Joseph

3047 karmaJoined Pursuing a graduate degree (e.g. Master's)Working (6-15 years)Seeking work

Bio

Participation
7

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.

Sequences
1

How to do hiring

Comments
535

Answer by Joseph16
5
0
1

A lot of the happiness or unhappiness that people have in jobs tends to be situationally specific. Thus, maybe if you took on a similar job at a different organization you wouldn't find it so burdensome.

With the enormous caveat that I don't know all the details about your preferences and life situation, I think that Staying in my role or org - or do a lateral switch to a similar org would be the best option. You preserve some optionality (you can always quit or switch if/when you feel that you have hit a ceiling), you are able to continue to build your career capital and your financial capital (both of which can be deployed for positive impact), there are benefits to being associated with an established organization (not just benefits/perks, but also networks, social respect, and the assessment/judgement that people make of an individual based on organizational affiliation).

If you really don't enjoy all of the coaching, delegation, and general people management that comes with your role (Your "people, ugh" comment made me laugh), then it will probably be challenging to find a senior-level role that you'd be happy with. A big part of greater authority, influence, power, and impact in organizations tends to flow through people. There are exceptions of course, but it does seems to be the most common situation. A few off the top of my head ideas:

  • Perhaps you could find some sort of subject matter expert role, where you are a senior-level technical specialist, and you don't have to do much 'people stuff.'
  • Or maybe you could hire somebody to tag-team some of these tasks with you. Many organizations have HRBPs, but you might be able to hire an executive assistant, or even to partner with someone so that you are able to offload some of the tasks that you dislike. Imagine if somebody else could handle even just 40% or 50% of the hiring, developing, promoting, off-boarding, reallocating people,  and building alignment?
  • There might also be some level of tailoring your role, if you speak to your manager and tell them that you enjoy the role overall but some parts of it are things that bring you down. Maybe your job responsibilities could be adjusted.

Unless you have a very special situation, I would lean against a career reset (from an impact-focused perspective). You might find it challenging for people to give you a junior-level role doing something that you have never done before, or something that you haven't been focused on for many years. Do you actually have the skills to be competitive as a data scientist in a tech startup (or in some other role?), or would you need to get a few years of training and then complete alongside fresh grads?

It is really hard to find a high-impact volunteer role.

I'm not able to provide much insight regarding the options you listed, but I want to make a quick note about reaching your FIRE number and potential future donations. If you decided that you need X dollars per year before you feel comfortable FIREing, see if you can have enough in investments so that you have a little more than X per year in investment income, maybe 1.1X or 1.2X. That way you would be able to generate ever-increasing donations without lowering your own quality of life.

Some previous thoughts I threw together a while back that might help a little bit: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/sbtdPJpeKDtYLr2Zf/joseph-lemien-s-shortform?commentId=AWaKkWjBpiAnrtRAC 

I'm going to draw an analogy to finance/investments. If I check the level of the stock market every day or multiple times a day, I become acutely aware of increases and decreases. I might feel a rush of adrenaline when the stock market goes up by 2%, and an overwhelming feeling of despair if it drops by 2%. But if I stop checking it frequently, I can "zoom out" and see that the broader trend is upward. It is true that there is a lot of variation on a short timeline, but over decades the trend is quite clearly upward. Like all analogies, this falls somewhat short in a variety of ways, but the idea I want to drive home is that "the news is just incredibly depressing" because we look at the short-term news. We allow ourselves to be emotionally buffeted and battered by what is happening this day or this week rather than paying attention to larger trends. If it really is vital for a job to stay up to date on the latest news, then at least try to keep some perspective: what is and isn't within your control, and this too shall pass.

One useful framing can be asking yourself if there is anything you can do to affect this, asking why you care about this particular issue, and asking if there is any purpose/outcome in focusing it. I think that people dying in a civil war in Yemen is horrible because I detest suffering in general, but I have no influence to affect that at all, and my worrying about it doesn't serve any purpose. I think that the world will be a worse place if USAID funding is reduced, but there isn't any benefit to me stressing out about that. There are a million things that I would like to see different in the world, but most of them are very much outside my scope of influence.

Thanks for sharing your list. Several of these are new to me, and look useful.

I want to second the recommendation for Everything. It is much faster and easier than the built-in search function on a Windows computer, and it also allows for a variety of parameters to the search. If I want to quickly list out all the files I have related to a particular topic, Everything is what I use. As a simple example "Documents\Docs to Read\" !pdf market|promo would search for files within the Docs to Read folder that have either market or pomo in the title (which would capture marketing and promotion), excluding and PDFs. You can even use regular expressions.

I also want to second the recommendation for Libby for free, legal access to audiobooks and digital books through public libraries.

(my apologies for commenting here without having read your academic paper)

I suspect that two major elements prevent anti-capitalist ideas from being more popular within EA.

  1. First, it tends to be an issue that draws a lot of negative attention as a result of being far outside the Overton window.[1] I'm guessing that if influential EA organizations or figures came out against capitalism, that would do more harm than good: other EA organizations or figures  would disagree, and many newspaper articles would be published ridiculing EA. While reputation and status is not the goal of EA, it is (much like other types of power) a useful tool for achieving altruistic goals.
  2. Second, most of us lack a coherent vision of what else we would use as an economic system. The majority of people in EA have lived with a capitalistic economy and society their entire lives. Although some anthropologists or scholars might have a clear conception, I'm guessing that most of us have a lot of ignorance regarding what we would replace capitalism with.[2]

And that isn't even getting into the tractability element.

  1. ^

    If the leader of some organization (say, the Catholic church) were to make a statement that capitalism is bad for people and a different economic system should pursued, many Catholics would (to varying degrees) disagree, disrespect, or leave the catholic church. Even people who are not part of the catholic church would talk about how ridiculous the church's statement is. It would make it harder to convert people to Catholicism. 

  2. ^

    I have vague conceptions of worker's communes from documentaries I've watched, and I've read plenty about ways that non-capitalistic systems have failed, but I have a paucity of examples for ways that non-capitalistic systems have succeeded. I'd love to live in an intentional community with respect and equality and each contributing according to their ability, but I have no idea how that would work on a society-wide scale. So although the idea appeals to me, it is hard for me to envision how it would actually function.

I'm considering of doing a sort of pub quiz (quiz night, trivia night, bar trivia) for EA in the future. If you have some random trivia knowledge that you think would be good for such an occasion, please send it to me.

I'm not so much looking for things along the lines of "prove how brilliantly intelligent" you are, but more so fun/goofy/silly trivia with a bit of EA vibes mixed in. Hard/obscure questions are okay,[1] easy questions are okay, serious questions are okay,[2] goofy questions are okay[3], and tricky questions without any clear answer are welcome.[4] Questions with pedantic, and debatable answers are also okay.

Ideally, the questions will have some sort of EA-relevance, but I'm not planning to be strict about this. Some questions that are more 'general knowledge' might end up happening. Maybe this would be online, or maybe it would be at an in-person event; that is yet to be decided.

  1. ^

    Immanuel Kant was a man of habit. Every morning he did the same thing. There was one day which he broke his routine habits; why?

  2. ^

    What for-profit company has done the most to decrease human access to food, water, and medicine?

  3. ^

    What percent of EAG attendees wear animal costumes (either partial or full) while attending EAG?

  4. ^

    Which country has the longest coastline?

That strikes me as very reasonable, especially considering the likelihood and foreseeability. Especially since the education examples you mentioned really are currently capable of transforming parts of the world.

I suspect this might be two distinct uses of "AI" as a term. While GPT-type chatbots can be helpful (such as in the educational examples you refer to), they are very different from artificial general intelligence of the type that most AI alignment/safety work is expecting to happen.

To paraphrase AI Snake Oil,[1] it is like one person talking about vehicles while discussing about how improved spacecraft will open up new possibilities for humanity, and a second person mentions how vehicles are also helping his area because cars are becoming more energy efficient. While they do both fall under the category of "vehicles," they are quite different concepts. So I'm wondering if this might be verging near to talking past each other territory.

  1. ^

    The full quote is this: "Imagine an alternate universe in which people don’t have words for different forms of transportation—only the collective noun “vehicle.” They use that word to refer to cars, buses, bikes, spacecraft, and all other ways of getting from place A to place B. Conversations in this world are confusing. There are furious debates about whether or not vehicles are environmentally friendly, even though no one realizes that one side of the debate is talking about bikes and the other side is talking about trucks. There is a breakthrough in rocketry, but the media focuses on how vehicles have gotten faster—so people call their car dealer (oops, vehicle dealer) to ask when faster models will be available. Meanwhile, fraudsters have capitalized on the fact that consumers don’t know what to believe when it comes to vehicle technology, so scams are rampant in the vehicle sector. Now replace the word “vehicle” with “artificial intelligence,” and we have a pretty good description of the world we live in."

I don't have an answer to your question, but this post from a few years ago might help build context and understanding.

The 2013 debate between Gary Francione and Bruce Friedrich was also quite illuminating  to watch (although I need to remind myself that just because one side is represented by a person who appears more composed or who is a better debater, it doesn't demonstrate that side's truth/accuracy).

Superficially, it sounds similar to the idea of charter cities. The idea does seem (at face value) to have some merit, but I suspect that the execution of the idea is where lots of problems occur.

So, practically aside, it seems like a massive amount of effort/investment/funding would allow a small country to progress rapidly toward less suffering and better life.

My general impression is that "we don't have a randomized control trial to prove the efficacy of this intervention" isn't the most common reason why people don't get helped. Maybe some combination of lack of resources, politics & entrenched interests, and trade-offs are the big ones? I don't know, but I'm sure some folks around here have research papers and textbooks about it.

Load more