I recommended a 3-month grant to Tereza to explore independent research on how she can use her career in general for EA work, and for work in shelters in particular. In general, I am happy with the progress so far. I decided (with Tereza’s permission) to share my feedback publicly because in recent forum threads people have expressed unhappiness with not seeing feedback from grantmakers that they can learn from. I hope that publicly sharing this feedback might be helpful for at least one person other than Tereza. Please note that sharing this feedback is not a promise to share further feedback, including to accepted grantees, nor would I default to sharing feedback in public in the future.
I’ve read Tereza’s weekly notes, had a call with her, and reviewed this post. As of writing this comment, I did not have a chance to dive in and carefully evaluate her actual research to date.
Broadly, I am happy with Tereza’s progress so far. I think she’s making steady progress on a) doing research that’s relevant to work on shelters, b) other research that’s good for helping her with making an informed career choice, and c) work that doesn’t look like research but has high potential impact in terms of advancing her career or high-priority projects (e.g. this post, other communications about her work, trying to find and liaising with relevant founders for projects, etc).
Arguably most importantly, she seems to be in good spirits and making steady daily progress. This in itself is a nontrivial task:
[initial evidence you’re on track for a research career] You’re successfully devoting time to this and creating content. ([Holden expects] this to be the hardest milestone to hit for many—it can be hard to simply sustain motivation and productivity given how self-directed this work often needs to be.)
Independent research that’s unsupervised or only lightly supervised is often really hard to start or stay motivated in, especially for people without prior graduate academic or independent part-time experience in doing this. So her motivation and consistency itself is a good sign.
Readers may also find it helpful to read some of my own (lightly-edited) notes about this grant:
What she’ll do
Tereza Flídrová, Cambridge architecture grad with 2 years of work experience, and FTX EA fellow, to do more thinking on shelters specifically and how her background can be useful for EA work in general (e.g. also look at her she can contribute to stuff like selecting coworking spaces and pandemic-proof office spaces).
She wants to work 20h/week for 3 months.
Case for this grant
Tereza seems sharp and really excited about shelters. I haven’t found extremely good stuff for her to do that’s directly useful for my work on shelters, but having her independently follow her interests in this space (with light supervision from me) seems like it should have a pretty strong career capital building case.
Biggest reservations
My biggest reservation is that having her focused on shelters may be worse for her time/career capital use than free exploration. However, a) both of us thought that having a more focused target would be better for her motivation, b) it’d be easier for me to give light guidance and advice on this specific target than something very broad, and c) I communicated with her pretty explicitly about how she should consciously think about balancing general exploration with shelter-specific thinking.
Another reservation I have is that she doesn’t seem naturally “attuned”/drawn to the most important problems or solutions, but I think a) she can get better with practice, and b) not everybody needs to be master strategists and there are plenty of useful work elsewhere.
Projections of how the grant might go
poorly: Tereza wastes time and feels kinda dispirited about the whole thing
just OK: Tereza did some stuff that’s mildly useful for advancing shelters (mostly by plugging in a few holes that are not critical but nice to fill), but this does not extremely advance her career capital or interests.
well: Tereza did stuff that’s object-level quite useful for shelters. She gets really excited about EA stuff and starts thinking a bunch about further EA stuff to do.
very well: Tereza a) becomes an early employee of our shelter project, b) leads a different ambitious project with lower barrier of entry to shelters but still very exciting, for example either in community building or biosecurity (physical protection), or c) discovers she really likes EA research and continues doing generalist EA research, either independently or part of a respected EA org.
I recommended a 3-month grant to Tereza to explore independent research on how she can use her career in general for EA work, and for work in shelters in particular. In general, I am happy with the progress so far. I decided (with Tereza’s permission) to share my feedback publicly because in recent forum threads people have expressed unhappiness with not seeing feedback from grantmakers that they can learn from. I hope that publicly sharing this feedback might be helpful for at least one person other than Tereza. Please note that sharing this feedback is not a promise to share further feedback, including to accepted grantees, nor would I default to sharing feedback in public in the future.
I’ve read Tereza’s weekly notes, had a call with her, and reviewed this post. As of writing this comment, I did not have a chance to dive in and carefully evaluate her actual research to date.
Broadly, I am happy with Tereza’s progress so far. I think she’s making steady progress on a) doing research that’s relevant to work on shelters, b) other research that’s good for helping her with making an informed career choice, and c) work that doesn’t look like research but has high potential impact in terms of advancing her career or high-priority projects (e.g. this post, other communications about her work, trying to find and liaising with relevant founders for projects, etc).
Arguably most importantly, she seems to be in good spirits and making steady daily progress. This in itself is a nontrivial task:
Independent research that’s unsupervised or only lightly supervised is often really hard to start or stay motivated in, especially for people without prior graduate academic or independent part-time experience in doing this. So her motivation and consistency itself is a good sign.
Readers may also find it helpful to read some of my own (lightly-edited) notes about this grant: