monolingual household in the US, but I've lived most of my adult life outside the US, with about ten years in China, two years in Spain, and less than a year in Brazil.
As far as EA is concerned, I'm fairly cause agnostic/cause neutral. I think that I am a little bit more influenced by virtue ethics and stoicism than the average EA, and I also occasionally find myself thinking about inclusion, diversity, and accessibility in EA. Some parts of the EA community that I've observed in-person seem not very welcoming to outsides, or somewhat gatekept. I tend to care quite a bit about how exclusionary or welcoming communities are.
I was told by a friend in EA that I should brag about how many books I read because it is impressive, but I feel uncomfortable being boastful, so here is my clunky attempt to brag about that.
Unless explicitly stated otherwise, opinions are my own, not my employer's.
How others can help me
I'm looking for interesting and fulfilling work, so if you know of anything that you think might be a good fit for me, please do let me know.
I'm looking for a place to be my home. If you have recommendations for cities, for neighborhoods within cities, or for specific houses/communities, I'd be happy to hear your recommendations.
How I can help others
I'm happy to give advice to people who are job hunting regarding interviews and resumes, and I'm happy to give advice to people who are hiring regarding how to run a hiring round and how to filter/select best fit applicants. I would have no problem running you through a practice interview and then giving you some feedback. I might also be able to recommend books to read if you tell me what kind of book you are looking for.
Posts 19
Comments450
I do hope that people learn about behavioral norms before visiting a new place or interacting with people from other places, but it is an unrealistic expectation to expect (for example) for all people joining an event in COUNTRY_A to know about and adapt to COUNTRY_A-style norms of communication and interaction.
Little books of "Learn COUNTRY_A culture and customs while you are on your flight" have existed for decades; the knowledge is generally easily available. But most people simply don't bother (unaware? aware but deprioritizing?). I imagine that if there was an EAGx event in COUNTRY_A and a Google Doc of a few cultural norms to be aware of was shared with attendees in advance, some of the easier and more clear gaffes could be avoided (such as wearing a tank top and shorts in a religious temple, or not offering to pay for a shared meal, or making a comment about a person's weight).
There are some small things we can do to reduce the risk of poor CCIs occurring, but of course we will never reduce the risk all the way to zero. Realistically, I suppose we need to simply accept that some level of poor CCIs will occur.
One thing that seems notable to me about these cross-cultural communication/norms issues is how often they are simply a result of ignorance. If I live in a country for several years I'm probably going to learn that people view it as rude to do some things, and I'll see how the Romans do it. But if I am only visiting for a short period of time, I will probably be profoundly ignorant of how people there view various behaviors. If I haven't previously spent time living in, thinking about, or reading about different cultures, I might not even be aware that people have different norms.[1]
Before reading this, I didn't know that it was a norm in Malaysia to not greet people in a elevator or a corridor at an apartment. I almost certainly would be guilty of violating this norm if I were to visit Malaysia.
- ^
Or at most, I would be aware of relatively obvious artifacts and things that are easy to describe, such as how some cultures tend to take showers in the evening/morning, people eat using forks/chopsticks, greeting a person involves a handshake/hug/kiss/two kisses/three kisses. But it is much harder to describe similar underlying assumptions and values (relationships to parents, happiness with conformity, desire for uniqueness, etc.). I find the Edgar Schein 3-level framework for culture very simple, but useful for starting to think about these things.
It can be tricky to explore some of these topics that overlap between cultural background, nationality, how others perceive us, differing norms, assumptions, and communication styles. It can be hard to parse between what we view as the gradient between reasonable and unreasonable assumptions (such as predicting that a Black American in Chengdu probably doesn't speak much Mandarin, as opposed to confidently assuming that an Asian of unknown nationality in Chicago couldn't possibly have grown up speaking English).
Nonetheless, I also really like that there are people in this community who notice and who are aware of subtle things.
I'm glad to read explorations of these kinds of things, and I'm glad that you've spent all this time and effort exploring it and sharing some of your findings. Thank you.
This is somewhat parallel to an idea I read on Stack Exchange years ago. I don't always take notes on comments on internet forums and remember them years later, but some of them are good enough that I find it worth reminding myself from time to time, and this was one of them.
One of the most true things I've ever read is that every job pays you in two ways. It pays your bills, and it pays you in knowledge so you can hold a job later (even the same job after the market changes). If either of those stops, it's time to get a new job. And yes; I left my last job because there was no promotion path. In my case, they offered me the moon and a promotion path after I handed in my resignation, but it was too late--they'd been telling me the same thing for over a year, and I had no proof they'd actually follow up on it.
It came from a comment on this question, and was written by user62890. It isn't an exact parallel to the "cool" and "status" that Leila Clark is describing, but it is roughly similar enough that I thought I'd share.
Yes, older people are somewhat overlooked. While there are some efforts to reach out to specific older individuals or to certain types/categories of older people (such as very high net worth individuals or family offices), in general people who discover EA after university are discovering EA 'on their own,' not through the types of more formalized 'recruitment efforts' that happen at some universities. I do think that there is a lot of experience and knowledge that we are missing out on.
While I do see the downsides of this, I don't necessarily think that it is the wrong choice. It might be; I'm not sure. Setting aside by own biases in favor of older people, a few things strike me as pragmatic reasons to deprioritize/overlook older people to some extent.[1]
- Much like habits and identities in other areas of life, it is simply harder to convince older people to join something new. (This is a generalization, of course)
- Older people tend to have more commitments. Family and career can easily prevent someone from attending events, volunteering, taking a week off to attend a conference, doing a multi-hour work sample test, etc.
- Older people tend to be less geographically/institutionally concentrated in a single location than younger people. In my mind, this is the most important. If you want to get the word out to 18-to-22-year-olds in any particular city (in the USA at least), you can put up a dozen posters and share an image in a dozen chat groups, and a decent percent of your target audience will see your message. If I pick a different age range, say 58-to 62-year-olds, I think that it would take a lot more effort to each the same percent of that population.[2] How many places would you have to put up posters or share images?
So while I don't like it very much, I do think there are pretty understandable factors that make this a reasonable decision. But if you could get a GWWC style advertisement in the AARP magazine to convince senior citizens to funnel their charity dollars toward more impactful charity and to spend some of their free time mentoring junior people, I'd be a fan. I'd love to see EA meetups where most of the people are ages 30 to 60, and where we can all be at home in in bed before 10pm.[3]
- ^
Although we could certainly discuss to what extend would be ideal. Maybe devoting 30% of community building efforts/resources to older wouldn't be a good choice, but what about 0.5%, or what about 3%? I don't have an answer for this. I haven't done the thinking nor the number crunching to figure out what makes sense.
- ^
I think of paved roads as an analogy: my grandparents lived in a rural area with no paved roads. The road they lived on was dirt and gravel. They got electricity and plumbing later than most other places, too. The local government decided it simply wasn't worth it to spend all that money and effort to pave one or two miles of road for so few people. Those resources could be better spent elsewhere.
- ^
For anyone not familiar, there is a stereotype/cliché of older people going to sleep early, and I'm sort of teasing about that.
I think this post serves as a very good reminder. Thank you for writing this.
I like the EA community a lot, but it is helpful to have a reminder that we aren't so special, we don't have all the answers, and we should be willing to seek 'outside' help when we lack the experience or expertise. It is easy to get too wrapped up in a simplistic narrative.
if they’re so smart, where are the nobel laureates? The famous physicists?
This seems like a variation on "If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich?" The responses to these two prompts seems quite similar. Being smarter tends to lead toward more money (and more Nobel prizes), all else held equal, and there are many factors aside from intelligence that influence these outcomes.
There does seem to be some research supporting the idea that non-intelligence factors play the predominant role in success, but I have to confess that I have not studied this area, and I only have vague impressions as to how reality functions here.
Having that space/slack that strikes me as very valuable. Maybe it is somewhat analogous to the idea of psychological safety that gets talked about so often when discussing company culture.
Some of my most frustrating inter-personal situations involved me being judged for getting something wrong in which (in my perspective) it was totally reasonable and understandable for me to make a guess and get it wrong.