EAs in DC have a reputation for being especially nice, supportive, professional, and energetic about their work.
Hell yeah! I love visiting DC, and seeing the EA DC crowd is a high point of each trip.
Gavriel Kleinwaks
Karma: 556
Retrospective on the California SB 1308 Campaign
Sure, we’re just not hiring for the same role repeatedly or on a predictable schedule, especially not entry-level roles. Like other orgs, we do work tests and trial periods, which are the fit-testing part of the hiring procedure. We often hire for pretty specialized roles, usually not entry-level, and right now we don’t necessarily know the next role we’re going to hire for, so we don’t know what we’d want to look for in an intern. Those trial periods are useful lead-ins for the specialized jobs we’ve recently filled, they’re just not what I would call an internship. When I think of internships-as-work-training, I think of the model at consultant, financial, or engineering firms, which know they’re going to bring in new staff each year to fill entry-level roles that are very similar to each other, because they have a steady stream of work that fits a pattern into which they can predictably slot new people over the course of a year.
As David mentions below, 1Day also does periodically employ students or very early-career people for specific projects, which can look pretty similar to a paid internship in practice. But we can’t know that we’ll have a suitable full-time role available by the time those contracts are up. Basically, we sometimes do things that look like internships (and sometimes we even call them internships) and we also have a trial period for jobs, but there’s not good overlap between what we have interns/student contractors do and what we’ve hired for lately.
I work at 1Day Sooner, a small global health/biosecurity org. I’m answering based on my own observations, not in an official capacity.
We’ve had a couple of internships before as one-offs, but no continuous internship program. The biggest issues with running a standing internship program would be:
Carving out a suitable internship project is hard: Most of our work is pretty high-context, so projects need to be staffed by people who are continuously engaged (including both full-time staff and long-term contractors). Internship projects should be interesting and educational to the intern, but also should be a reasonable use of a mentor’s time (or at least not actively detracting from the mentor’s normal work). Those conditions mean that an internship project needs to be relatively compact and low-context so the intern is able to actually do stuff pretty independently within their internship time frame.
Hiring and training takes a lot of time: We, like a lot of small orgs, are constantly operating at the edge of our capacity, so staff mostly don’t have time for “extras”. If you’re going to expend a lot of time on hiring and training, and you’re already bandwidth-constrained, you’d rather look for people who are able to make a longer commitment. (In some orgs, internships are sort of a training/test period or lead-in to a full-time role, but my understanding is that’s mostly a thing for bigger organizations that hire for the same roles every year, and definitely not realistic for us.)
Speaking for myself, I actually would like to have more interns. I think good internships can be a great way to “pay it forward” in terms of all the educational experiences I’ve had that have gotten me here. I also just enjoy the opportunity to be a mentor! However, I mostly can’t, in good conscience, argue that creating and running internships is a great use of my time or our grant money, and I don’t think that we have enough internship-suitable projects that would make for a valuable and interesting internship experience. (I have offered to supervise/advise on independent projects before, which would be on my own time and wouldn’t take up 1Day resources, although have yet to be taken up on that.)
I have colleagues in other organizations who are involved in ASHRAE; one contributed to the development of 241! 241 is great, and to be very clear, my job is not to promote far-UV, it is to promote indoor air cleaning. Far-UV gets a lot of attention in my social circles because it is exciting and new, and people have a lot of questions about that specifically—this post is meant for the very narrow case of answering questions I’ve directly gotten about far-UV.
If far-UV is so great, why isn’t it everywhere?
Great to see your thinking laid out this way, and of course thank you for your interest in our (1Day Sooner/Rethink Priorities) report!
It was useful to see the discussion of possible overhype from the funding side of the field, since I don’t have insight into funding decisions. On the other hand, there are reasons funders might want to focus attention on far-UV, without disregarding the usefulness of conventional-wavelength GUV: since far-UV requires more research than conventional-wavelength systems at this time, but might ultimately be easier to install, the far-UV research payoff could be very large for increasing adoption of GUV in general. I expect that conventional-wavelength systems would benefit from investment into R&D for easier installation, but that’s not obviously a place for philanthropic funding. The safety studies necessary for far-UV are too expensive for the current market size, so if far-UV research does not get more philanthropic funding than conventional-wavelength GUV, far-UV safety studies might not be performed in a rigorous way. However, I would agree that funders should be wavelength-agnostic if they are directly funding installations.
Because of the challenges facing comprehensive far-UV analysis, I was surprised that you didn’t think it would be very impactful for philanthropists to fund studies—broadly speaking, I agree about the lack of expertise, but this is a small enough field that the informed voices are fairly well-known within the field and I think interested philanthropic bodies would be able to consult those informed opinions. Again, I don’t have insight into the funding side of the process, so that may be optimistic. I am certainly biased, since 1Day Sooner does regularly apply/advocate for philanthropic funding for technical research! On the reverse side, personal experience has left me pessimistic about policy advocacy for GUV research, but your report has swayed me somewhat to at least consider the fact that there is not a concerted, heavyweight policy advocacy effort in this area.
I appreciated the argument on capturing the bulk of the risk by later deployment; it was a very helpful presentation of the case. I do think that there is a learning-by-doing element to GUV rollout (for either type of GUV), where rollout and analysis in select environments is necessary for better understanding broader GUV use cases. Identifying those environments is an element of the current 1Day Sooner IAQ project. I also would love to see the cost of GUV installation fall sooner rather than later in order to address endemic disease burden worldwide, e.g. via widespread installation in TB clinics. (I’m fully aware that this use case might remain impractical, but it’s nice to consider the potential to address global health! Of course if a funder is specifically trying to fight TB, I’d still recommend sinking their money into vaccine research or treatment.)
Finally, this report was extremely helpful for a current 1Day Sooner project! We’re working on a report to assess the potential for market shaping techniques to accelerate the adoption of indoor air cleaning technology. This post, and writing up this comment, really helped clarify some of my thinking about the possible directions we’d been tossing around, so a huge thank you for that!
I was originally not sure if I would donate this year, as my living expenses skyrocketed. I wound up donating to The Human League—the donation was much smaller than ones I’ve sent to charities in previous years, but THL was a new charity for me. I realized I have been underweighting animal welfare relative to my values, due to my discomfort thinking about it. I decided to donate to THL both because I was convinced by the cost-effectiveness argument, and as an expression of my ongoing effort to bring my actions more in line with my values. Here’s hoping that each new year finds me more ethical and compassionate than the last. :)
There is heavy geographic concentration, but the secondary concentrations include Boston, DC, and NYC in my vague sense of things. It looks like organizations are self-added to the newsletter, so these are just the ones that have volunteered to provide updates. I can say that we’re hiring for roles with a DC preference: 1daysooner.org/jobs.
I switched to a much more motivating job, and then later began taking ADHD medication, each of which was a major boost. The change in motivation (when I switched from an academic lab to a small nonprofit) has more interesting factors, so to break those out:
I received more feedback and demonstrated interest from colleagues.
My colleagues respected me more—the new workplace allowed for more specialization, and was less hierarchical...
...which made it much less intimidating to ask for in-depth explanations, so I probably learned a lot faster.
Projects had much more clear-cut checkpoints and endpoints.
Individual tasks didn’t have severe failure points, so if a detail was wrong, I didn’t have to start from scratch.
This is stellar advice! What’s wild is, I have accidentally stumbled on each of these techniques at various points and just never really consciously identified the technique, which meant it wasn’t repeatable at will. This post really crystallizes important options for me; definitely feeling some sheepish “shoulda figured that one out” combined with relief that you did it for me. THANK YOU.
Great theme idea. I’ll aim to post (working title) “Impostor syndrome can be valuable information.”
Personally I have also been skeptical of Nonlinear’s work, BUT before anything else, I just want to say I have not carefully kept track of Nonlinear’s work and this is a pretty uninformed vague impression.
I’m not skeptical because of the prizes specifically, I just think they had ideas that sounded not particularly fruitful, or more costly than they were worth. I do think that there was a lot of theoretical discussion around that type of prize setup before Nonlinear tried it, and I respect the ethos of just try-it-and-see-what-happens for something like that, with minimal downside risk. (Notably, if nobody claims the prize, the money isn’t spent and can just be used for other work.) The best-sounding concepts in the world still have to be tested before we should build lots of infrastructure on them, so I see the prize stuff as a fairly inexpensive experiment, and I think often good coordinators are undervalued. My skepticism is more that despite Nonlinear’s high profile as coordinators, I have no evidence of Nonlinear’s impact, and I’m unconvinced that they’ve found good pressure points for coordination in general. I have also judged them more harshly for this than I otherwise would, due to what I perceive as a gimmicky and overconfident style to some of their written materials. This style unavoidably puts up my guard, but its influence on my assessment may be unfair of me!
Recently told a friend about one of the easiest-but-important things I did for personal professional development, and based on her reaction, thought maybe other people would benefit from it.
A few months ago, I noticed how much I appreciated a certain person in my professional community, and thought I should try to emulate his actions. That led me to making a short list of the professional acquaintances I look up to, and my reasons for looking up to them, so that I could be very concrete about the traits I want to emulate. This exercise was pretty low-effort, but also inspiring (it feels really good to reflect on the people you appreciate!) and very quickly actionable. Examples:
Person A goes out of their way to introduce people, or to send notice of opportunities to people, which makes me feel valued and recognized. It generally doesn’t occur to me to make introductions—I should do that more often, and say good things about people’s work when I think of it!
Person B is so welcoming toward my questions and I really appreciate how they make time to help other people understand their field. I should be very clear that I appreciate people’s interest when they ask questions about my work, and make plenty of time for them.
Person C is a very direct speaker, and is very good at translating their field across different audiences with different levels of expertise. They have a good understanding of what details are interesting to different audiences, and I should carefully consider my audience’s priorities when I write or speak, not just the expected format.
Person D is very expressive and shows a lot of interest in what each person is saying, which makes interlocutors feel really good. I could stand to work on demonstrating more attentiveness and less guardedness.
Person E has extremely audacious ideas, and improves them by being unafraid to discuss them with people while they’re still half-baked. This quality is harder than the others for me to emulate, because that Big Idea™ chutzpah is really not me (and Person E has a much longer track record to draw on), but I can at least notice that it works for Person E to share their ideas liberally, and they’re not losing face, so maybe I should be less self-conscious about working through project ideas with others.
This exercise was especially useful for me because I don’t have long professional experience—since I don’t have detailed insight to lots of people’s work styles, I have to be more thoughtful about the work I have seen. It’s not common to have it explicitly pointed out, “This person is great to work with because of this habit or trait,” but once I started this exercise, it felt like an important piece of professional development snapped into focus for me.
Gavriel Kleinwaks’s Quick takes
Thanks so much for the kind feedback and comparison calculation! Your skepticism about the eACH estimates is warranted—I was unaware that coronaviruses were unusually susceptible (compared with other viruses, you mean?); the estimates we saw were all based on either SARS-CoV-2 or tuberculosis (also quite susceptible). It’s useful to know how other people are approaching this question, and ultimately the problem calls for much more extensive real-world observations.
Great questions—my colleagues and I (at 1Day Sooner) have actually spoken to representatives from HERA and BARDA (which is under HHS) who are very interested in the potential of far-UVC. What we’ve seen is that policymakers are genuinely concerned about the effectiveness and safety of widespread far-UVC use, and want to see greater research in the field, without necessarily being able to guarantee that funding themselves. We, and other organizations, have been advocating for and trying to organize research and pilot programs. (I don’t have a good sense of the international advocacy field around pandemic prep, though; most of our partners are based in the US.) I think that generally advocacy has actually been fairly specific, or at least been targeted at understanding specific concerns from policymakers, but it’s not surprising that this doesn’t necessarily come across at a glance. The more detailed and specific the plan, the more technical it gets and the more it’s being communicated person-to-person or through gigantic reports. Our report does contain specific recommendations in the “Bottlenecks and Funding Opportunities” section if you’d like to check it out!
Thanks so much for the kind words about our report! We actually published an updated version just an hour ago—you can see the new report here and the forum announcement with a summary here. (Small note on organizational affiliation: the report is a collaboration between 1Day Sooner and Rethink Priorities.)
Hi Matthew, thanks for the clear and thoughtful response. I just want to emphasize first that my team really hoped this bill would pass, with our amendment, but the political process didn’t allow for that. Regardless of our intentions, it’s reasonable for you to still identify harm in the outcome.
All my arguments were laid out in the post—I’d guess we just have different grounding assumptions about, among other things: the importance of preparing to fight future airborne superspreading-driven pathogens, the potential for far-UV to become a cheaper and more accessible consumer product than longer wavelengths, the potential relative impact of far-UV vs alternatives like filtration, the impact that far-UV could have on pathogens in an already reasonably-ventilated room, and the value of investing in far-UV equipped with scrubbers.
Of course, I just said “potential” and “could” a lot above. You’re right that the benefit was uncertain. As I wrote, I had serious concerns during this effort, but we couldn’t avoid acting under uncertainty.
I also want to emphasize that far-UV is in a particularly vulnerable development stage relative to its potential value, but we’re fighting to improve indoor air quality broadly, not just focusing on far-UV. 1Day Sooner’s current IAQ project is more focused on filter implementation.