Focused on impact evaluation, economics, and (lately) animal welfare
geoffrey
Karma: 555
I also share these frustrations with career advice from 80,000 Hours and the EA Forum. There was time about 2 years back where my forum activity was a lot of snarky complaints (of questionable insight) about career advice and diversity.
Like you mentioned, the career advice usually leaves a lot to be desired in the concrete details of navigating a lack of mentors, lack of credentials, lack of financial runway, family obligations, etc. I’ve sometimes wondered about writing an article to fill in the gap, but it’s not exactly a “one article” sized hole. Maybe that’s a yearlong project you or I or someone else can work on someday.
As for my comment on “above-the-curve”, I think we’re in agreement but I could have worded this better. I don’t think the community is diverse but the initiatives are much higher quality than I see elsewhere. Usually, these initiatives range from bad to useless. Whereas this list of EA diversity initiatives feels mostly harmless or slightly positive nudges. A few feel like they’ll pay dividends in a few years.
This is great stuff. I often find it hard to remember a lot of initiatives have happened (despite having read 80% of this list already) so this timeline is a good reference
As an aside, I think others may benefit from reading about diversity initiatives outside EA to remember this is hard problem. It’s totally consistent for EA to be above-the-curve on this and still not move the needle much (directionally I think those two things are true but not confident on magnitudes), so linking some stuff I’ve been reading lately:
DEI Deconstructed: Your No-Nonsense Guide to Doing the Work and Doing It Right has two neat chapters at the beginning: one on corporate initiatives over the past 10 years and another on US initiatives since World War II. The tidbits on US military diversity initiatives (and their mixed results) were new to me and sadly not something I see talked about much elsewhere. The rest of the book seemed to be a corporate strategy workbook which I didn’t find useful but others might.
Affirmative Action and the Quality-Fit Trade-Off explores the stronger forms of affirmative action practiced at law school + elite undergraduate universities. It summarizes the economic theory and evidence on whether these stronger forms can “backfire” for minority students. Ultimately, it’s hard to say but mild forms seem good. Plato Stanford Encylopedia of Philosophy takes a legal and philosophical look at how the justification and practice for affirmative action has shifted over time.
Echoing what Eva said, I think you should consider waiting a year then apply for IDE / applied econ masters. An IDE program is probably the right fit given your goals, but I don’t know any beyond Yale’s IDE which expects you to already have worked in development first.
For Applied Econ, I like University of Maryland’s Applied Economics Master’s program. The program only requires Calc I and is very transparent about what it can do. Dev / global health placements, content, and networking will take a huge hit compared to IDE programs though.
You can use the year in the workforce to save money and take online classes on the side. Believe me, you’ll want the savings. Development and global health can be financially tough in early career.
In general, the econ and math background required isn’t too high for these type of real-world Master’s degrees. Working + getting good grades in first-semester calculus, first-semester probability and stats, intermediate micro, and intermediate macro may be enough for admission.
This is my favorite in the series so far. I really enjoy the tacit knowledge flavor of it and that some of these lessons generalize beyond the CBA domain.
Would also love this. I think a useful contrast will be A/B testing in big tech firms. My amateur understanding is big tech firms can and should run hundreds of “RCTs” because:
No need to acquire subjects.
Minimal disruption to business since you only need to siphon off a minuscule portion of your user base.
Tech experiments can finish in days while field experiments need at least a few weeks and sometimes years.
If we assume treatments are heavy tailed, then a big tech firm running hundreds of A/B tests is more likely to learn of a weird trick that grows the business when compared to a NGO who may only get one shot.
Something I’ve noticed more in the EA Forum is the increase in drive-by professional posts. Organizations will promote a idea, a job posting, or something else. Then they’ll engage as long as they’re on the front page before bouncing.
That’s fine in small amounts or if the author is a regular contributor. But if the author is just stopping by to do their public engagement, then it breaks the illusion of a community.
And for me, that is the aesthetic draw of the forum. It’s a place where expects and amateurs alike coexist in the same space, say things that are too rough for professional publication, and then respond to each other in real time.
It’s magical and unreal that I can develop these (admittedly shallow and sometimes parasocial) relationships with people. It’s cool that I have some chance of getting a leading expert to respond to my quarter-baked comment. It’s cool that people sometimes recognize me in real life from what I wrote online.
And that feeling has been decreasing over time, which has made me lean more towards Slack, Discord, or even Twitter for real-time engagement. Meanwhile, I treat the Forum more as a searchable repository for EA-style research
This is a class act in reasoning transparency. I love how easy it is to skim and drill down into things for more detail. Same goes for the pre-print and replication code.
Nits:
I was confused what calibration meant since I think of this exercise as simulation. To me, calibration is taking some observed data and reverse engineering the elasticity. But this is starting with the elasticity values—taken from the Bouyssou et al. (2024) meta-analysis—and seeing how that goes forward in a pretend-tax situation.
I would have loved to hear about how trustworthy you found the Bouyssou et al. (2024) study, since it’s providing the elasticity values for your main analysis. That meta-analysis is really cool and probably the best we have. But it also feels like a bucket of numbers that doesn’t think too critically about its inputs. And cross-price elasticity feels like a tricky thing to estimate, something Rethink Priorities wrote about here.
But it’s still really cool. I like how simple this is conceptually and that (given some assumptions) carbon tax can be net-positive for all animals.
I love this tiny hearts on pink banner aesthetic. Especially in the middle of winter where I’m at.
I’m on a pause with donations for some personal and financial reasons, but if I was on the fence or was procrastinating, this absolutely would have pushed me to do so.
Personal reasons why I wished I delayed donations: I started donating 10% of my income about 6 years back when I was making Software Engineer money. Then I delayed my donations when I moved into a direct work path, intending to make up the difference later in life. I don’t have any regrets about ‘donating right away’ back then. But if I could do it all over again with the benefit of hindsight, I would have delayed most of my earlier donations too.
First, I’ve been surprised by ‘necessary expenses’. Most of my health care needs have been in therapy and dental care, neither of which is covered much by insurance. On top of that, friend visits cost more over time as people scatter to different cities, meaning I’m paying a lot more for travel costs. And family obligations always manage to catch me off-caught.
Second, career transitions are expensive. I was counting on my programming skills and volunteer organizing to mean a lot more in public policy and research. But there are few substitutes for working inside your target field. And while everyone complains about Master’s degrees, it’s still heavily rewarded on the job market so I ultimately caved in and paid for one.Finally, I’m getting a lot more from ‘money right away’ these days. Thanks to some mental health improvements, fancy things are less stressful and more enjoyable than before. The extra vacation, concert, or restaurant is now worth it, and so my optimal spending level has increased. That’s not just for enjoyment. My productivity also improves after that extra splurging, whereas before there wasn’t much difference in the relaxation benefit I got from a concert and a series of YouTube comedy skits.
If I had to find a lesson here, it’s that I thought too much about my altruistic desires changing and not enough on everything else changing. I opted to ‘donate right away’ to protect against future me rebelling against effective charity, worrying about value drift and stories of lost motivation. In practice, my preference for giving 10% has been incredibly robust. My other preferences have been a lot more dynamic.
Hey John, this is very cool to read. I like the focus on what surprised you as a founder (and maybe newcomer?) in the mental health field.
I’m curious to hear more about the implementation details. Could you tell me more about the length, intensity, and duration of a typical treatment program? I saw 6 sessions in a graph which makes me think this is once-a-week program for 1-2 hour sessions over 1-2 months
Less sessions is a reliable way to reduce cost, but my understanding is there’s a U-shaped curve to cost-effectiveness here. 1 session doesn’t have enough benefits but 100 sessions costs too much and doesn’t add more benefit.
Also, are you targeting specific conditions? I see improvement in insomnia but that can arise from a sleep intervention or a general CBT course too
Quickly throwing in a related dynamic. I suspect animal welfare folks have more free time to post online.
Career advancement in animal welfare is much more generalist than global health & development. This means there’s not as many career goals to ‘grind’ towards, leaving more free time for public engagement. Alternative proteins feel like a space where one can specialize, but that’s all I can think of. I’d love to know of other examples.In contrast, global health & development has many distinct specialities that you have to focus on if you want to grow your career. It’s not uncommon for someone’s career to be built on incredibly narrow topic like, say, the implications of decentralization for regulating groundwater pollution. There are even ‘playbooks’ for breaking into the space, and they rarely align with writing EA Forum posts, or really any public writing.
Thanks, this is exactly what I’m looking for.
Accuracy isn’t too important here. More interested in how people approach this
[Question] What are publicly available BOTECs people did for career choices?
This advice sounds right to me if you already have the signal in hand and deciding whether to job search.
But if you’re don’t have the signal, then you need to spend time getting it. And then I think the advice hinges on how long it takes to get the signal. Short time-capped projects are great (like OP’s support on 80,000 hours CEO search). But for learning and then demonstrating new skills on your own, it’s not always clear how long you’ll need.
Ooh good idea. I should do more of that.
I do think this can run into Goodhart’s Law problems. For example, in the early 2010s, back when being a self-taught software engineer was much more doable, and it was a strong sign when someone had a GitHub profile with some side projects with a few months of work behind each of them. GitHub profile correlated with a lot of other desirable things. But then everyone got that advice (including me) and that signal got rapidly discounted.
So I guess I’d qualify that with: press really hard on why the signal is impressive and also ask people explicitly if they agree with the signals you heard from others (ex. I heard from people in field that signal X is good / bad, do you agree with that?)
I like this advice a lot but want to add a quick asterisk when transitioning to a new field.
It’s really really hard to tell what an expensive signal is without feedback. If you’re experienced in a field or you hang out with folks who work in a field, then you’ve probably internalized what counts as an “impressive project” to some degree.
In policy land, this cashes out as advice to take a job you don’t want in the organization you do want. Because that’s how you’ll learn what’s valuable and what’s not. Or taking low paid internships and skilled volunteering roles. Or dropping a lot of money to attend a conference for your target field.
It’s also really hard to know the steps to executing the “impressive project” (which is why the signal is so expensive!). With internships and skilled volunteering, you’ll get supervision. And even a light touch can prevent you from investing a ton of time in something that doesn’t matter. Or get reassurance that task X really does take everyone a long time so don’t feel bad about the time sink.
But with grants or independent work, you’ll have to seek out the feedback, brief them on project and hope you’ve given enough context for useful feedback, and also hope you picked someone who knows your area well enough. (I haven’t had success here and I’m not sure how realistic it is for most people.)
Work tests are awesome here since they’re mini-projects. But feedback is often noisy and hard to interpret since there aren’t good incentives for orgs to specialize in concrete feedback. I’ve interpreted this feedback wrong in both directions (first being too optimistic about a generic but lengthy “there were many strong candidates” and then too pessimistic about the terse but personalized rejections encouraging me to still consider research as a career)
The point I’m trying to make is that the idea of “cheap tests, expensive signal” is probably a lot easier for mid-career folks to apply independently. But for people without any experience, the advice depends on whether you can get supervision from an organization. Without that, it may be better to just “get your foot in the door” in any way possible. Maybe a “good enough cool sounding project” helps to demonstrate interest, but it’s tough for people to perform at 1-year of experience level before they have that 1 year of experience.
Strong agree. By no means am I suggesting organizations outsource or cancel more of their non-core work. It’s hard for organizations to define those, non-core work needs a lot of context, and a lot of grunt work is genuinely “real work” that people don’t appreciate.
But from an individual POV, I wanted to make sense of the feeling that extra hours could sometimes be increasing in value even when I was very tired. And I think it’s this dynamic with some tasks or career goals where the last N% is where most of the rewards are. So spending more time once you get there is a big deal.
I believe Claudia Goldin calls these “greedy jobs”.
Decreasing focus over time may not mean decreasing productivity:
Suppose you want to double your productivity by doubling your work hours from 30 to 60 per week. Standard advice will say this is silly, since focus decreases over time. You may still increase your productivity but it will scale slower than your work hours.
But this assumes all assigned work is equally important. In reality, many jobs have peripheral tasks that must be done before your core tasks (or your “real work”). Civil servants have reporting requirements, academic researchers have teaching obligations, and individual contributors everywhere have to attend meetings so managers can coordinate direction.
Suppose the non-core tasks takes 20 hours per week. Then going from a 30-hour to 60-hour workweek isn’t just doubling your core task hours; it’s quadrupling your core task hours from 10 to 40! And that quadrupling of core task hours can outweigh the diminishing focus over time. It can even mean that the last 20 hours are more productive than the first 20 hours.
Now 20 hours of peripheral tasks is admittedly an extreme example. But it may not be that far off for modeling career advancement. Promotions are based partly on stretch assignments (or “performing above your level”) and you won’t get to work on stretch assignments all the time. Managers may split your time between your current job and the job you want to promote into.
Once you get to a certain level of seniority and organizational maturity, then more of your hours become core task hours. So diminishing focus more directly translates into diminishing productivity. But I think the earlier you are in your career, the more exploration you’re doing, and the further you are from your target job, the more likely you’ll want those extra hours.
Any tips for running discussion groups on the WIT sequences? I’m vaguely interested in doing one on the CURVE sequence (which I’ve read deeply) or the CRAFT sequence (which I have only skimmed). However, the technical density seems like a big barrier and perhaps some posts are more key than others
Hey Ozzie, a few quick notes on why I react but try not to comment on community based stuff these days:
I try to limit how many meta-level comments I make. In general I’d like to see more object-level discussion of things and so I’m trying (to mixed success) to comment mostly about cause areas directly.
Partly it’s a vote for the person I’d like to be. If I talk about community stuff, part of my headspace will be thinking about it for the next few days. (I fully realize the irony of making this comment.)
It’s emotionally tricky since I feel responsibility for how others react. I know how loaded this topic was for a younger me, and I feel an obligation to make younger me feel welcome
These conversations often feel aspirational and repetitive. Like “there should be more X” is too simple. Whereas something like “there should be more X. Y org should be responsible for it. Tradeoffs may be Z. Failure modes are A, B, and C.” is concrete enough to get somewhere.