I think there's a ton of obvious things that people neglect because they're not glamorous enough:
1. Unofficially beta-test new EA stuff e.g. if someone announces something new, use it and give helpful feedback regularly 2. Volunteer to do boring stuff for impactful organisations e.g. admin 3. Deeply fact-check popular EA forum posts 4. Be a good friend to people doing things you think are awesome 5. Investigate EA aligned charities on the ground, check that they are being honest in their reporting 6. Openly criticise grifters who people fear to speak out against for fear of reprisal 7. Stay up-to-date on the needs of different people and orgs, and connect people who need connecting
1. Get a pilot up and running NOW, even if it's extremely small.
You will cringe at this suggestion, and think that it's impossible to test your vision without a budget. Everyone does this at first, before realizing that it's extremely difficult to stand out from the crowd without one. For you, maybe this is a single class delivered in a communal area. 30 students attending regularly, demonstrating a good rate of progress, is a really compelling piece of evidence that you can run a school.
- Do you have the resilience and organisation skills it takes to independently run a project? - Will people actually use it? - Can you keep your staff? - Can you cost-effectively produce results?
It can compelling prove the above, whilst having a ton of other benefits.
2. YOU need to be talking to funders NOW
Don't fall into the trap of trying to read their minds. Get conversations with them. Get their take on your idea. Ask what their biggest concerns would be. Go address them. Repeat. Build relationships with them and get feedback on your grant proposals before submitting them.
As the founder, its YOUR job to raise money. Don't delegate it. It'll take forever to get them to understand your organisation well enough, they won't be as sufficiently motivated to perform, and you won't learn. This is going to be a long-term battle that you face every year. You need to build the network, skills & knowledge to do it well.
3. Be lean AF
The best way to have money is not to spend it. Both you and your charity may go without funding for months or years. Spend what little money you have, as a person and as a charity, very slowly. The longer you've been actively serving users, the easier fundraising gets. It's about surviving until that point.
4. Funders will stalk your website, LinkedIn, and social media if they can
As much as possible, make sure that they all tell the same story as your grant application - especially the facts and figures.
5. When writing your proposals, focus on clarity and concreteness above all else
Bear the curse-of-knowledge in mind when writing. Never submit anything without first verifying other people can understand it clearly. Write as though you're trying to inform, not persuade.
- Avoid abstractions - State exact values ("few" -> "four", "lots" -> "nine", "soon" -> "by the 15th March 2024") - Avoid adjectives and qualifiers. Nobody cares about your opinions. - Use language that paints a clear, unambiguous image to the readers mind
OLD: mean student satisfaction ratings have increased greatly increased since programs began and we believe it's quite reasonable to extrapolate due to our other student-engagement enhancements underway and thus forecast an even greater increase by the end of the year"
NEW: When students were asked to rate their lessons out of 10, the average response was 5. Now, just three months later, the average is 7/10. Our goal is to hit 9/10 by 2025 by [X,Y,Z].
I think schlep blindness is everywhere in EA. I think the work activities of the average EA suspiciously align with activities nerds enjoy and very few roles strike me as antithetical. This makes me suspicious that a lot of EA activity is justified by motivated reasoning, as EAs are massive nerds.
It'd be very kind of an otherwise callous universe to make the most impactful activities things that we'd naturally enjoy to do.
What's a good heuristic for knowing if you're being self-sacrificial to the point of negative returns for the thing you're being self-sacrificial for? I'm interested in things people have actually used and found to work in practice, either for themselves or others.
If nobody is working on a problem, there's usually a reason:
It's not a real problem
It's already solved - you just don't know it yet
There's some other reason not to work on it (e.g. nobody will fund it)
Heuristics for finding good problems others will miss
You could realistically be the best in the world at it, even with 100+ people working on it. Rewards (money, status, influence) go disproportionately to the best people in a space. You can channel those rewards into impact.
It's high-risk, high-reward. Most people are overly risk-averse.
It takes a long time (people overly discount the future) and has a strong feedback loop, so you know you're actually making progress.
Solving it would cost the incumbents money. Permanent solutions threaten expensive, recurring short-term ones e.g. if Ozempic's makers had a one-shot vaccine with the same effect, they wouldn't sell it.
You can otherwise establish that people avoid it for non-impact reasons (e.g. it's low status, boring)
Only powerless entities have the problem e.g. animals, people in extreme poverty).
Existing solutions are terrible but still widely used. strong validation that it's a big problem.
We operate a mental health coaching service for charity founders. We've worked with 40 or 50 now. We get the inside details people don't share publicly for PR / relationship reasons.
Looking back, almost everyone agrees retrospectively that their co-founder breakups happened too slowly. You won't hear about this publicly because it's a terrible career / PR move to be anything but freakishly civil towards your current and former co-founders.
Especially if you're pairing co-founders as part of your programme, I'd urge you to consider the opposite stance. If it's not working out, make it easier for people to break up amicably and quickly.
Two practical things you can do as an incubator:
1. Above all else, prioritise founder selection and pairing. This the only fuck-up that cannot be repaired. Good duos can self-train or learn from experience, raise their own money, pivot out of a shitty TOC.
2. Encourage them to express disagreements / unhappiness promptly. Of the co-founder breakups that seemed preventable in retrospect, almost all involved feelings getting bottled up and hardening into irrecoverable resentment. The more agreeable the founders, the greater the risk this happens.
0. Consider only enterprises that wouldn't be appealing to purely for-profit investors 1. Model the business's existence as being the creation of a stream of lives saved per year. 2. Model it's effectiveness by using the philanthropic equivalent of discounted cash-flow analysis 3. Model the cost of investment as the difference between the returns generated by this business and what your money would otherwise have been doing. 4. Divide the present day equivalent by the cost of investment to get the cost-effectiveness.
Below are two toy examples. Opus 4.8 can one-shot the relevant calculations, so I'll skip their explanations. Use the prompt "What is the Net Present Value of [something valuable] per year, starting Y years from now. If philanthropic, use GiveWell's current discount rate? (4%). If financial, use a 6% discount rate."
AMF Vs Social Enterprise
Q: Say AMF saves a life for £4k. A social enterprise could saves 1 life a year forever if you donate £200k to it right now. Which is better?
A: AMF
1 life saved a year = 25 lives right now. 25 lives right now would cost you £4k per life * 25 lives = £100k. Therefore, donating to AMF is twice as good.
AMF vs Startup
Q: Donate to AMF or invest $500k in an a YC startup that, if it works, would return 10x over 5 years and save 100 lives a year every year. If it doesn't work though, nothing of value is created whatsoever.
A: Probably Startup
YC success rate = 5% 100 lives a year * 5% chance of happening = 5 lives per year saved on average. 5 lives per year, starting from 5 years from now-> 107 lives saved right now. 10x return / 0.05 chance of materialising / 5 year worth of discounting = ~$200k dollars Cost to invest = $500k - $200k = $300k
107 lives for $300k dollars; $2.8k dollars per life. So, better than $4k via AMF.
I think there's a ton of obvious things that people neglect because they're not glamorous enough:
1. Unofficially beta-test new EA stuff e.g. if someone announces something new, use it and give helpful feedback regularly
2. Volunteer to do boring stuff for impactful organisations e.g. admin
3. Deeply fact-check popular EA forum posts
4. Be a good friend to people doing things you think are awesome
5. Investigate EA aligned charities on the ground, check that they are being honest in their reporting
6. Openly criticise grifters who people fear to speak out against for fear of reprisal
7. Stay up-to-date on the needs of different people and orgs, and connect people who need connecting
In generally, looking for the most anxiety provoking, boring, and lowest social status work is a good way of finding impactful opportunities.
1. Get a pilot up and running NOW, even if it's extremely small.
You will cringe at this suggestion, and think that it's impossible to test your vision without a budget. Everyone does this at first, before realizing that it's extremely difficult to stand out from the crowd without one. For you, maybe this is a single class delivered in a communal area. 30 students attending regularly, demonstrating a good rate of progress, is a really compelling piece of evidence that you can run a school.
- Do you have the resilience and organisation skills it takes to independently run a project?
- Will people actually use it?
- Can you keep your staff?
- Can you cost-effectively produce results?
It can compelling prove the above, whilst having a ton of other benefits.
2. YOU need to be talking to funders NOW
Don't fall into the trap of trying to read their minds. Get conversations with them. Get their take on your idea. Ask what their biggest concerns would be. Go address them. Repeat. Build relationships with them and get feedback on your grant proposals before submitting them.
As the founder, its YOUR job to raise money. Don't delegate it. It'll take forever to get them to understand your organisation well enough, they won't be as sufficiently motivated to perform, and you won't learn. This is going to be a long-term battle that you face every year. You need to build the network, skills & knowledge to do it well.
3. Be lean AF
The best way to have money is not to spend it. Both you and your charity may go without funding for months or years. Spend what little money you have, as a person and as a charity, very slowly. The longer you've been actively serving users, the easier fundraising gets. It's about surviving until that point.
4. Funders will stalk your website, LinkedIn, and social media if they can
As much as possible, make sure that they all tell the same story as your grant application - especially the facts and figures.
5. When writing your proposals, focus on clarity and concreteness above all else
Bear the curse-of-knowledge in mind when writing. Never submit anything without first verifying other people can understand it clearly. Write as though you're trying to inform, not persuade.
- Avoid abstractions
- State exact values ("few" -> "four", "lots" -> "nine", "soon" -> "by the 15th March 2024")
- Avoid adjectives and qualifiers. Nobody cares about your opinions.
- Use language that paints a clear, unambiguous image to the readers mind
OLD: mean student satisfaction ratings have increased greatly increased since programs began and we believe it's quite reasonable to extrapolate due to our other student-engagement enhancements underway and thus forecast an even greater increase by the end of the year"
NEW: When students were asked to rate their lessons out of 10, the average response was 5. Now, just three months later, the average is 7/10. Our goal is to hit 9/10 by 2025 by [X,Y,Z].
Good luck!
I think schlep blindness is everywhere in EA. I think the work activities of the average EA suspiciously align with activities nerds enjoy and very few roles strike me as antithetical. This makes me suspicious that a lot of EA activity is justified by motivated reasoning, as EAs are massive nerds.
It'd be very kind of an otherwise callous universe to make the most impactful activities things that we'd naturally enjoy to do.
Was there anything in the book that you found especially helpful?
What's a good heuristic for knowing if you're being self-sacrificial to the point of negative returns for the thing you're being self-sacrificial for? I'm interested in things people have actually used and found to work in practice, either for themselves or others.
Based
I regret that particular phrasing. I wish I instead wrote:
"Heuristics for coming up with ideas for how to spend your time, and then prioritizing between them"
Neglectedness is often a trap.
If nobody is working on a problem, there's usually a reason:
Heuristics for finding good problems others will miss
We operate a mental health coaching service for charity founders. We've worked with 40 or 50 now. We get the inside details people don't share publicly for PR / relationship reasons.
Looking back, almost everyone agrees retrospectively that their co-founder breakups happened too slowly. You won't hear about this publicly because it's a terrible career / PR move to be anything but freakishly civil towards your current and former co-founders.
Especially if you're pairing co-founders as part of your programme, I'd urge you to consider the opposite stance. If it's not working out, make it easier for people to break up amicably and quickly.
Two practical things you can do as an incubator:
1. Above all else, prioritise founder selection and pairing. This the only fuck-up that cannot be repaired. Good duos can self-train or learn from experience, raise their own money, pivot out of a shitty TOC.
2. Encourage them to express disagreements / unhappiness promptly. Of the co-founder breakups that seemed preventable in retrospect, almost all involved feelings getting bottled up and hardening into irrecoverable resentment. The more agreeable the founders, the greater the risk this happens.
Sorry for the unsolicited advice. Best of luck!
I think something like this could work:
0. Consider only enterprises that wouldn't be appealing to purely for-profit investors
1. Model the business's existence as being the creation of a stream of lives saved per year.
2. Model it's effectiveness by using the philanthropic equivalent of discounted cash-flow analysis
3. Model the cost of investment as the difference between the returns generated by this business and what your money would otherwise have been doing.
4. Divide the present day equivalent by the cost of investment to get the cost-effectiveness.
Below are two toy examples. Opus 4.8 can one-shot the relevant calculations, so I'll skip their explanations. Use the prompt "What is the Net Present Value of [something valuable] per year, starting Y years from now. If philanthropic, use GiveWell's current discount rate? (4%). If financial, use a 6% discount rate."
AMF Vs Social Enterprise
Q: Say AMF saves a life for £4k. A social enterprise could saves 1 life a year forever if you donate £200k to it right now. Which is better?
A: AMF
1 life saved a year = 25 lives right now. 25 lives right now would cost you £4k per life * 25 lives = £100k. Therefore, donating to AMF is twice as good.
AMF vs Startup
Q: Donate to AMF or invest $500k in an a YC startup that, if it works, would return 10x over 5 years and save 100 lives a year every year. If it doesn't work though, nothing of value is created whatsoever.
A: Probably Startup
YC success rate = 5%
100 lives a year * 5% chance of happening = 5 lives per year saved on average.
5 lives per year, starting from 5 years from now-> 107 lives saved right now.
10x return / 0.05 chance of materialising / 5 year worth of discounting = ~$200k dollars
Cost to invest = $500k - $200k = $300k
107 lives for $300k dollars; $2.8k dollars per life. So, better than $4k via AMF.