John Salter
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Participation1
Founder of Overcome, an EA-aligned mental health charity
Posts 14
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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.
How Fran goes out of her way to acknowledge the good, even after a genuinely awful experience, is a testament to her truth-seeking.
- She calls the CEO's final apology genuine and says she appreciated it.
- She's enthusiastic about the new HR hire.
- She praises her line manager who otherwise might have faced a ton of undue scrutiny.
Perhaps largely due to this, the comment section has remained unusually civil and constructive for something as scandalous. As bad as it would be to punish CEA for allowing this post to happen, it'd be even worse if despite it nothing changes. I really hope this works out for both parties!
As both a manager and someone who trains coaches to help people through burnout, I think your last three suggestions are killer!
Figure out what you're missing and ask for it. What do you need from your work to feel nourished? Autonomy? Positive feedback? A sense of completion? More social connection? Everyone is different here, and you'll learn over time what you need. But you have to actually ask for it and make it happen, rather than assuming the mission will eventually reward you.
I've never met anyone who has acted on this too soon. If you're slaying, you might be shocked how much you organisation will be willing to adjust to keep you. That said, every day you perform without adjustments strengthens the argument you don't need adjustments and every day you don't perform is evidence they'd be better off hiring someone else. It never gets easier. Schedule a meeting with someone ASAP!
Seek outside help. Find a coach or therapist you can talk to about your relationship to work, to impact, to this whole EA thing. For what it's worth, I had a therapeutic relationship during my burnout period. It didn't prevent me from burning out, but it still helped a bit, and if I’d been in less of a cage, maybe it could have prevented the worst.
If you're looking for something specific, consider doing an "energy audit". Essentially, track how you feel before and after different work activities. You'll likely identify that ~20% of your job (sometimes it's one particular colleague!) is responsible for ~50% of the energy being sucked from your life. In my case, one hour of admin drains me about as much as 6 of any other task. I hired someone to do that hour for me, and now I can work many more hours without tiring. If you'd like to do this with a coach, consider Overcome - the charity I run. It's free.
Other great options exist, especially if you got cash. The best predictor of how well it's likely to go is how much you like and respect the coach / therapist after a session or two. It should feel as though it's really aligned with your goals and preferences. If you're dreading showing up - move on!
Speak openly about what you're experiencing. Tell the people around you that you're struggling. This is harder than it sounds in a community that valorizes sacrifice and grit, but it's important.
We've coached 30+ EA founders. The advice that's produced the most impact per second is talking openly to their peers about their struggles. Besides being a necessary step to getting support from your friends and peers, the best best placed to support you, it's a massive public service. Others are in the same place you are now, hiding it because of shame.
If you don't have peers that you think would be open, you could consider Rethink Wellbeing - they gather a bunch of EAs who want to improve their mental health into groups that support each other. Last I spoke to them, they put a ton of effort into picking who goes into each group so everyone gets their needs met.
For Managers / Founders
One of my biggest ever mistakes as a founder was underestimating how seriously you need to take agreeable staff members dropping hints that they are unhappy. Schedule a meeting with every new hire about what they need to be happy. The framing I've found that works best is: "Everyone has selfish reasons to choose a job over others. For me personally, [3-5 unvirtuous ways my job satisfies me]. What about you?"
There's something about going first that unlocks more candid responses.
To respond briefly:
1. "First of all, the AI 2027 people disagree about the numbers".
That's irrelevant to your claim that you'd put "60% odds on the kind of growth depicted in AI 2027"
"you've predicted a 95-trillion-fold increase in AI research capacity under a 'conservative scenario.'" is false. I was just giving that as an example of the rapid exponential growth.
Here's what you wrote:
"This might sound outrageous, but remember: the number of AI models we can run is going up 25x per year! Once we reach human level, if those trends continue (and they show no signs of stopping) it will be as if the number of human researchers is going up 25x per year. 25x yearly increases is a 95-trillion-fold increase in a decade."
You then go on to outline reasons why it would actually be faster than that. If you aren't predicting this 95-trillion-fold increase, then either:
1. The trends do indeed show signs of stopping
2. The number of AI models you can run isn't really going up 25x YOY
We can talk all day, but words are cheap. I'd much rather bet. Bets force you to get specific about what you actually believe. They make false predictions costly, true ones profitable. They signal what you actually believe, not what you think writing will get you the most status / clicks / views / shares etc.
What's the minimum percentage chance of greater than 10% GDP growth in 2029 that you think is plausible given the trends you're writing about and how much are you willing to bet at those odds? I'd rather bet on an earlier year, but I'd accept 2029 if that's all you've got in you.
To be explicit, I'm trying to work out what you actually believe and what is just sensationalised.
This is a response more befitting Jim Cramer's Chihuahua than Jeremy Bentham's Bulldog.
I’d put about 60% odds on the kind of growth depicted variously in AI 2027...
According to AI 2027, before the end of 2027, OpenAI has:
- a “country of geniuses in a datacenter.” each:
- 75x more capable than the best human human at AI research
- "wildly superhuman" coding, hacking and politics
- 330K Superhuman AI Researcher copies thinking at 57x human speed"
In their slowest projection, by April 2028, OpenAI has achieved generalised superintelligence.
But you're only willing to bet US GDP grows just 10%, in just one year, across the next 15? The US did 7.4% in 1984. Within 10 years - five years before your proposed bet resolves - you've predicted a 95-trillion-fold increase in AI research capacity under a 'conservative scenario.' According to your eighth section, this won't cause major bottlenecks elsewhere that would seriously stifle growth.
If this is really the best bet you're willing to offer, one of three things is true:
- You're wildly risk averse
- You don't believe what you're writing
- You're misleadingly missing out the fine print (e.g. "I’d put about 60% odds on the kind of growth depicted variously in AI 2027" 2027
but not any time close to when they actually predict it will happen")
Which is it?
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.