Yonatan Cale

• Yonatan Cale 25 Nov 2023 11:52 UTC

  15 points

  1 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Dawn Drescher’s comment on: Yonatan Cale’s Shortform

  I have thoughts on how to deal with this. My priors are this won’t work if I communicate it through text (but I have no idea why). Still, seems like the friendly thing would be to write it down

  My recommendation on how to read this:

  1. If this advice fits you, it should read as “ah obviously, how didn’t I think of that?”. If it reads as “this is annoying, I guess I’ll do it, okay....”—then something doesn’t fit you well, I missed some preference of yours. Please don’t make me a source of annoying social pressure

  2. Again, for some reason this works better when speaking than in writing. So, eh, … idk.. imagine me speaking?? get a friend to read this to you?

     1. (whatever you chose, consider telling me how it went? this part is a mystery to me)

  So,

  TL;DR:

  1. The goal of interviews is not to pass them (that’s the wrong goal, I claim). The goals I recommend are:

     1. Reducing uncertainty regarding what places will accept you. (so you should get many rejections, it’s by-design, otherwise you’re not searching well)

     2. Practicing interviews. Interviews are different than actual work, and there’s skill to build there. So after interviews, I’ll review stuff I didn’t know, and I’ll ask for feedback about my blind spots. I have some embarrassing stories about blind spots I had in interviews and would never notice without asking for feedback. Like, eh, taking off my shoes and walking around the room including the interviewer 🫣 these are actual blind spots I had which are absolutely unrelated to my profession of software development

  2. Something about the framing of “people who interview a lot beat others in getting better jobs”—and motivation to be one of those

  3. Get yourself ice cream or so after interviewing

     1. Important sub point: Positive reinforcement should be for “doing good moves” (like scheduling an interview, or like reviewing what you could do better), and NOT for passing interviews (which imply to your brain that not-passing is negative, and so if your brain has uncertainty about this—it will want to avoid interviewing)

  4. Asking a close friend /​ partner /​ roommate what they think could work for you. They might say something like “play beat saber, that always makes you feel good” which I couldn’t guess

  5. Sometimes people spend a lot of time on things like writing cover letters (or other things that I think are a wrong use of time and frustrating (and in my model of people: some part of them knows this isn’t a good idea and it manifests as stress/​avoidance, though I’m no therapist)). I’d just stop doing those things, few things are (imo) worth the tradeoff of having more stress from interviews. It’s a tradeoff, not a game of “do interviews perfectly and sacrafice everything else”

• Yonatan Cale 22 Nov 2023 21:43 UTC

  4 points

  1 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Dawn Drescher’s comment on: Yonatan Cale’s Shortform

  Seems to me from your questions that your bottle neck is specifically finding the interview process stressful.

  I think there’s stuff to do about that, and it would potentially help with lots of other tradeoffs (for example, you’d happily interview in more places, get more offers, know what your alternatives are, ..)

  wdyt?

• Yonatan Cale 21 Nov 2023 20:38 UTC

  4 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Dawn Drescher’s comment on: Yonatan Cale’s Shortform

  TL;DR: The orgs know best if they’d rather hire you or get the amount you’d donate. You can ask them.

  I’d apply sometimes, and ask if they prefer me or the next best candidate plus however much I’d donate. They have skin in the game and an incentive to answer honestly. I don’t think it’s a good idea to try guessing this alone

  I wrote more about this here, some orgs also replied (but note this was some time ago)

  (If you’re asking for yourself and not theoretically—then I’d ask you if you applied to all (or some?) of the positions that you think are really high impact. because if not—then I think once you know which ones would accept you, and once you can ask the hiring managers things like this, then your dillema will become much easier, almost trivial)

• Yonatan Cale 21 Nov 2023 20:30 UTC

  7 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: jknowak’s comment on: Yonatan Cale’s Shortform

  The main reason for this decision is that I failed to have (enough) direct impact.

  Also, I was working on vague projects (like attempting AI Safety research), almost alone (I’m very social), with unclear progress, during covid, this was bad for my mental health.

  Also, a friend invited me to join working with him, I asked if I could do a two week trial period first, everyone said yes, it was really great, and the rest is (last month’s) history

• Yonatan Cale 21 Nov 2023 20:18 UTC

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: ChrisSmith’s comment on: Yonatan Cale’s Shortform

  Yeah, I think maybe seeing a post like this would have helped me transition earlier too, now that you say so

• Yonatan Cale 21 Nov 2023 20:18 UTC

  6 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Dawn Drescher’s comment on: Yonatan Cale’s Shortform

  I might disagree with this. I know, this is controversial, but hear me out (and only then disagree-vote :P )

  So,

  1. Some jobs are 1000x+ more effective than the “typical” job. Like charities

  2. So picking one of the super-impactful ones matters, compared to the rest. Like charities

  3. But picking something that is 1x or 3x or 9x doesn’t really matter, compared to the 1000x option. (like charities)

  4. Sometimes people go for a 9x job, and they sacrifice things like “having fun” or “making money” or “learning” (or something else that is very important to them). This is the main thing I’m against, so if you can avoid this, great. For example, if you’re also excited to work on ethereum, and they have a great dev community that mentors you and so on

  5. I do think it’s important to work on something that you enjoy

     1. So I do think you should have a bar of “do enough good to have a good time”, but this is a super subjective bar, and I wouldn’t lose track of the ball that is “your motivation” (super under rated btw)

     2. I’ll also note that (imo) most (though not all) companies are net positive. So having a bar of “net positive”, if it works for you emotionally, won’t reduce many options and I think it’s great

  6. (and I recommend sometimes checking if there’s a high impact job that could use your skillset and applying)

     1. (I’m also not against doing high-risk high-reward things, or projects that aren’t “recognized” by EA orgs. Such as open source stuff)

  7. I do personally think I have a bar of not taking harmful jobs, not ruining coordination, things like that.

  8. Oh, and: While you’re working on something fun, learning and making money, I do think (in the typical case) you could see yourself as “preparing” for a potential very high impact job you might have in the future, and I think our community would be better off if people would take this path happily and without guilt. Just don’t forget to check for the high impact jobs sometimes.

  I have many many thoughts about this topic and I could go on forever, so I’ll arbitrarily stop here but feel free to ask followup questions or tell me I’m wrong

• Yonatan Cale 18 Nov 2023 14:02 UTC

  92 points

  3 ∶ 0

  on: Yonatan Cale’s Shortform

  I quit trying to have direct impact and took a zero-impact tech job instead.

  I expected to have a hard time with this transition, but I found a really good fit position and I’m having a lot of fun.

  I’m not sure yet where to donate extra money. Probably MIRI/​LTFF/​OpenPhil/​RethinkPriorities.

  I also find myself considering using money to try fixing things in Israel. Or maybe to run away first and take care things and people that are close to me. I admit, focusing on taking care of myself for a month was (is) nice, and I do feel like I can make a difference with E2G.

  (AMA)

  What links here?

  • I’m Offer­ing Free Coach­ing for Soft­ware Devel­op­ers in the EA community by Yonatan Cale (25 Oct 2021 4:33 UTC; 115 points)

• Yonatan Cale 30 Oct 2023 15:09 UTC

  10 points

  6 ∶ 0

  on: Pres­i­dent Bi­den Is­sues Ex­ec­u­tive Order on Safe, Se­cure, and Trust­wor­thy Ar­tifi­cial Intelligence

  Thank you very much for splitting this up into sections in addition to posting the linkpost itself

• Yonatan Cale 16 Oct 2023 13:24 UTC

  3 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: What do Marginal Grants at EAIF Look Like? Fund­ing Pri­ori­ties and Grant­mak­ing Thresh­olds at the EA In­fras­truc­ture Fund

  Hey, is it a reasonable interpretation that EAIF is much much more interested in growing EA than in supporting existing EAs?

  (I’m not saying this is a mistake)

  P.S

  Here are the “support existing EAs” examples I saw:

  • “[funding a] PhD student to attend a one-month program” [$100k tier] - this seems like a very different grant than the other examples, I’m even surprised to see this under EAIF rather than LTFF

  • “A shared workspace for the EA community” [$5M tier] - totally supports existing EAs

  • “an open-source Swapcard alternative” [$10M tier] - I’m surprised this isn’t under CEA

• Yonatan Cale 10 Oct 2023 17:28 UTC

  6 points

  2 ∶ 0

  in reply to: NickLaing’s comment on: I’m a Former Is­raeli Officer. AMA

  Hey, just saying explicitly that I linked to opinions of other people, not my own.

  (and I’m suggesting that you reply there if you have questions for them)

• Yonatan Cale 10 Oct 2023 12:53 UTC

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: NickLaing’s comment on: I’m a Former Is­raeli Officer. AMA

  Some answers from the LW AMA:
  https://​​www.lesswrong.com/​​posts/​​zJCKn4TSXcCXzc6fi/​​i-m-a-former-israeli-officer-ama?commentId=K8Cjv9rTzfa5Lp4gd

• Yonatan Cale 10 Oct 2023 8:39 UTC

  5 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Yonatan Cale’s Shortform

  AMA about Israel here:
  https://​​www.lesswrong.com/​​posts/​​zJCKn4TSXcCXzc6fi/​​i-m-a-former-israeli-officer-ama

• Yonatan Cale 18 Sep 2023 13:52 UTC

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Yonatan Cale’s Shortform

  Against “the burden of proof is on X”

  Instead, I recommend: “My prior is [something], here’s why”.

  I’m even more against “the burden of proof for [some policy] is on X”—I mean, what does “burden of proof” even mean in the context of policy? but hold that thought.

  An example that I’m against:

  “The burden of proof for vaccines helping should be on people who want to vaccinate, because it’s unusual to put something in your body”

  I’m against it because

  1. It implicitly assumes that vaccines should be judged as part of the group “putting something in your body”

  2. It’s a conversation stopper. It claims one of the sides of the conversation has nothing to do.

  I prefer:

  “my prior for vaccines is that they’re bad, because my prior for putting things in my body is bad (but I’m open to changing my mind from evidence, and I’m open to maybe using a different prior if you have a better idea)”

  I also like:

  “my prior is that governments should not force people to do things, and so I’m against forcing people to be vaccinated” or “my prior is that governments are allowed to force people to do things that, by scientific consensus, protect them”. I like that we’re discussing explicitly “which priors should we use to decide which policy to accept and which not to”

  What got me to write a about this now:

  I don’t like the discussion about who has the “burden of proof” to decide we should or shouldn’t have an AI pause. I would prefer discussing which prior to use for it.

  For example,

  • Should our prior be “should we pause any new technology”, and so AI is “just” another new technology?

  • Should our prior be that an AI is an extinction risk like a meteor in “don’t look up”, and so should be paused unless we have further evidence showing reasons to not-pause it?

  • Should our priors be based on expert polls (do experts recommend a pause), and should we require evidence in order to change our mind from those polls?

  My opinion: we should explicitly discuss which priors to use (which isn’t an easy question), and not just assume that one “side” has the “burden of proof”

  </​rant>

• Yonatan Cale 18 Sep 2023 13:29 UTC

  9 points

  1 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Holly_Elmore’s comment on: AI Pause Will Likely Backfire

  I agree that the question of “what priors to use here” is super important.

  For example, if someone would chose priors for “we usually don’t bring new more intelligent life forms to live with us, so the burden of proof is on doing so”—would that be valid?

  Or if someone would say “we usually don’t enforce pauses on writing new computer programs”—would THAT be valid?

  imo: the question of “what priors to use” is important and not trivial. I agree with @Holly_Elmore that just assuming the priors here is skipping over some important stuff. But I disagree that “you could have stopped here”, since there might be things which I could use to update my own (different) prior

• Yonatan Cale 12 Sep 2023 19:46 UTC

  5 points

  1 ∶ 1

  in reply to: alex lawsen (previously alexrjl)’s comment on: Avoid­ing 10 mis­takes peo­ple make when pur­su­ing a high-im­pact ca­reer (Alex Lawsen on the 80k After Hours Pod­cast)

  Hey Alex :)

  1.

  I don’t think it’s possible to write a single page that gives the right message to every user

  My own attempt to solve this is to have the article MAINLY split up into sections that address different readers, which you can skip to.

  2.

  the second paragraph visible on that page is entirely caveat.

  2.2. [edit: seems like you agree with this. TL;DR: too many caveat already] My own experience from reading EA material in general, and 80k material specifically, is that there is going to be lots of caveat which I didn’t (and maybe still don’t) know how to parse. it feels almost like how people are polite in the U.S (but not in Israel), or like fluff in emails, I’m never sure how to understand it, so I mostly skip it

  2.3. [more important] I think there’s a difference between saying “we’re not sure” and saying “here’s a way that reading this advice might do you more harm than good” (which I personally often write in my docs (example), including something I wrote today)

• Yonatan Cale 12 Sep 2023 15:06 UTC

  8 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Ivan Burduk’s comment on: Ivan Bur­duk’s Quick takes

  voted for calendar sync, may the world be sane again!!

• Yonatan Cale 12 Sep 2023 14:21 UTC

  8 points

  2 ∶ 0

  on: Avoid­ing 10 mis­takes peo­ple make when pur­su­ing a high-im­pact ca­reer (Alex Lawsen on the 80k After Hours Pod­cast)

  I love that you wrote such a readable summary!

  More thoughts:

  1. Regarding “Taking 80,000 Hours’ rankings too seriously” (and specifically thinking that you MUST work on AI Safety) - maybe it’s worth writing something about that in the website in the section about AI Safety?

     1. (I think I share 80k’s views both on the importance of AI Safety and also that not everyone should go do that)

  2. I love that you talk so much about personal fit.

     1. I think this is something that historically 80k says a lot but readers don’t internalize. Not sure how to fix it but I’m happy it’s on your radar

  3. “Another one that I’m super familiar with is basically being on a reasonably high-impact path or in a high-impact role, but still constantly considering other career options that might be even more impactful”—I’d like to point out that the new 80k career guide (that I’m currently listening to) seems to have a narrative of “thinking that X is good, then discovering Y! thinking Y is good, and then discovering Z!”.

     1. I think there are lots of positive things about this kind of writing and I’m not saying I’d change it, but it might be contributing to your readers’ perfectionism. (again, not saying you should change this, idk really)

     2. “And for years it just meant I ended up being in a role for a bit, and someone suggested I apply for another one. In some cases, I got those roles, and then I’d switch because of a bunch of these biases, and then spent very little time getting actually very good at one thing because I’ve done it for years or something.”—are you sure this is actually bad? If each time you moved to something 10x more effective, and then at some point (even if years later) settled into learning your job and doing it really well, it might still be.. good?

        1. Alex, regarding “The next time I’m looking at options is in a couple of years.”—would you endorse this sort of thing for yourself? I mean, I’m guessing it would be a big loss if you weren’t in 80k, and if (now) you weren’t in OP. I do think it would be reasonable to have you take even a whole day of vacation each week in order to make sure you get to OP 1-2 years sooner. [not as a realistic suggestion, I don’t think you could consider career options for a whole day per week, but I’m saying that the value of you doing exploration seems pretty high and would probably even justify that. no? or maybe the OP job had nothing to do with your proactive exploration]

     3. My own opinion here is that people are often just pretty bad at considering alternatives. Time spent in considering alternatives just isn’t so effective, so deciding to “only spend X time” doesn’t seem to solve the problem, I think.

        1. I do think that talking to someone like an 80k advisor is a pretty good magic pill for many people. 80k does have a sense of what careers a certain person might get, and also has a sense of “yeah that is actually super useful”, plus 100 other considerations that it’s pretty hard to figure out alone imo. It also overcomes impostor syndrome (people not even considering jobs that seem to senior regardless of how long they spend thinking) and so on.

           1. I acknowledge this doesn’t scale well

• Yonatan Cale 12 Sep 2023 13:45 UTC

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Writ­ing about my job: Growth lead at a startup in Kenya

  Hey! This sounds super fun, I’d be happy to talk about maybe joining or maybe you have recommendations for similar orgs that I might want to look at

  Specifically

  • marketplaces are close to my heart. I live in Israel, and when we got reasonable Amazon deliveries (within “only” 1-2 weeks), this improved things here so much imo. Also we have a lame taxi app which is still so-much-better than nothing (it does have ratings!). Each such thing helps so much (it’s a topic I could talk a lot about) - and we’re a 1st world country! I can’t even imagine what’s going on in Kenya, but I can feel (without trusting statistics) that it would be significant

  • I love that you’re talking to your users! So neglected!

  My own skillset is mainly around software, and specifically I think I’m better at early stages of startups than at growth stages (which I’ve never done), I don’t really know how well I’d fit here but I’m at least curious. Here’s my CV.

  Also, if you don’t publish jobs on the 80k job board then I recommend you do. It’s the hub that many people (including me [1] [2]) refer EA devs to—to find an impactful job. Sometimes very senior people (which are almost unhirable) look for jobs there, I think it might be an amazing way for you to find very-capable (and also probably very-good-culture-fit) people to join.

  P.S

  Thanks for posting this! It also reminded me I know someone else doing a similarish job, maybe they’ll write something for career week too :)

• Yonatan Cale 11 Sep 2023 11:57 UTC

  5 points

  2 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Yonatan Cale’s comment on: Crit­i­cism of the 80k job board list­ing strategy

  Tiny suggestion:

  In the “Career development: Technical tag”

  

  add alt text that appears when my mouse is over it, similarly to what you did here:

  

  (which looks really good and clear to me, I love it)

• Yonatan Cale 11 Sep 2023 11:52 UTC

  12 points

  3 ∶ 0

  on: Crit­i­cism of the 80k job board list­ing strategy

  Update:

  I love that the 80k job board team added this filter:

  

  as well as in the “area”:

  

  And the tags (and even title!) in some of the postings:

  

  (and maybe more things I didn’t notice yet?)

  This seems both well communicated (I won’t take a job that I mistakenly think is rated by 80k as high impact) and it’s easy to configure based on what I’m actually looking for.

  I really like it, and I’ll edit the post to indicate that the original criticism I had is mostly resolved.

  Kudos from me to @kush_kan and the rest of the team

  What links here?

  • Crit­i­cism of the 80k job board list­ing strategy by Yonatan Cale (21 Sep 2022 9:36 UTC; 112 points)