dan.pandori

Karma: 422

dan.pandori Jan 2, 2023, 1:14 AM
7 points
3 ∶ 0
in reply to: NunoSempere’s comment on: Why Anima International suspended the campaign to end live fish sales in Poland
I instead read this point as saying “assume that if we persuaded 100 folks to give up carp, then 1 of those would replace their carp consumption with salmon.” So it’s talking about the replacement effect, rather than the number persuaded (the latter gives magnitude, as you say).

dan.pandori Jan 1, 2023, 12:59 AM
−2 points
0 ∶ 2
in reply to: moonjurassic’s comment on: Givewell, and its hiring process, needs serious reform
You can see how that the lack of details is basically asking me to… trust you without evidence?

Edit: to use less ’gotcha phrasing, anonymously claiming that another organization is doing better on feedback, but not telling me how, is asking for me to blindly trust you for very little reason.

I don’t think feedback practices are widely considered secrets that have to be protected, and if your familiarity is with the UK Civil Service, that’s a massive organization where you can easily give a description without unduly narrowing yourself down.
What links here?
- dan.pandori's comment on Doing EA Better by ConcernedEAs (Jan 18, 2023, 2:43 AM; 27 points)

dan.pandori Jan 1, 2023, 12:23 AM
0 points
3 ∶ 1
in reply to: moonjurassic’s comment on: Givewell, and its hiring process, needs serious reform
This thread is the kind of tiring back and forth I’m talking about. Please, try organizing feedback for 5k+ rejected applicants for something every year and then come back to tell me why I’m wrong and it really is easy. I promise to humbly eat crow at that time.

dan.pandori Jan 1, 2023, 12:21 AM
4 points
3 ∶ 0
in reply to: Richard Möhn’s comment on: Givewell, and its hiring process, needs serious reform
Phone calls for me are socially awkward and I generally want some time to privately process rejection rather than immediately need to have a conversation about it. Also I generally keep my phone at home during business hours so it’s quite likely I’d need to spend half an hour playing phone tag.

dan.pandori Dec 31, 2022, 6:47 PM
2 points
2 ∶ 0
in reply to: Will Bradshaw’s comment on: Givewell, and its hiring process, needs serious reform
Was going to say the same. I’ve only ever been rejected over email (or ghosted entirely). I would also find it off-putting to get a phone call rejection. I guess organizations can choose to call if they wanted, but I wouldn’t personally encourage it.

dan.pandori Dec 31, 2022, 6:43 PM
1 point
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: moonjurassic’s comment on: Givewell, and its hiring process, needs serious reform
A hypothetical example that I would view as asking for trust would be someone telling me not to join an organization, but not telling me why. Or claiming that another person shouldn’t be trusted, without giving details. I personally very rarely see folks do this. An organization doing something different and explaining their reasoning (ex. giving feedback was not viewed as not a good ROI) is not asking for trust.

Regarding why giving feedback at scale is hard, most of these positions have at best vague evaluation metrics which usually bottom out in “help the organization achieve its goals.” Any specific criteria is very prone to being Goodharted. And the people who most need feedback are in my experience disproportionately likely to argue with you about it and make a stink to management. No need to trust me on this, just try out giving feedback at scale and see if it’s hard.

My admittedly limited understanding of the UK Civil Service suggests that it’s more amenable to quantization compared to GiveWell research analysts and Google software engineers. For example, if your job is working at the UK equivalent of a DMV, we could grade you based on number of customers served and a notion of error rate. That would seem pretty fair and somewhat hard to game. For a programmer, we could grade you based on tickets closed and bugs introduced. In contrast, this is absolute trash as the sole metric (although it does have some useful info).

dan.pandori Dec 31, 2022, 12:52 AM
7 points
5 ∶ 0
in reply to: moonjurassic’s comment on: Givewell, and its hiring process, needs serious reform
I guess I read that as a description of what they’re doing rather asking me to trust them. CEA can choose the admission criteria they want, and after attending my first EAG earlier this year I felt like whatever criteria they were using seemed to broadly make for a valuable event for me as an attendee.

I think you’re really underestimating how hard giving useful feedback at scale is and how fraught it is. I would be more sympathetic if you were running or deeply involved with an organization that was doing better on this front. If you are, congrats and I am appreciative!

dan.pandori Dec 30, 2022, 4:53 AM
6 points
6 ∶ 0
in reply to: moonjurassic’s comment on: Givewell, and its hiring process, needs serious reform
Separately regarding trust, I don’t feel obligated to trust senior EAs. I sometimes read the analyses of senior EAs and like them, so I start to trust them more. Trust based on seniority alone seems bad, could you give some examples where you feel senior EAs are asking folks to trust them without evidence?

dan.pandori Dec 30, 2022, 4:49 AM
8 points
4 ∶ 2
in reply to: moonjurassic’s comment on: Givewell, and its hiring process, needs serious reform
I am telling you what Google told me (and continues to tell new interviewers) as part of its interview training. You may believe that you know the law better than Google, but I am too risk averse to believe that I know the law better than them.

dan.pandori Dec 29, 2022, 11:13 PM
40 points
16 ∶ 4
on: Givewell, and its hiring process, needs serious reform
I’m sorry to hear about your negative experience with GiveWell’s hiring cycle.

I think that it’s easy to under-estimate how hard it is to hire well though. For comparison, you can honestly give all the same complaints about the hiring practice of my parent company (Google).

It is slow, with many friends of mine experiencing up to a year of gap between application and eventual decision.

Later interviewers have no context on your performance on earlier parts of the application. This is actually deliberate though, since we want to get independent signal at each step. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was deliberate at GiveWell as well.

You often aren’t told what is important at each interview stage. You’re just posed technical or behavioral questions, and then you have to figure out what’s important to solve the problem. Again, this is somewhat deliberate to see if candidates are able to think through what the important parts of an issue are.

You certainly aren’t given feedback for improvement after rejection. An explicit part of interviewer training is noting that we shouldn’t say anything about a candidate’s performance (good or bad) to the candidate, for fear of legal repercussions. Some EA orgs have chosen to give rejection feedback despite this, but it seems to be both not standard and not necessarily wise for the organization.

Interviewing and hiring just kind of sucks. I’d love it if GiveWell was unusually excellent here, but I think that it’s at least important to recognize that their hiring practices are pretty normal.

dan.pandori Dec 14, 2022, 6:22 AM
9 points
5 ∶ 0
on: A better society shortcuts away the “longterm consequences versus rules” dilemma
I worry that this post is claiming that EAs are uncommonly likely to recommend rules violations in order to achieve their goals (ie, ends justify the means). I don’t think that’s true, and I generally see EAs as trying very hard to be scrupulous and do right by all involved parties.

Concretely, I believe that if you went to an EA conference or a similar gathering and presented people with prisoners dilemma issues, or just lost wallets, they would behave more pro-socially than average for the country.

I think that the FTX collapse is a very salient example of EA folks committing crime (perhaps in the belief that the ends justified it?), but that doesn’t mean that EA increases the probability of crime.

dan.pandori Sep 29, 2022, 5:30 PM
9 points
2 ∶ 0
in reply to: Charles He’s comment on: Offering FAANG-style mock interviews
As someone who has recently been in the AI Safety org interview circuit, about 50% of interviews were traditional Leetcode style algorithmic/coding puzzle and 50% were more practical. This seems pretty typical compared to industry.

The EA orgs I interviewed with were very candid about their approach, and I was much less surprised by the style of interview I got than I was surprised when interviewing in industry. Anthropic, Ought, and CEA all very explicitly lay out what their interviews look like publicly. My experience was that the interviews matched the public description very well.

dan.pandori Sep 28, 2022, 5:55 PM
4 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: andrew_richardson’s comment on: Offering FAANG-style mock interviews
Thanks! Current volume is reasonable but I will totally forward some your way if I get overwhelmed.

dan.pandori Sep 28, 2022, 3:10 AM
8 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Offering FAANG-style mock interviews
I forgot to mention in the body, but I should thank Yonatan for putting a draft of this together and encouraging me to post it. Thanks! I’ve been meaning to do this for a while.

Offering FAANG-style mock interviews

dan.pandoriSep 28, 2022, 3:09 AM

43 points

10 comments1 min readEA link

dan.pandori Jun 15, 2022, 12:39 AM
3 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Charles He’s comment on: Expected ethical value of a career in AI safety
This is a touchingly earnest comment. Also is your ldap qiurui? If those words mean nothing to you, I’ve got the wrong guy :)

dan.pandori Apr 5, 2022, 5:26 PM
13 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Software Developers: Should you apply to work at CEA?
I would not have applied without this post, and I think it also seriously increased my probability of applying to a variety of AI research roles (which I’d been putting off for years).
What links here?
- Yonatan Cale's comment on I’m Offering Free Coaching for Software Developers in the EA community by Yonatan Cale (9 Aug 2022 21:07 UTC; 8 points)

dan.pandori 6 Aug 2021 18:01 UTC
9 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Writing about my job: Web Developer
This almost perfectly matches my experience as a full-stack programmer at a FAANG. I especially appreciate the point that getting along well with your team-mates is a huge deal. It is a surprisingly consistent source of enjoyment in my job that I can joke and post memes to my team.

dan.pandori 5 Aug 2021 23:35 UTC
1 point
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Aaron Gertler 🔸’s comment on: Utilitarianism Symbol Design Competition
Fair enough. I would personally find it less off-putting if you framed it in terms of collecting feedback instead of focusing on the downvotes. For example, suppose I saw a thread starting with:

‘I’m curious on feedback to this post. Please take this survey[link]’
and then the survey itself has questions about the positions 1/2/3/4/5 mentioned, and a question on whether the respondent up/downvoted.

Then that seems like a fine thread. You’re collecting genuine feedback, maybe it seems a little over the top, but it doesn’t come across as speculation on why someone disliked something. There’s also an easy way for me to provide that feedback without making a public statement that people can then argue with. If I downvote something, there is a very good chance that I don’t want to spend time explaining my reasoning on a public thread where I’m in a social contract to reply to objections.

dan.pandori 5 Aug 2021 21:02 UTC
14 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Aaron Gertler 🔸’s comment on: Utilitarianism Symbol Design Competition
I want to say that I didn’t downvote the post (I think its a relatively neat idea, and has garnered at least one good submission).

On the other hand, I find speculation on ‘why the downvotes?’ to be unproductive. Its reasonable to encourage people explain their opinions, but I’ve generally found that threads about downvotes are low quality with lots of guesses and trying to put words in other people’s mouths. I don’t think you’re doing that here very much, but it isn’t the kind of thread I’d like to see often if at all.

It also seems odd that there are so rarely threads in the other direction, asking people to explain why they liked a particular post :)

dan.pandori

Offer­ing FAANG-style mock interviews

Offering FAANG-style mock interviews