Maybe a group AMA thread would be a good idea, where everyone can post a comment that they are happy to answer questions?
Denise_Melchin
Karma: 3,381
Your observations is correct. How much karma you start off with depends on the amount of karma you have—unfortunately I don’t know the minimum required to start off with 2 karma. The more karma you have, the more weighty your strong upvotes become as well (mine are 7 karma, before I hit 2500 karma it was 6).
Regarding helping people with major life transitions, I just wanted to mention that there is a (reasonably active) Parents in Effective Altruism Facebook group! We are also keen to hear from people who are not parents yet, but are considering becoming parents in the future.
(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 (!).
Thanks for the response! Freedom unfortunately just stopped working for me many times. After I uninstalled and reinstalled it for the fifth time (which makes it work again for a while) and the customer service had no idea what was going on, I gave up. I still use it for my phone however.
I don’t think there is anything on the market which blocks things by default, which is the primary feature I am looking for, plus much more fine grained blocking (e.g. inability to access or google content containing specific phrases).
Why do content blockers still suck?
I’d still be curious how many unique views there are—I’m pretty surprised at the high view counts above. I had expected the discrepancy between unique views and upvotes to be smaller.
Are there just a lot of silent readers who never upvote or do the same readers who already upvoted click on the post again and again (to read the comments)?
This looks great! And I agree with Aslan that the minesweeper edition feels very different and I am glad you created it.
One note: existential risks are a distinct concept to both extinction risks and global catastrophic risks. Table 6.1 in Toby’s book describes existential risks which is what you are depicting here—existential risks include extinction risk but also the risk that humanity will turn into a permanent dystopia as well as permanent civilisational collapse (but humanity lives on).
Global catastrophic risks are different again: they are risks that kill at least 10% of the human population.
Agree with all of the above!
I don’t currently know of a reliable way to actually do a lot of good as a doctor.
I do know of such a way, but that might be because we have different things in mind when we say ‘reliably do a lot of good’.
Some specialisations for doctors are very high earning. If someone was on the path to being a doctor and could still specialise in one of them, that is what I would suggest as an earning-to-give strategy. If they might also do a great job as a quant trader, I would also suggest checking that out. But I doubt most doctors make good quant traders, so it might still be one of the best opportunities for them.
I am less familiar with this and therefore not confident, but there are also some specialisations Doctors without Borders have a hard time filling (while for some, there is an over-supply). I think this would be worth looking into, as well as other paths to deliver medical expertise in developing countries.
I appreciated this post.
I wrote a post on the subject here!
Hi Ana,
It’s great to hear you are so passionate about learning and doing research! My best guess would be that you should focus on getting some real world job experience for a year or so. While you may not have as much statistical knowledge yet as you might want, I suspect it is better for you to learn them in a supportive ‘real work’ environment than on your own. Given that you have a PhD and soon two Master’s (impressive!) I expect employers will trust they can train you up in the skills you need, so you don’t have to learn them outside of a job first.
Something employers will often want to see is some evidence that you can solve their problems outside of a research/academic context. I expect it will be a lot easier for you to find a role you are really passionate about once you have some job experience, even if that means doing something that is not your dream job yet in the meantime.
Good luck!
This is not only relevant to my career, but I asked a couple of questions here about the impact of UK civil service careers.
Personal context that I did not add to the main body (as I want it to be helpful for other people too): I am currently a civil servant, just starting in a new role which I expect to stay in for a year or so.
In my previous role, my main goal was to gain generic career capital and become more optimistic about having an impact through my career. In my free time, I have been trying to think about my values, and am currently still thinking about what I believe about cause prioritisation as well as how to practically have an impact in the world (see the above questions).
If I don’t find it plausible that the UK civil service has particularly good leverage compared to other options (e.g. earning to give), I will likely still focus on generic career capital in my role until I have a better sense of what my general views on how to best have an impact in the world are. If I do find it plausible that the UK civil service is a very promising path to have a high impact compared to other options, I will try harder to find out how to specifically have a high impact within the civil service and what my personal fit is, given that I am already there anyway.
I am not a UK national and thanks to Brexit unfortunately this will not change, so a few paths are not possible for me: e.g. Dfid now having been merged in the Foreign Office rules it out as well as options related to national security.
[Question] How high impact are UK policy career paths?
Hi Richard, I just wanted to say that I appreciate you asking these questions! Based on the number of upvotes you have received, other people might be wondering the same, and it’s always useful to propagate knowledge like Alex has written up further.
I would have appreciated it even more if you had not directly jumped to accusing EA of being misleading (without any references) before waiting for any answers to your question.
Thank you all for your responses, I really appreciated them. Your perspectives make more sense to me now, though I have to say I still feel really confused.
[Following comment not exhaustively responding to everything you said.]
I hadn’t intended to communicate in my first comment that Mark deliberately intended to violate the forum guidelines, but that he deliberately decided against being kind and curious. (Thank you for pointing that out, I did not think of the alternative reading.) I didn’t provide any evidence for this because I thought Mark said this very explicitly at the start of his post:
To play by gentlemans rules is to their advantage—curtailing the tools in at my disposal to makes bullshit as costly as possible.
I acknowledge there are some negative costs to this (e.g. polluting the information commons with avoidable conflict), and good people can disagree about if the tradeoff is worth it. But I believe it is.
Gentleman’s rules usually include things like being kind and curious I would guess, and Mark says explicitly that he ignores them because the tradeoff is worth it to him. I don’t understand how these lines can be interpreted in any other way, this seems like the literal reading to me.
I have to admit that even after all your kind elaborate explanations I struggle to understand how anything in the section ‘Conflict can be an effective tactic for good’ could be read as tongue-in-cheek, as it reads very openly hostile to me (...it’s right there in the title?) .
I don’t think it is that unlikely that interviewees on the 80k podcast would respond to a kind thoughtful critique on the EA Forum. That said, this is not just about Tristan, but everyone who might disagree with Mark, as the ‘Conflict can be an effective tactic for good’ section made me doubt they would be treated with curiosity and kindness.
I will take from this that people can have very different interpretations of the same content, even if I think the content is is very explicit and straightforward.
Hi Michelle,
Sorry for being a bit slow to respond. I have been thinking about your question on how the EA community can be more supportive in situations I experienced, but struggled to come up with answers I feel particularly confident in. I might circle back to this question at a later point.
For now, I am going to answer instead what I suspect would have made me feel better supported while I was struggling to figure out what I should be doing, but I don’t feel particularly confident:
i) Mentorship. Having a soundboard to talk through my decisions (and possibly letting me know that I was being silly when I felt like I wasn’t allowed to make my own decisions) might have helped a lot.
ii) Having people acknowledge that I maneuvered myself into a position that wasn’t great from the perspective of expected impact, and that this all kind of sucked.
That said, for the latter one, the bottleneck might have been me. I had quite a few people who I thought knew me well express surprise at how miserable I felt at the time, so apparently this was not as obvious as I thought.
I would expect my first suggestion to generalise, mentorship is likely very useful for a lot of people!
I had a lot of contact with local and global EAs, and without that I probably would have done worse. I particularly appreciated people’s support when I was actually applying to ‘real jobs’ last year. Both when I was trying to decide whether I should accept a low-ball offer from a tech startup (which I rejected) as well as the wide support I received from civil servants in how to navigate the civil service application process.
In the post I mentioned that I mentally distanced myself from EA a bit, but I wouldn’t say that I distanced myself from EA. This was a purely mental shift in how I relate to the community and doing as much good as I can. Please don’t kick me out ;-)
Hi Milan,
This was now quite a while ago but I have spent some time trying to figure out why I don’t find cluelessness arguments persuasive. After we spent a bunch of time deconfusing ourselves, Alex has written up almost everything I could say on the subject in a long comment chain here.