This is an update from the Centre for Effective Altruism on our work in the fourth quarter of 2020. Most of this information was not included in our annual review, which we began to draft in October.
Summary
Our mission is to build a community of students and professionals acting on EA principles, by nurturing high-quality discussion spaces.
In Q4, we began to focus on achieving our annual goals.
Going into the quarter, we had a much clearer scope and goals than before. We began to focus more on those goals, and test out new programs that could further them, like online fellowships and student-focused events. We also reviewed our progress in 2020, made plans for 2021, and began a major fundraising campaign.
Huw Thomas joined the groups team. Now that CEA’s scope and goals are clear, I think that we’re in a position to make several excellent hires. This will be a major focus for next year.
Org-wide/executive updates
Joan (our managing director) took over our groups and recruitment work, and Katie (formerly head of groups) became the interim head of community health (while we search for a permanent manager). This will mean each goal has a single owner, and will also allow Joan and Katie to play to their strengths.
We spun Funds and Giving What We Can out of CEA, as planned.
Progress towards our goals
Goal 1: We aim to help onboard new students and young professionals, particularly from highly-ranked universities and underrepresented groups.[1] We plan to do this by following a cohort of students through the academic year,[2] and helping them to engage with quality content, make connections, and take action.
We’ve begun to search for examples of EAs who became highly engaged through our work in 2020 to pressure test our ability to measure this target. So far, we’ve found 2 highly-engaged EAs from the Student Summit, 3 from CBGs, and 6 from introductory fellowships.
One example is Neel who has just completed an AI Alignment visiting fellowship at FHI, and is about to start a research engineering internship at DeepMind. He graduated top of the year in Maths at Cambridge and is an IMO Gold Medallist. He has previously interned at Jane Street and is considering earning to give. In his response to the CBG group member survey in 2019, he estimated attending 20+ of the Cambridge group’s events in the last 12 months. He also mentioned the following:
“[As a result of] the EA Cambridge retreat last year […] and contacts I made, I ended up interacting a lot with the EA London community (met >20 new people and made >5 good new friends), went to a CFAR workshop, EAG, got 80K coaching and went to an AIRCS workshop. I think that being involved in helping to run/organise EA Cambridge events was pretty helpful for me to become more agenty and to feel more emotionally invested in things (eg, doing outreach/giving careers advice helped me clarify my own thoughts). As a result of this much stronger exposure to the EA Community, ideas like changing my career plan and working on things like AI Safety feel much more plausible and OK on an emotional level, and more likely to happen.”
Goal 2: We aim to increase the total value that highly-engaged EAs[3] get from EA discussion spaces by 30%, by producing more high-quality content (which will encourage continued learning) and helping them make more connections.
We are still developing a dashboard to track the number of engagement hours and new connections.
Forum and event engagement time continued to grow this quarter (after a strong Q3).
Goal 3: We aim to mitigate key risks to EA’s and CEA’s success.
The Groups team advised group organizers on handling conflicts within the group, handling tense discussions, etc.
The Community Health team advised several other EA-align organizations about best practices in HR and diversity, equity, and inclusion.
We worked with Rethink Priorities to plan a survey measuring US students’ inclination/understanding of EA.
Other program updates
We continue to pilot introductory and advanced fellowships in groups (especially at highly-ranked universities), and we’re planning to promote fellowships more broadly online.
We had ~100-150 attendees at three groups training sessions, and >75 calls with organizers.
We made 5 Community Building Grants, including a new one at Harvard.
We ran two major online events and began to plan a more goal-focused program of events for next year.
80,000 Hours hosted a popular careers open thread on the Forum.
We began to import Pablo Stafforini’s effective altruism wiki (currently in development) onto the EA Forum.
Program updates
Groups
We help local group organizers by advising them, providing resources they can use, and creating online spaces where they can share resources and support each other.
Progress this quarter
University groups
Huw Thomas will be joining CEA in a Groups Associate role.
Huw will develop resources for EA university groups, and aid them with strategy and planning.
Before joining CEA, Huw studied Maths and Philosophy at the University of Oxford, and spent two years funded by a CEA community building grant to work on various projects, including leading the EA Oxford student group and launching the Student Career Mentoring Program.
Support
Our contractors ran 2 strategy workshops for a total of 8 university group leaders from Stanford, Harvard, and Yale. (The average likelihood of recommending the event was 8.8/10.)
Joan hosted a call for university groups with Community Building Grants in December to align on plans for 2021.
Resources
300+ students (the majority from highly-ranked universities) participated in an introductory fellowship in Q4. Fellowships are 6-8 week courses for learning more about topics related to effective altruism and discussing them in a weekly facilitated group.
We reviewed and drafted learning objectives for the In Depth Fellowship. This led to some major changes in our approach; we plan to launch an updated version in January. We surveyed students who had taken the introductory fellowship, and 130 of them expressed interest in the In Depth Fellowship. So did 425 people who took the EA Survey, and 68 Student Summit attendees. (Note: these may double- or triple-count some people).
Community Building Grants (CBGs) allow group organizers to professionally engage in local community building activities.
We made the following grants:
EA Brown − 1 FTE, 6 months
EA Harvard − 0.5 FTE, 5 months
EA Czechia − 2 FTE, 12 months
EA Stanford − 1.4 FTE, 12 months
EA Geneva − 2 FTE, 12 months
Support
With our help, EA Norway hosted a training call for CBG recipients on user-centered design in December.
Broad resources & support
Resources
We drafted a website for making group-organizer-led online fellowships available to the public.
We’re working with Emma Abele (EA Brown) to pilot this in Q1.
We’re planning to offer introductory and advanced fellowships, and may expand offerings in the future based on data we’ve gathered about what students are looking for.
We hope that this will make high-quality groups-style content accessible to anyone who wants to join.
Trainings at the Student Summit:
~125 group organizers[4] attended a workshop from Joan on goals for uni groups
~100 organizers attended a session on how to teach group members about EA principles
~150 organizers attended a workshop on using career resources in groups
These resources have now been published on the EA Hub to help other organizers.
We have also updated our Giving Season activity resources in collaboration with Giving What We Can.
Events
We have passed information on 600+ attendees from the Student Summit to group organizers, so that the organizers can follow up with anyone they’re not already in regular contact with.
Operations
The Groups Survey has been completed (327 people participated).
The groups list is up to date online and in our CRM.
$5,060 in basic group funding has been disbursed.
Calls
In Q4, the Groups team had 75 calls with group organizers, plus several more casual, unlogged calls.
Demand data
We now have information about areas of demand for further engagement from the Student Summit, the Intro Fellowship post survey, and the EA Survey. We’ve shared this information with CBG recipients. Sample below:
Reflections
Highlights
Huw will add a lot of capacity and relevant experience to the team.
We’re excited about the pilot online courses platform: we think that local group organizers could refer their members to this while still holding lower-effort events. This would allow them to provide quality content without spending much time: “not enough time” is the most common bottleneck for organizers (according to the 2020 EA Groups Leaders survey).
For the first time, we have data on what people interested in EA want from groups, which we can share with group leaders.
Setbacks
Mentorship for group organizers: we think that group organizers might benefit more from calls with people who can give them direction and feedback on their plans for the group, rather than calls with core EAs who can advise them on EA ideas and career plans (but might have fewer ideas about group plans). This is partly because we’ve found that mentees often aren’t sure what kind of support they want.
We had an objective to align on a set of 2021 goals and metrics for the CBG programme based on CEA’s objectives; this was deprioritized due to the management change between Joan and Katie.
Community Health
The Community Health team aims to reduce key risks to the EA community’s future. Their work includes fostering a healthy culture, improving diversity, mitigating harm done by risky actors, reducing the harm of negative PR, and identifying risks to early field-building.
This quarter, the team handled:
7 inquiries or cases around media stories about EA
6 concerns around interpersonal problems such as sexual harassment
4 cases where we advised on situations in early field building (geographies or fields where EA is just getting established)
24 other situations where we advised groups, organizations, and individuals on situations like conflicts between staff or group members, online conflicts, best practices in HR, personal or mental health problems, and improving diversity, equity, and inclusion within organizations.
Progress this quarter
PR
We have worked with the Operations team to set up systems to vet and monitor donations.
We have worked with Rethink Priorities to set up a repeatable survey of college students to monitor EA awareness and inclination in the US.
Diversity, equity, and inclusion
We read the available chapters of Will MacAskill’s in-progress book on long termism, and provided support to Will’s team on finding other reviewers who could advise on diversity, equity, and inclusion in the book.
We followed up individually with 13 promising Black / Latino leads from the Student Summit.
Culture and epistemics
We provided input on the epistemics section of the In Depth Fellowship
Advised and interviewed group organizers on handling group discussions about the relationship between EA and social justice; we are currently preparing a resource we hope will be helpful for them.
Reflections
We had some internal confusion between teams about the process of reaching out to Black and Latino students after the Student Summit; for a time, we weren’t sure whether to prioritize having conversations ourselves, or finding a person who would be well-suited to having many such conversations in the future.
Events
Events enable attendees to make new connections, learn about core concepts, share and discuss new research, and coordinate on projects.
This report covers:
The EA Student Summit, October 24-25
EAGxAsia Pacific, November 21-22
EA Student Summit
Early results from this event were covered in our annual report.
Some additional updates:
There were 1.07 meetings per student through our event app (848 meetings in total), but people who filled out our survey reported 4.3 new connections (average). We think this is mostly because people who filled out the survey engaged more with the event, although some people were also booking meetings outside of the event app.
94% of participants in our mentorship program that responded to our survey intend to take at least one significant action (e.g. Giving What We Can pledge, career change) in the next 6 months.
89% of highly-engaged EAs (who attended the event mostly to advise students) report that their expectations for the event were met or exceeded.
EAGxAsia-Pacific
EAGxAsia-Pacific, held virtually in November, evolved out of in-person conferences planned by organizers in Singapore and Australia. We also aimed to promote connections between community members in the Asia-Pacific region and community members in other places. Unlike our previous virtual events, the event was scheduled for the convenience of people in Asia-Pacific time zones. 526 people attended the event. As the event was held recently, we do not yet have an in-depth analysis of the outcomes.
Attendees reported 4.4 new connections in the post-event survey (on average). We succeeded in attracting >200 attendees from outside the Asia-Pacific region, which we hope will build international connections.
Reflections
Attendees seem to be increasingly more demographically diverse than EA Survey respondents; we’ve seen diversity increase as events have gone virtual and become more accessible to people in a variety of countries.
Attendees’ likelihood to recommend Student Summit to other people was lower than the average for in-person events, while EAGxAsia-Pacific scores were more in line with in-person events:
Total hours of engagement across events for 2020:
Content engagement seems to drop quite a bit over the course of virtual events — it seems harder to maintain viewership, compared to in-person events. We will consider how to remedy this for future virtual events (for example, with shorter events, fewer talks, or more interactive sessions).
The Events Team is increasingly focused on designing events around specific types of users, in support of CEA’s org-wide goals. We hope that this exploration will help us to find more impactful event formats. The team has spent the last few weeks designing a portfolio of events for 2021. We also continue to receive advice from experts on which in-person events (if any) will be sensible to hold in 2021 given COVID-19.
EA Forum
The Effective Altruism Forum (EA Forum) aims to be the central place for collaborative discussion about how to do the most good.
Progress this quarter
We continued our experiment with open threads by adding monthly progress threads in addition to welcome threads. These have been moderately successful (usually getting a dozen or so comments). Open threads can be found here.
80,000 Hours posted an open careers thread which drew dozens of participants, many of whom had never posted on the Forum before.
Pablo Stafforini received a grant from the Long Term Future Fund to create a Wikipedia-like collection of content focused on EA. We’ve been working with Pablo to host his work on the Forum’s tagging/wiki system. We began uploading his work this quarter. We hope that the combination of Pablo’s full-time work and the Forum’s network effects will allow this wiki to be maintained and used much more consistently than past efforts of this kind.
We imported the following features from LessWrong:
You can comment on wiki/tag pages.
The new text editor is now the default option.
You can embed content from Elicit, YouTube, and Metaculus.
EA Forum-specific features:
Posts now appear on the front pageby default, rather than having to be moved there by moderators.[5] We expect this to create a more pleasant experience for both authors and moderators.
A post’s social media preview image is now the first image in the post rather than the Forum logo (we’ve passed this feature along to LessWrong). We hope that this will drive more engagement from social media.
We link to the EA Hub’s groups page in the sidebar (thus hopefully increasing referrals to local groups).
Metric status
Our primary metric is the number of hours engaging with content on the Forum. This metric is up 13% (30-day trailing average view hours is 3452 on December 14 versus 3066 on October 1). Most of that growth comes from a couple of unusually successful posts in early December. From the beginning of October to the end of November, views actually dropped slightly.
You can see other metrics here. We ended the quarter up on most other metrics, particularly the number of comments, notably due to the 80,000 Hours career advice open thread (which has 247 comments as of this writing). 80,000 Hours mentioned they might do these open threads quarterly if there was interest.
Reflections
We had planned to set up OAuth in Q4 (to allow a single sign-in for the Forum and EA Funds/Giving What We Can, and maybe other things in the future). We decided not to do this because the LessWrong team was already working on it.
As with most content platforms, our success is driven by the popularity of our users’ posts, which have a relatively fat-tailed distribution. Regular open threads seem like a promising approach (particularly if we can sustain the type of engagement we got in the career advice thread).
So far, tracking view hours seems like a good metric; it seems consistent with other metrics and our subjective sense of how the Forum is doing
Notably, page views reported by Google Analytics have increased 74% this quarter, so we are no longer in the situation where our internal metric is growing a lot but page views are flat.
Funds
Effective Altruism Funds (EA Funds) aims to be an easy and effective way for EA-aligned donors to donate.
EA Funds is now operating independently from CEA, more information here.
Operations
The Operations team provides the finance, legal, HR, grantmaking, office management, and fundraising support that enables CEA, 80,000 Hours, Forethought Foundation, EA Funds, and Giving What We Can to run efficiently.
Progress this quarter
We managed CEA’s annual review and fundraising process, publishing our annual review much earlier than normal and reaching out to many potential donors. We also ran financial analysis for all five organizations within the CEA legal entity (80,000 Hours, Forethought Foundation, etc). This process was much easier than last year, because our financial systems are now much more efficient.
We moved out of our former Oxford office, and pushed forward on the preparation of the new office. The project has been delayed by 6 weeks due to some complications with internal electrics, and we expect to take possession of the building on the 14th of January.
We improved the user interface of our grant management system. Our grants contractor is now the only person managing that system, which has freed up capacity for the rest of the team.
We began to scope out a project to develop a CRM for CEA’s projects.
Key Metrics
Average score from key internal users: 8.7/10 (measured annually in November)
Grantee satisfaction with grant experience: 4.6/5
Grantee satisfaction with time taken to process grant: 4.7/5
Finances
Projected values combining US and UK (USD), as of December 14th.[6]
Metrics and CRM
Development of our CRM has slowed this quarter, as we focused on the annual review and following up with leads from the Student Summit. Josh is now leading on developing the CRM, and is exploring next steps.
Staff
Joan began to manage all groups work, while Katie switched to a new interim role as head of community health. The main motivation for this was to make sure that each of our organization-wide goals has a clear owner. I also think that this will make good use of their skills: it will free Joan up to pursue her vision for recruitment and university groups, and I think that Katie will be strong at supporting and project-managing community health work.
The following people are now reporting to me and leading on well-specified org-wide goals:
Joan: recruitment goal
Ben: retention goal
Katie: risk reduction goal
Josh: operations
Caitlin: people operations
I feel like we now have more clarity about our managers’ goals and responsibilities than we’ve ever had before, and I’m hopeful that this will allow CEA to make faster progress.
Staff support
We’ve launched a new professional development strategy which is centered around a set of core competencies.
We’ve held biweekly all-staff discussion on recent publications, podcasts, and talks. We hosted two social events near the end of the quarter.
We ran an all-staff training session on survey design in collaboration with Faunalytics, and may do more expert-led training for staff.
Hires/departures
Huw Thomas will join CEA as Groups Associate.
Sara Elsholz joined as an Executive Assistant (contractor) to Joan and me, and Aadil Kara joined as a part-time contractor.
Morale
Morale has averaged 6.61/10 over the past 3 months, which is slightly lower than our annual average of 6.66.
Public communications
We released our annual review and plans on the EA Forum. In December, we published an update about the Funds/Giving What We Can spinoff.
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In 2021, we aim to help onboard 125 students and young professionals, 30 of whom are from 15 particular highly-ranked universities and 10 of whom are Black/Latino. Based on 2019 EA survey data, we currently estimate that there were around 100 new highly-engaged EAs in 2020, 18 from highly-ranked universities, and 6 who are Black/Latino. We are currently gathering additional data on this from the 2020 EA Survey, and we may adjust our estimate as we go. Although we’re uncertain about this target, we think that concrete and specific goals are clearer and more motivating.
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All students who attended an introductory fellowship, our introductory events, or the EA Student Summit in 2020.
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Weighted towards the most engaged and underrepresented groups.
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The event was specifically marketed toward group organizers, though we didn’t verify participation.
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The Forum’s front page is quite inclusive; any post with a clear connection to effective altruism will appear there (though most posts fall off after a few days, unless they get a lot of upvotes). The prior default option, “Personal Blog”, is used only for posts without a clear connection to EA, and was rarely the proper designation for posts.
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The expansion budget is the budget we aim to use, which allows us to make additional hires.
Question for the Forum Team on the content from Pablo’s work that has been uploaded—is any of this public yet? If yes, could you link to it/some examples of it?
Currently, Pablo is working on a series of “stub” uploads. Basically, he has a lot of fleshed-out articles done, but those link to articles he hasn’t finished, so we’re uploading articles/tags to stand in for those. This will ensure that the fleshed-out articles aren’t full of broken links.
Here are some examples of stubs:
Michael Kremer
Certificates of Impact
Ought
These are searchable on the Forum, but they aren’t visible on the “All Tags” page because I’ve made them “Wiki only” for now (so as not to clutter the page/tag selection tool).
Once the fleshed-out articles are uploaded, I’ll create a new page that makes everything easier to find, and many articles will become tags. At this point, I’d guess we have at least 100 stubs uploaded to the Forum.
Thanks Aaron this is helpful!
So would the the final version of this would that the wiki is essentially a bunch of tags? So. e.g. the tag for certificates of impact has an article-length description (written by Pablo) ?
I’m a bit confused :)
The Wiki would take the form of a bunch of tags, but a tag can be of any length and use all Forum formatting, so the articles should be flexible.
Many initial tags/articles will have long descriptions, but many others won’t. When Pablo finishes uploading the first batch of long descriptions, we’ll do a lot of advocacy on the Forum for people to start treating the tags as a Wiki and making lots of updated. This might involve prizes or something like that, but I don’t expect the launch to happen for a couple of months, so I don’t have details to share yet.
Echoing what Vaidehi said, I think it’s somewhat unusual for a wiki to be built into a tag system, so I’d like to advocate for seeing if there’s a way to make it more intuitive and less confusing, ideally in a way that doesn’t require explaining/tutorials but is immediately obvious to users. Perhaps the solution could be to simply to use the term “wiki” instead of “tags” in most places.
I think the changes will be less confusing once we have:
A full post outlining what’s happening
All of Pablo’s wiki content imported and available to read
We’re still figuring out some timelines, but I expect (1) to happen within two weeks, and to contain information on the timing of (2).
I do expect us to move to a term like “wiki” or “concepts” instead of “tags” in many places once we’re further along in the project.
Great to see you expanding, especially on the groups team!
How do you plan to hire people—public vacancies or private offers?
I’m personally in favor of public vacancies as you reach more people and might find better applicants, and also because it makes the whole process more transparent and fair. I feel like EA employers currently often offer jobs privately to people in their network, which makes it seem like knowing the right people is more important than having the best skills. Consequently, people interested in EA might feel like they need to focus more on networking and being visible instead of actual work (also if that’s not actually the case).
On the other hand, public hiring processes cost time which may not be worth it, and there might be other downsides I’m not yet aware of. Curious about your thoughts on this (if you find it worth your time to elaborate, no worries if you have more important things to do!)
PS: Just to be clear, I don’t mean to criticize any previous hires—glad that Huw, Sara & Aadil joined your team!
We plan to do most hiring through public vacancies, but we will make occasional exceptions when we think we’re very likely to be aware of the top candidates.
In the first case we wanted to hire someone who had experience leading a successful university group, and since we work closely with many group leaders we felt like we had a good enough sense of the talent pool to do a closed round (where we invited a small number of candidates to do work trials, interviews etc.) We might do this sort of thing again.
We brought on Sara and Aadil through the same hiring round, for an executive assistant position. Longview Philanthropy and 80,000 Hours had recently advertised a public position for an operations/executive assistant role. With the help of those organizations and their applicants, we were able to cut out some of the early advertisement/screening steps, and focus on some of their top candidates. I think this saved us a fair amount of time without compromising much on accessibility/fairness. We might do similar things in the future.
But I acknowledge the costs you share, and we plan to normally invite public applications (as for this new contractor role, and for a finance/data role that we plan to post soon).
Thank you Max for elaborating!
Happy to hear that you generally prefer public vacancies too. In my impression, this often has not been the case for EA orgs in the past (and the people who upvoted my comment might feel similar), so it’s nice to see you publicly write in favor of that.
It makes sense that you make those occasional exceptions for specific cases and I agree that they seem worth it to save time as long as it does not compromise too much on accessibility and fairness.
It seems like your group support in Q4 was mostly focussed on students—is that just a coincidence or will student groups be your main priority for 2021 (compared to city groups, national groups, cause area groups & career groups)?
(Only reply if you have time to elaborate, no worries if not!)
Yes—student groups will be our main priority for additional support in 2021 (we say a bit more about why here, and we discuss what that means concretely for our groups team here). But we’ll be maintaining or expanding the support we give to all groups, including new initiatives like Virtual Programs.
Thanks for elaborating!
In my experience with running EA Berlin since two years, outreach to students seemed worthwhile but outreach on recent graduates / young professionals seemed even more worthwhile, as they were actively thinking about career plans and most keen to apply the EA philosophy right away (compared to students who will only make career decisions years later and then may or may not take EA considerations into account). They are often in their early twenties too, usually 21-25 y/o. If you’re interested in this, I would be happy to continue this discussion sometimes via comments, email or a (short) call (if you find it worth your time, no worries if not!).
If you feel like CEA is better suited to focus its own programs to students that seems fair to me, and I appreciate that your programs (especially EAG(x) conferences) remain open to other groups as well. I hope this also applies to the CB grant program, so city groups and national groups have equally good chances of receiving funding compared to university groups focussed on students only.
That’s interesting—I’m surprised by that and wonder if it’s due to some differences between systems? In the UK people often begin to think about internships in their first or second years, and then look for jobs in the 3rd year, so I think there’s quite a lot of ability to influence and discuss career plans early on. In the US degrees are longer, but early on people are trying to decide their major which is also a significant career decision. I also think that students have a lot more time and interest in engaging with new things, and they tend to be easier to reach (e.g. because they all come to activity fairs). How do you find/target these early-career people? And aren’t they already normally in employment/set on a career path?
CBGs remains open to non-student groups.
(I’m German, but have lived in the UK for 4.5 years now.)
My best guess is that you are both right, and large cultural differences are at play. I found this really bizarre when I moved to the UK. In Germany, you are an ambitious overachiever if you have a ‘career plan’ at 22. In the UK this is standard.
Among educated Germans, people take longer to finish their degrees, are more likely to take gap years, change degrees. Internships seem to be much rarer. The ‘summer internship’ system does not seem to exist as much in Germany, and just is not considered necessary in the same way. Most Germans do Master’s (which take 2 years in Germany) as only a Bachelor’s degree is taken less seriously. Having children during your degree is more common.
Educated Germans just start full-time employment much later. This is so extreme that in my friendship circle I do not know any German non-EA who has finished their education (all including Master’s) and started a full-time job before the age of 27 (!).
Interesting! Thanks for sharing.
I agree with Denise’s description and Max’s, but I don’t see how it follows that focusing on professionals is more useful than focusing on students. In fact, I think that Germans taking gap years, changing degrees, etc. makes it more plausible that student groups are a promising target audience, as this allows students to spend more time thinking about EA ideas and make relatively large changes to their careers.
Thanks a lot for taking the time to write up and share your strategy as well as these quartlery updates!
Thanks for writing this!