Thanks! She talked there last year or the year before… But just out of curiosity, are you saying that she is an effective altruist? This didn’t seem obvious to me in previous exchanges with her...
acristia
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Thanks!! She looks perfect, and it wasn’t obvious from her professional page that she was EA, so this was a great find—I’ve suggested her name.
Keiran Harris kindly replied to an email: “app called Forecast to create the chapters (I think it’s only available on mac). And then we use Wordpress for the website, and our podcast hosts are ‘Backtracks’ and ‘Transistor’ (for 80k After Hours / the compilation feeds) — and they send the episodes out to all the podcasting apps.”
Hi Simon,
I couldn’t agree more! Personally, I invested the ~200 US$ to join noomii.com, which has a coaching circle (you coach someone and someone else coaches you). I’ve learned a lot from these exchanges with other coaches, although I sometimes do think that it would be interesting to be paired up with someone else within EA. However, since I only coach it part-time, I understand it’s not in other’s best interest to get paired up with me :)
I don’t know if you’ve already met with Lynette Bye, potentially one of the most experienced EA coaches, or been in touch with Sebastian Schmidt (who wrote this post recently, which includes a link to this list of coaches). As far as I know, there is no slack as the one you describe , so I think it would be a really good initiative. If you start it, count me in!
Hi Jamie, it’s been about a year and I wondered if you had new thoughts based on your experience?
Just a little update after coaching for a year, with a maximum of 3 clients a week (about 80h in the whole year).
My clients report benefits to themselves, the time I spend coaching is usually a pleasure for me, and everyone likes the feeling that the money is going to effective charities. I don’t think I’ve been stealing too much work from professional coaches because the majority of the people I have worked with have signed a promise to donate when they are better off/in a different legal situation, so they wouldn’t have been able to pay someone now (or perhaps even to qualify for subsidies). And for those who have made donations already, the sum of that is greater than what I paid to be listed on a coaching site, so it is cost-effective if we don’t take into account my own time.
But as an EA, I think it makes sense to take into account my own time, in which case it’s not totally clear that this is the most effective thing I could do. I’ll be working with a coach who specializes on academics drawn to industry for a few weeks to think through alternative “business” plans, but will probably continue coaching just as I do now for another 6 months.
Addition 2022-02-06: In total, taking into account preparation, website creation, email, and actual coaching, I spent about 110 hours over 2 years, and resulted in a total of 1495€ being donated to effective charities, therefore at a rate of about 13 €/h. Without taking direct benefits to the coachees, this does not seem a very effective way for me to do good, taking into account my own time. As for the possibility of specializing on academics, that seems to be a niche that is already well populated, and my approach does not appear to be a low-hanging fruit for me.
Thank you! Happy to have a chat if interested—my email is on my site ;)
To get things started, I imagine one non-human perspective is that represented by “big history”, where “good” is more complex, and bad results from failures to maintain or increase complexity
If you are trying to train yourself to have an intuition on the sizes, you can use visualization tools, and there are two main ones at present:
this visualization tool for group differences. The tool is based on Cohen’s d, and since Hedges’ g is just Cohen’s d with a sample size correction, the tool will help you grasp to what extent two groups overlap/differ.
this visualization tool for association between two variables. This tool is based on Pearson’s r correlations, but you can conceptually use it to develop intuitions for other tools measuring association (like Spearman rho, R = R-squared, or eta-squared—let me know if you’d like me to elaborate on this!)
If you want someone else to have an intuitive grasp of the size of an effect you’re discussing, you can refer to lists of benchmarks. My height example comes from Cohen (1988′s Statistical power analysis for the behavioral sciences), but more modern examples can be found here and here.
In your case, a run-of-the-mill productivity coach, who focuses on good habits, may not be ideal: It would take a lot of effort for small gains (due to diminishing returns).
But you could try coaches who aim to help you in mid- and long-term planning and strategies, and/or with clarifying values and thought patterns that influence those larger decisions. To give you two examples from within the EA/rationalist community (more names here), Lynette Bye has written about how you can prioritize projects on her blog and Pamela J Hobart introduces herself as a “philosophical life coach who helps intellectuals to clarify their thinking and values”. Depending on your line of work, consider looking into consultants to get radically different viewpoints on longer term planning because being extremely efficient in the small scale of hours or days won’t matter if you’re working towards the wrong goal (or the right one with the wrong strategy).
About your two last questions: Some people are happy to meander through existence to chance upon an interesting self-discovery. Based on your question, my guess is that you are not one of them, and therefore randomly meeting coaches will just feel like a frustrating waste of time. So if you’re not sure what you’d gain from a given coach and/or you don’t resonate with their public materials, this is a great way of discarding their names when doing your coach search!
sorry for the lack of context! In this case, it’s a series of talks from external researchers, and the topic has to be something relevant to developmental economics, but no other specific topic otherwise.