Yonatan Cale

• Yonatan Cale 19 Apr 2024 16:05 UTC

  3 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Per­sonal re­flec­tions on FTX

  Linking to Zvi’s review of the podcast:

  https://​​thezvi.wordpress.com/​​2024/​​04/​​15/​​monthly-roundup-17-april-2024/​​

  Search for:

  Will MaCaskill went on the Sam Harris podcast

  It’s a negative review, but opinions are Zvi’s, I didn’t hear the podcast myself.

• Yonatan Cale 19 Apr 2024 10:47 UTC

  5 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Adam Binks’s comment on: Job Post Template

  do you have a rough guess at what % this is a deal breaker for?

  It’s less of “%” and more of “who will this intimidate”.

  Many of your top candidates will (1) currently be working somewhere, and (2) will look at many EA aligned jobs, and if many of them require a work trial then that could be a problem.

  (I just hired someone who was working full time, and I assume if we required a work trial then he just wouldn’t be able to do it without quitting)

  Easy ways to make this better:

  1. If you have flexibility (for example, whether the work trial is local or remote, or when it is, or something else), then say that in the job post.

     1. It was common for me to hear that candidates didn’t even apply because of something like that which is written as a strict requirement, and then for me to hear from an employer that they didn’t really care about it.

  2. If your candidates will feel comfortable talking to you and telling you about things like this, and then you can find a solution together—I imagine that would be great.

  Also, some candidates will WANT a work trial to see how the job actually is. I asked for a work trial in my current job.

  Also, CEA does work trials. You could ask them how it goes. (But they won’t hear about people who didn’t even apply, I guess)

• Yonatan Cale 11 Mar 2024 7:53 UTC

  2 points

  0 ∶ 2

  on: OpenAI an­nounces new mem­bers to board of directors

  I recommend adding “Sam Altman” to the title, it can act as a TLDR. The current phrasing has a bit of a “click here to know more” vibe for me (like an ad) (probably unintentionally)

• Yonatan Cale 24 Feb 2024 16:00 UTC

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

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

  1.a and b.

  I usually ask for feedback, and often it’s something like “Idk, the vibe seemed off somehow. I can’t really explain it.” Do you know what that could be?

  This sounds like someone who doesn’t want to actually give you feedback, my guess is they’re scared of insulting you, or being liable to something legal, or something like that.

  My focus wouldn’t be on trying to interpret the literal words (like “what vibe”) but rather making them comfortable to give you actual real feedback. This is a skill in itself which you can practice. Here’s a draft to maybe start from: “Hey, I think I have some kind of blind spot in interviews where I’m doing something wrong, but I don’t know what it is and a friend told me I probably won’t notice it myself and I better get feedback from someone else. Any chance you’d tell me more about what didn’t work for you? I promise not to be insulted or complain for not passing or anything like that”

  2.

  But in non-EA jobs I’m also afraid that I might not live up to some expectations in the first several weeks when I’m still new to everything.

  This is super common. Like, I’m not making this up, I had dozens of conversations and this is a common thing to worry about, and it’s probably true to many other people interviewing to the same position.

  My own approach to this is to tell the interviewer what I’m worried about, and also the reasons that I might not be a good match for whatever this is. For example, “I never worked with some-tech-you-use”. If after hearing my worries they still want to hire me, that’s great, and I don’t need to pretend to know anything. I also think this somewhat filters for hiring managers that appreciate transparency (and not pretending everything is perfect), which is pretty important to me personally.

  (also, reasonable managers understand you will need onboarding time, and if they don’t understand that—then I prefer they don’t hire me)

  This all totally might be a Yonatan-thing, idk.

  4.

  You mean as positive reinforcement?

  Yeah

  I could meet with a friend or go climbing. :-3

  I think (?) I’d aim for something short that I could do right-after, so my brain will understand this is a positive reinforcement and not just an unrelated fun evening? This is just my own intuition. I guess it would work if I’d meet a friend and they’d keep saying “good job for interviewing! now let’s get you chocolate!” or whatever :)

  I don’t really know, I recommend you trust your own introspection, I might be unusual here

  5.

  Maybe I should practice minimally next time to avoid that.

  Eh, you might have (right now) downsides to applying and not having it work well. The downsides might be subjective or “technically wrong” but if you’re averse to applying with minimal practice, I would acknowledge that feeling and try to address it (or if you can’t—I’m not personally pushing you to apply to Google unprepared, if it seems scary or so).

  Examples of things that might worry you:

  a. “will google never invite you to interview again if you fail” --> You can check Google’s policy. I think they have a 6-12 months cooldown for people who didn’t pass, but you can apply again. Is this time too long? Maybe you don’t care at all? I don’t know, depends on your circumstances

  b. maybe you’re not interviewing to dozens of places and so it (maybe correctly) feels like Google is your only chance? ( --> I’d recommend interviewing to dozens of places, to be clear :P )

  I think a useful answer here would mainly involve listening to you which I can’t really do over text. If you want to brainstorm out loud here, I can try to contribute “textbook solutions” if I have them. Or you could do introspection with a friend, or we could talk, or none of the above! just trying to share how I’d approach this

  :)

• Yonatan Cale 10 Feb 2024 15:06 UTC

  5 points

  1 ∶ 0

  on: In­tro­duc­ing the Effek­tiv Spen­den “Defend­ing Democ­racy” fund

  I would be interested in something like this existing for Israel

• Yonatan Cale 25 Nov 2023 11:52 UTC

  16 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

  9 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

  96 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

  7 ∶ 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)