Aaron Gertler(Aaron L. Gertler)

EA Fo­rum Prize: Win­ners for May-July 2021

Fo­rum Up­date: New Fea­tures (Oc­to­ber 2021)

• Aaron Gertler 18 Oct 2021 10:58 UTC

  8 points

  on: Con­cerns about AMF from GiveWell read­ing—Part 1

  Malaria rates in Benin, DRC, Ghana, Mali & Sierra Leone increased as net coverage increased, which is more evidence that the malaria data being used is not great.

  I appreciate your sharing what you find as you dig through the data. But I’d also recommend sharing links for statements like this (or at least instructions for finding the same information you found). This makes it much easier for other people to dig along with you.

  Elsewhere, I have read that AMF requires its distribution partners to collect monthly malaria case rate data from all health centers in the distribution zone for 12 months preceding and 4 years following the distribution. I don’t think this requirement is actually enforced.

  If you email AMF to ask about whether they enforce this, I think you’ll get a response pretty quickly. Ditto other questions you come up with in your research. (At least, based on my own experience emailing AMF about things.)

• Aaron Gertler 18 Oct 2021 10:21 UTC

  6 points

  in reply to: evelynciara’s comment on: Pro­pose and vote on po­ten­tial tags

  Seems like a good idea!

  If we have three criticism tags covering “causes”, “organizations”, and “community”, then having a general “criticism of EA” tag doesn’t seem to make sense. The best alternative seems like “criticism of EA philosophy”.

  If I don’t hear objections from Pablo/​Michael, I’ll make that change in a week or so and re-tag relevant posts.

• Aaron Gertler 17 Oct 2021 23:17 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: Mathieu Putz’s comment on: How to use the Forum

  Upvotes (and downvotes) are anonymous.

Creative Writ­ing Con­test: Now with more prizes!

• Aaron Gertler 14 Oct 2021 5:09 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: joannadior’s comment on: EA Fo­rum Creative Writ­ing Con­test: $10,000 in prizes for good stories

  I assume this is just a general comment, but so I can be sure — did you mean to make a point about the current rules of the contest?

• Aaron Gertler 13 Oct 2021 10:03 UTC

  5 points

  on: Notes on “Manag­ing to Change the World”

  Great review!

  Green’s blog, “Ask a Manager”, is really well-written. Many of the questions are a bit narrow, or “funny but rare”, but I still find the blog a good way to immerse myself in the mind of someone who thinks clearly about hard problems in the workplace.

• Aaron Gertler 13 Oct 2021 9:35 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: Jack R’s comment on: In­tro­duc­ing Train­ing for Good (TFG)

  Several of CEA’s new hires over the past couple of years have been people older than 30 with no prior EA experience, who in at least some cases were responding to materials that were “broad” enough to include them in the discussion. This doesn’t necessarily mean that we should be investing a lot of effort into reaching experienced people, but they do apply for first-time EA jobs!

  Two examples of impressive older people switching into EA work (no comment on how much impact they’ve had in their roles):

  • Open Philanthropy’s Beth Jones (led ops for Hillary Clinton’s campaign, worked on Obama’s staff)

  • ex-MIRI staffer Edward Kmett, one of the world’s foremost Haskell programmers, who worked there for ~3 years

• Aaron Gertler 13 Oct 2021 9:14 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: Jackson Wagner’s comment on: How im­pact­ful is free and open source soft­ware de­vel­op­ment?

  This should probably be a post! I’d love to share it in the Forum Digest and elsewhere — I can technically do this even when it’s a comment, but I’d love to see it get a title, some tags, its own full comment section, etc.

• Aaron Gertler 13 Oct 2021 9:10 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: Ben_Snodin’s comment on: Ben_Sn­odin’s Shortform

  The lobbying pressure seems more important than the common knowledge.

  EA orgs already spend a lot of time identifying and sharing important and simple ideas — I wouldn’t call them “uncontroversial”, but few ideas are. (See “building more houses makes housing cheaper”, which is a lot more controversial than I’d have expected before I started to follow that “debate”.)

  I do think it would be worth spending a few hours trying to come up with examples of ideas that would be good to spread + calculating very rough BOTECs for them. For example, what’s the value of getting one middle-class American to embrace passive rather than active investment? What’s the value of getting one more person vaccinated?

  Development Media International is the obvious parallel, and the cost-effectiveness of using ridiculously cheap radio advertisements to share basic public health information seems hard to beat on priors. But there are a lot of directions you could go with “civilizational epistemics”, and maybe some of them wind up looking much better, e.g. because working in the developed world = many more resources to redirect.

  (Speaking of which, Guarding Against Pandemics is another example — their goal isn’t just to reach a few specific politicians, but to reach people who will share their message with politicians.)

• Aaron Gertler 13 Oct 2021 9:02 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: kokotajlod’s comment on: Ben_Sn­odin’s Shortform

  For a billion dollars, you can buy hundreds of millions of eyeballs.

  As an extreme example, a 30-second Super Bowl advertisement costs just under $6 million and reaches almost 100 million people. And that can’t be anywhere near the upper limit of efficiency (I’d guess those ads are wildly overpriced given the additional status/​prestige they confer).

• Aaron Gertler 13 Oct 2021 8:57 UTC

  6 points

  in reply to: Aaron Gertler’s comment on: Is it crunch time yet? If so, who can help?

  Of course, some organizations and people that do a lot of work on this problem would say that it is, in fact, crunch time. If someone decides to explore the area, “it’s crunch time” is a hypothesis they should consider. I just don’t think it should be their default assumption, or your default pitch.

• Aaron Gertler 13 Oct 2021 8:56 UTC

  26 points

  on: Is it crunch time yet? If so, who can help?

  One way to collect some “answers” to this is to observe the behavior of organizations that do a lot of work on this problem. For example:

  • Open Philanthropy still makes grants in several different longtermist areas

  • 80,000 Hours lists biorisk as a priority on the same “level” as AI alignment

  • FLI is using their massive Vitalik Buterin donation to fund PhD and postdoctoral fellowships, which seems to imply that “drop everything” doesn’t imply e.g. “drop out of school” or “start thinking exclusively about alignment even if it tanks your grades”

  Biorisk needs people who are good with numbers and computers. EA community building needs people who are good with computers (there’s a lot of good software to be built, websites to be designed, etc.)

  To keep the scope of my analysis limited, I’m not even going to mention the dozens of other priorities that someone with the right skills + interests might be better off pursuing. But it at least seems not to be consensus that “crunch time” is here, even among people who think about the problem quite a lot.

  That said, I would never turn away anyone who wants to work on alignment, and I think anyone with related skills should strongly consider it as an area to explore + take seriously. That’s the pitch I’d be making if I were in college, alongside messages like (paraphrased a lot):

  • “This seems like a good way to end up working on something historically significant, in a way that probably won’t happen if you join Facebook instead.”

  • “If you want to do this, there’s a good chance you’ll have unbelievable access to mentorship and support from top people in the field, which… probably won’t happen if you join Facebook instead.” (As a non-programmer, I don’t know whether this is true, but I’d guess that it is.)

• Aaron Gertler 13 Oct 2021 8:32 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: Emrik’s comment on: Em­rik’s Shortform

  This is a feature we’ve been considering for a while! Thanks for sharing the idea and getting some upvotes as additional evidence.

  I can’t promise this will show up at any particular time, but it is a matter of active discussion, for the reasons you outlined and to give people a third option alongside publishing something on their own account and publishing on a second, pseudonymous account.

• Aaron Gertler 12 Oct 2021 2:41 UTC

  20 points

  on: The Cost of Rejection

  I think feedback on job applications is far too rare given its value, for reasons others have stated and the additional reason “everyone I’ve ever talked to about this has complained about how hard it is to get feedback”.

  Here’s how I handled feedback for the one hiring process I’ve run at CEA:

  • Anyone I rejected in the first round got an offer from me to provide feedback on their application. Looking back, I see that I didn’t make this offer to second-round candidates; this seems really dumb, and I’m not sure why I didn’t, though I think I did share some verbal feedback when I interviewed those candidates.

  • When someone asked for feedback, I generally wrote a paragraph or two, very quickly, sometimes copying and pasting from other feedback emails (in cases where multiple people made the same mistake).

  • Because I was mostly providing feedback on a standardized work test, that part was very quick (though giving people advice on how to copyedit better probably wasn’t very valuable). My other feedback concerned unclear descriptions of their experience or confusing resumes — this seems more valuable.

  • People were very grateful for even this basic feedback. It helped that one of my most common notes was “this was above-average for all applications, but not in the top 10%, and I only took the top 10% for the second round”. This let me give people some amount of confidence/​comfort while still being honest about the high standards for the position.

  General lessons:

  • It seems much easier to give feedback when you have a standardized task to comment on.

  • Having “opt-in” feedback seems ideal; people who ask for it will value it more, and most people won’t ask (maybe 15% of the people who got my offer followed up to ask).

  As an additional data point, I got very detailed feedback when I applied for a position at Ought in 2018: “You did X, which was good, but the best candidates did X and also Y, which was clearly better”. This was a good learning experience and left me feeling very positive about the organization.

• Aaron Gertler 9 Oct 2021 10:35 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: Pseudonym’s comment on: EA Fo­rum Creative Writ­ing Con­test: $10,000 in prizes for good stories

  Anyone can submit — we don’t care about age, nationality, or any other category that immediately comes to mind.

  Let me know if there’s something specific you’re concerned about.

• Aaron Gertler 7 Oct 2021 6:30 UTC

  3 points

  on: Any EAs in Derby/​ Der­byshire, UK?

  I recommend using EA Hub’s group list to find groups near you, since those are the most likely way to find individuals in your area. Looks like there are groups in Manchester and Sheffield!

• Aaron Gertler 4 Oct 2021 10:18 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: jackmalde’s comment on: Should I have my full name as my user­name?

  Reasonable enough!

• Aaron Gertler 3 Oct 2021 2:40 UTC

  8 points

  in reply to: jackmalde’s comment on: Should I have my full name as my user­name?

  You can ask me if you want it changed.

  In general, I like people using their real names — it makes the Forum feel more warm and community-ish. I think risks like doxxing seem far more likely than they are because incidents of doxxing get a lot of news coverage relative to their likelihood. In addition, what we discuss here mostly isn’t very interesting to the outside world.

  But in the end, of course, it’s totally up to you! Everyone has their own personal standards around privacy, and the Forum is open to everyone.

  (On a separate note, I imagine that the decision looks different for “John Smith” vs. “Aaron Gertler” — some names are much harder to Google than others.)