I recently spent ~2 hours reflecting on RP’s longtermism department’s wins, mistakes, and lessons learned from our first year[1] and possible visions for 2022. I’ll lightly adapt the “lessons learned for Michael specifically” part of that into a comment here, since it seems relevant to what you’re trying to get at here; I guess a more effective person in my role would match my current strengths but also already be nailing all the following things. (I guess hopefully within a year I’ll ~match that description myself.)
(Bear in mind that this wasn’t originally written for public consumption, skips over my “wins”, etc.)
“Focus more
Concrete implications:
Probably leave FHI (or effectively scale down to 0-0.1 FTE) and turn down EA Infrastructure Fund guest manager extension (if offered it)
Say no to side things more often
Start fewer posts, or abandon more posts faster so I can get other ones done
Do 80⁄20 versions of stuff more often
Work on getting more efficient at e.g. reviewing docs
Reasons:
To more consistently finish things and to higher standards (rather than having a higher number of unfinished or lower quality things)
And to mitigate possible stress on my part, [personal thing], and to leave more room for things like exercise
And to be more robust against personal life stuff or whatever
(I mean something like: My current slow-ish progress on my main tasks is even with working parts of each weekend, so if e.g. I had to suddenly fly back to Australia because a family member was seriously ill, I’d end up dropping various balls I’ve somewhat committed to not dropping.)
Maybe trust my initial excitement less regarding what projects/posts to pour time into and what ideas to promote, and relatedly put more effort into learning from the views and thinking of more senior people with good judgement and domain expertise
E.g., focus decently hard on making the AI gov stuff go well, since that involves doing stuff Luke thinks is useful and learning from Luke
Maybe pay more attention to scale and relatedly to whether an important decision-maker is likely to actually act on this
Some people really do have a good chance of acting in very big ways on some stuff I could do
But by default I might not factor that into my decisions enough, instead just being helpful to whoever is in front of me or pursuing whatever ideas seem good to me and maybe would get karma
Implement standard productivity advice more, or at least try it out
I’ll break this down more in the habits part of my template for meetings with Peter
[I’m also now trying productivity coaching]
Spend less time planning projects in detail, and be more aware things will change in unexpected ways
Be more realistic when making plans, predictions, and timelines
(No, really)
Including assuming management will take more time than expected, at least given how I currently do it
Spend more time, and get better at, forming and expressing hot takes
Spend less time/words comprehensively listing ideas/considerations/whatever
More often organise posts/docs conceptually or at least by importance rather than alphabetically or not at all
Be more strict with myself regarding exercise and bedtime
Indeed optimise a fair bit for research management careers rather than pure research careers
This was already my guess when I joined, but I’ve become more confident about it”
[1] I mean the first year of the current version of RP’s longtermism department; Luisa Rodriguez previously did (very cool!) longtermism work at RP, but then there was a gap between her leaving (as a staff member; she’s now on the board) and the current staff joining.
Thank you for being vulnerable enough to share this!
It sounds like you’re focusing a lot on working on the right things (and by extension, fewer things)? And then becoming more efficient at the underlying skills (ex: explaining, writing, etc.) involved?
Yeah, though I’m also aiming to work on fewer things as “a goal in itself”, not just as a byproduct of slicing off the things that are less important or less my comparative advantage. This is because more focus seems useful on order to become really excellent at a set of things, ensure I more regularly actually finish things, and reduce the inefficiencies caused by frequent task/context-switching.
I’m not as aggressive at problem/question/cause prioritization as I could be. I can see improvements of 50-500% for someone who’s (humanly) better at this than me.
I’m not great at day-to-day time management either. I can see ~100% improvement in that regard if somebody is very good at this.
I find it psychologically very hard to do real work for >30h/week, so somebody with my exact skillset but who could productively work for >40h/week without diminishing returns would be >33% more valuable.
I pride myself of the speed and quantity I write, but I’m slower than eg MichaelA, and I think it’s very plausible that a lot of my outputs are still bottlenecked by writing speed. 10-50% effectiveness improvement seems about right.
I don’t have perfect mental health and I’m sometimes emotional. (I do think I’m above average at both). I can see improvements of 5-25% for people who don’t have these issues.
I’m good at math* but not stellar at it. I can imagine someone who’s e.g. a Putnam Fellow be 3-25% more effective than me if they chose to work on the same problems I work on (though plausibly they’d be more effective because they’d gravitate towards much mathier problems; otoh ofc not all/most mathy problems are very important)
Relatedly, obviously I’m not the smartest person in the world. I don’t have a good sense of how much e.g. being half a standard deviation smarter than me would make someone a better researcher, anything from “not a lot” to “very high” seems plausible to me. ??? for quantitatively how much effectiveness this adds.
*Concretely, I did a math major in a non-elite liberal arts college, which wasn’t too hard for me. I perceived both my interns last summer as probably noticeably better at math than me (one was a math major at Columbia and the other at MIT). Certainly they know way more math.
Thank you for the specific estimates and the wide variety of factors you considered :-) It may be that @MichaelA is also working primarily on improving cause prioritisation. I guess maybe you’ve both discussed that :D
The person who replaces me has all my same skills but in addition has many connections to policymakers, more management experience, and stronger quantitative abilities than I do.
I’ve adjusted imperfectly to working from home, so anyone who has that strength in addition to my strengths would be better. I wish I knew more forecasting and modeling, too.
(less helpful answer, will think of a better one later)
Hmm Rethink follows pretty reasonable management practices, and is maybe on the conservative side for things like firing unproductive employees.
You’re fired tomorrow...
So I can’t really imagine being fired for ineffectiveness without warning on a Saturday. The only way this really happens is if I’m credibly accused of committing a pretty large crime or sexually harassing a RP colleague or maybe faking data or something like that.
To the best of my knowledge I have not done these things.
...and replaced by someone more effective than you. What do they do that you’re not doing?
Hmm since I haven’t done these things, I must be set up to be falsely accused for a crime in a credible way. So the most likely way someone can replace me and be more effective on this dimension is by not making any enemies who’s motivated enough to want to set them up for murder or something.
Is the most important part of your question the “fired” part or the “more effective” part? Like would you rather I a) answer by generating stories of how I might be fired and how somebody can avoid that, or b) answer what can people do to be more effective than me?
To any staff brave enough to answer :D
You’re fired tomorrow and replaced by someone more effective than you. What do they do that you’re not doing?
I recently spent ~2 hours reflecting on RP’s longtermism department’s wins, mistakes, and lessons learned from our first year[1] and possible visions for 2022. I’ll lightly adapt the “lessons learned for Michael specifically” part of that into a comment here, since it seems relevant to what you’re trying to get at here; I guess a more effective person in my role would match my current strengths but also already be nailing all the following things. (I guess hopefully within a year I’ll ~match that description myself.)
(Bear in mind that this wasn’t originally written for public consumption, skips over my “wins”, etc.)
“Focus more
Concrete implications:
Probably leave FHI (or effectively scale down to 0-0.1 FTE) and turn down EA Infrastructure Fund guest manager extension (if offered it)
Say no to side things more often
Start fewer posts, or abandon more posts faster so I can get other ones done
Do 80⁄20 versions of stuff more often
Work on getting more efficient at e.g. reviewing docs
Reasons:
To more consistently finish things and to higher standards (rather than having a higher number of unfinished or lower quality things)
And to mitigate possible stress on my part, [personal thing], and to leave more room for things like exercise
And to be more robust against personal life stuff or whatever
(I mean something like: My current slow-ish progress on my main tasks is even with working parts of each weekend, so if e.g. I had to suddenly fly back to Australia because a family member was seriously ill, I’d end up dropping various balls I’ve somewhat committed to not dropping.)
Maybe trust my initial excitement less regarding what projects/posts to pour time into and what ideas to promote, and relatedly put more effort into learning from the views and thinking of more senior people with good judgement and domain expertise
E.g., focus decently hard on making the AI gov stuff go well, since that involves doing stuff Luke thinks is useful and learning from Luke
E.g., it was good that I didn’t bother to finish and post my research question database proposal
Maybe pay more attention to scale and relatedly to whether an important decision-maker is likely to actually act on this
Some people really do have a good chance of acting in very big ways on some stuff I could do
But by default I might not factor that into my decisions enough, instead just being helpful to whoever is in front of me or pursuing whatever ideas seem good to me and maybe would get karma
Implement standard productivity advice more, or at least try it out
I’ll break this down more in the habits part of my template for meetings with Peter
[I’m also now trying productivity coaching]
Spend less time planning projects in detail, and be more aware things will change in unexpected ways
Be more realistic when making plans, predictions, and timelines
(No, really)
Including assuming management will take more time than expected, at least given how I currently do it
Spend more time, and get better at, forming and expressing hot takes
Spend less time/words comprehensively listing ideas/considerations/whatever
More often organise posts/docs conceptually or at least by importance rather than alphabetically or not at all
Be more strict with myself regarding exercise and bedtime
Indeed optimise a fair bit for research management careers rather than pure research careers
This was already my guess when I joined, but I’ve become more confident about it”
[1] I mean the first year of the current version of RP’s longtermism department; Luisa Rodriguez previously did (very cool!) longtermism work at RP, but then there was a gap between her leaving (as a staff member; she’s now on the board) and the current staff joining.
Thank you for being vulnerable enough to share this!
It sounds like you’re focusing a lot on working on the right things (and by extension, fewer things)? And then becoming more efficient at the underlying skills (ex: explaining, writing, etc.) involved?
Yeah, though I’m also aiming to work on fewer things as “a goal in itself”, not just as a byproduct of slicing off the things that are less important or less my comparative advantage. This is because more focus seems useful on order to become really excellent at a set of things, ensure I more regularly actually finish things, and reduce the inefficiencies caused by frequent task/context-switching.
Some ways someone can be more effective than me:
I’m not as aggressive at problem/question/cause prioritization as I could be. I can see improvements of 50-500% for someone who’s (humanly) better at this than me.
I’m not great at day-to-day time management either. I can see ~100% improvement in that regard if somebody is very good at this.
I find it psychologically very hard to do real work for >30h/week, so somebody with my exact skillset but who could productively work for >40h/week without diminishing returns would be >33% more valuable.
I pride myself of the speed and quantity I write, but I’m slower than eg MichaelA, and I think it’s very plausible that a lot of my outputs are still bottlenecked by writing speed. 10-50% effectiveness improvement seems about right.
I don’t have perfect mental health and I’m sometimes emotional. (I do think I’m above average at both). I can see improvements of 5-25% for people who don’t have these issues.
I’m good at math* but not stellar at it. I can imagine someone who’s e.g. a Putnam Fellow be 3-25% more effective than me if they chose to work on the same problems I work on (though plausibly they’d be more effective because they’d gravitate towards much mathier problems; otoh ofc not all/most mathy problems are very important)
Relatedly, obviously I’m not the smartest person in the world. I don’t have a good sense of how much e.g. being half a standard deviation smarter than me would make someone a better researcher, anything from “not a lot” to “very high” seems plausible to me. ??? for quantitatively how much effectiveness this adds.
*Concretely, I did a math major in a non-elite liberal arts college, which wasn’t too hard for me. I perceived both my interns last summer as probably noticeably better at math than me (one was a math major at Columbia and the other at MIT). Certainly they know way more math.
Thank you for the specific estimates and the wide variety of factors you considered :-) It may be that @MichaelA is also working primarily on improving cause prioritisation. I guess maybe you’ve both discussed that :D
The person who replaces me has all my same skills but in addition has many connections to policymakers, more management experience, and stronger quantitative abilities than I do.
I’ve adjusted imperfectly to working from home, so anyone who has that strength in addition to my strengths would be better. I wish I knew more forecasting and modeling, too.
(less helpful answer, will think of a better one later)
Hmm Rethink follows pretty reasonable management practices, and is maybe on the conservative side for things like firing unproductive employees.
So I can’t really imagine being fired for ineffectiveness without warning on a Saturday. The only way this really happens is if I’m credibly accused of committing a pretty large crime or sexually harassing a RP colleague or maybe faking data or something like that.
To the best of my knowledge I have not done these things.
Hmm since I haven’t done these things, I must be set up to be falsely accused for a crime in a credible way. So the most likely way someone can replace me and be more effective on this dimension is by not making any enemies who’s motivated enough to want to set them up for murder or something.
Quick clarifying question:
Is the most important part of your question the “fired” part or the “more effective” part? Like would you rather I a) answer by generating stories of how I might be fired and how somebody can avoid that, or b) answer what can people do to be more effective than me?
Part b) is more important. Part a) is just to make the question more real to the person answering.