Yonatan Cale

I’m Offer­ing Free Coach­ing for Soft­ware Devel­op­ers in the EA community

• Yonatan Cale 26 Oct 2021 23:34 UTC

  6 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: CBelle’s comment on: I’m Offer­ing Free Coach­ing for Soft­ware Devel­op­ers in the EA community

  Context: CBelle is my girlfriend, and she believes I am a cat. She is correct.

• Yonatan Cale 26 Oct 2021 23:40 UTC

  5 points

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  in reply to: BrianTan’s comment on: I’m Offer­ing Free Coach­ing for Soft­ware Devel­op­ers in the EA community

  Hey,

  TL;DR: Feel free to contact me

  The main thing that would help me estimate how much I can help would be 2-3 examples of actual questions you’d ask if we’d talk today

• Yonatan Cale 26 Oct 2021 23:41 UTC

  1 point

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  in reply to: Henri Thunberg’s comment on: I’m Offer­ing Free Coach­ing for Soft­ware Devel­op­ers in the EA community

  Thanks!

• Yonatan Cale 27 Oct 2021 15:19 UTC

  6 points

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  in reply to: BrownHairedEevee’s comment on: I’m Offer­ing Free Coach­ing for Soft­ware Devel­op­ers in the EA community

  Yay, thank you <3 I joined

• Yonatan Cale 27 Oct 2021 18:00 UTC

  6 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Ori Adam’s comment on: I’m Offer­ing Free Coach­ing for Soft­ware Devel­op­ers in the EA community

  Thank you <3
  I’d like to add that Ori was the CTO of a bootstrapped startup that made ~$350,000 in the 1st month

• Yonatan Cale 7 Nov 2021 23:36 UTC

  9 points

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  on: Listen to more EA con­tent with The Non­lin­ear Library

  1. OMG! I am SO happy to see this! I was considering developing something like this myself, which is my way of saying how much I’m excited about this project

  2. Do you accept small donations?

  3. I probably started ~20 podcast episodes already, it’s a big deal!

Give Me Ca­reer Advice

• Yonatan Cale 11 Nov 2021 12:04 UTC

  1 point

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Jay Bailey’s comment on: Give Me Ca­reer Advice

  I agree this is a calculation that would produce a correct result, but it multiplies a lot of numbers that I’m highly unconfident in.

  I assume there’s some clever approach such as:

  1. Ignoring all the ~zero-impact charities.

  2. Asking Givewell:

     1. How many kind-of-ok charities exist?

     2. Did Givewell talk to ~10/​~100 such charities? If so, do these charities need help with their tech at all? How important is that problem?

     3. How many charities would I be able to reach? (This specifically is a B2B-sales question, where I have better priors)

  There are other blind spots I might have.
  I’ll give you some examples that I’ve already thought of, but the point is that I assume there are more:

  1. If I help The Association of Pavement Sweepers (I just made them up) more efficient in raising funds and volunteers, will that be at the expense of better charities?

  2. If I help charities advertise their ESG metrics

     1. Am I promoting a bad metric that is “competing” with better ones, such as QALYs (or something else)?

     2. Is this something that capitalizm would have handled anyway, since there is a strong financial incentive for it from the impact investing movement? Unclear, but if so, I prefer pushing the other problems

  3. Could I nudge charities to do better impact evaluations? Maybe create a community where they help each other be more effective with their resources? (Seems hard)

  4. The founder of Wave replied here that maybe I’m focusing on impact too much, and considering remote-working too little

  5. Maybe there is a specific “class” of charities that if I only help them, it is already easily worth it. Specifically, I’m thinking about:

     1. Advocating for governments to do different things. (Though, would I also help the “wrong side”?)

     2. Meta organizations such as the world bank (though, I imagine they’re really tidy already.. they must be, right?)

     3. Disaster relief: Monday helped with an earthquake and with covid vaccinations. I think this is something they do regularly, even though they don’t seem to consider it a focus right now.

  I hope this paints the picture of why I see so much potential in getting outside advice on this. There are so many ways to approach the problem, and I totally might be thinking inside some kind of box without being aware of it. Of course, when it’s time to make a decision, I’ll make it with whatever uncertainty remains. So far I passed their technical interview, there are a few more steps in the process.

• Yonatan Cale 11 Nov 2021 12:24 UTC

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Give Me Ca­reer Advice

  TL;DR: I reached out, didn’t hear back yet, thanks for this comment

  ---

  So the embarrassing truth is that I reached out to them years ago, they didn’t get back to me, and I was left with some vague impostor syndrome about not being important enough for 80000 hours’ time. I don’t think I was really aware of this until your comment just now.

  Following your comment, I looked back at the email exchange and it seems to have been a technical problem in their computer systems, not even a person rejecting me. OMG my brain over (or under?) thought this way too much. I hope some of my mentees will see this comment and remember that I’m human too.

  So my first lesson is that maybe 80000 hours need technical help ;)

  But also: In the last day of EAG, I talked to someone from the 80000 hours team. No concrete advice beyond “the side projects sound good”, “I can think bigger with some of them”, some surprisingly effective words of encouragement, and I didn’t ask about Monday.

  I emailed this person as soon as I posted this, I hope they’ll get back to me.

  I guess the takeaway here is that I should nudge them some more?

• Yonatan Cale 11 Nov 2021 13:12 UTC

  1 point

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: MichaelStJules’s comment on: Give Me Ca­reer Advice

  Working on EA projects funded by grants

  TL;DR: Yes. (Which?)

  Animal groups

  I’m already talking to a very senior developer (20+ years of experience) who’s done a lot of work with Animals Now and is interested to do more in the same/​similar area (also climate change, if you hear about something! I have another eager developer for that too!), so if we’ll find a good opportunity, he’d probably be the first to take it, I think.

  Also, working on animal welfare is less close to my heart than meta/​rationality/​systematic causes. I know this might sound strange. But it’s how my brain is wired, and I think there’s an advantage in working on things that come easily to me.

  Projects that are already funded

  I agree this would be good, but I’ll say this this happens not to be a limitation for me. I think I might even have an edge in being able to start early stage unfunded projects, without being dependent on grant makers having the capacity to evaluate them first.

  The way I really think about this is like a startup, where I expect to show actual impressive relevant metrics before I go fundraising.

  But maybe I’m mistaken. Maybe I should already fundraise for “Effective Developers”? Maybe it would at least elicit some unfiltered feedback from people who often evaluate such initiatives?

  ---

  What the EA Funds are looking to make grants to support

  Going over their list:

  Animal welfare

  See the “animal groups” title above.

  Infrastructure: Access to talent

  This would be a good fit for me, but it seems like a lot of people are starting to work on it, and I’m somewhat involved in part of it (I’m very grateful for the people approaching me about this! This is close to my heart).

  I’m considering focusing on a smaller niche where I think I have some extra good fit: Startups and Software Developers.

  Global health and development

  Not accepting applications.

  Also, there are other reasons I probably wouldn’t start a project here (such as, I could just work for Wave), unless it would be starting a mental health app with a specific approach that I don’t understand why nobody else is doing (disclaimer: I didn’t actually research this).

  Longtermism

  See this section.

  ---

  Co working space in Israel

  Non EA workspace, like WeWork

  TL;DR: Not so good

  I tried this when I was a freelancer. Note I’m an extroverted person who wears colorful cat shirts and who probably shares many common interests with the other founders and developers over there, but still the atmosphere was mostly each person has their own space. I did meet some nice people, but orders of magnitude less than I do in a regular job that has an office.

  EA workspace

  TL;DR: HELL YES!

  I proposed this [Hebrew link] ~3 months ago and there seems to be interest, I wonder if our community manager would be interested in pursuing this project, they’d probably be good at it.

  I think this has the potential to free up Israelis to work remotely on way more impactful projects, if it’s done right. And once we have a critical mass (which is the hard part), more and more people could join easily.

  I’m not sure I could pull this off, the temptation to work at home “just today”, everyday, would exist for everyone.

  I wonder if

  1. Someone has already tried this

  2. Some org would sponsor an experiment

• Yonatan Cale 12 Nov 2021 9:36 UTC

  1 point

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  in reply to: rnole’s comment on: I’m Offer­ing Free Coach­ing for Soft­ware Devel­op­ers in the EA community

  Adding: Richard is the CTO

  And thanks!

• Yonatan Cale 15 Nov 2021 23:09 UTC

  2 points

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  on: Should Earn­ers-to-Give Work at Star­tups In­stead of Big Com­pa­nies?

  TL;DR: Personal fit matters a lot and I think we don’t talk about this enough

  I know this is out of scope for your post, but I thought it at least deserves a comment

  ---

  Personal Fit is neglected

  From lots of discussions with EA software developers, they often don’t even think much about optimizing factors such as “how much will I enjoy this”

  Personal fit also affects the financial aspect

  A lot of the variance in income comes from skill, which comes from

  1. How much do I enjoy my work?

  2. How quickly do I improve at what I do? (This snowballs! A higher rate of improvement matters A LOT in the long term!)

     1. Improvement rate is affected a lot by how much I enjoy my work

  I’m not saying you’re wrong with your calculations

  I’m just saying that other factors may be really important and I wish they got more “air time”.

  I still appreciate you doing these calculations, I couldn’t do them myself, so still thank you

  What links here?

  • Why fun writ­ing can save lives: the case for it be­ing high im­pact to make EA writ­ing entertaining by Kat Woods (11 Nov 2021 22:17 UTC; 125 points)
  • Yonatan Cale's comment on Why fun writ­ing can save lives: the case for it be­ing high im­pact to make EA writ­ing entertaining by Kat Woods (16 Nov 2021 13:01 UTC; 3 points)
  • Yonatan Cale's comment on Give Me Ca­reer Advice by Yonatan Cale (16 Nov 2021 21:58 UTC; 1 point)

• Yonatan Cale 15 Nov 2021 23:14 UTC

  1 point

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Yonatan Cale’s comment on: Should Earn­ers-to-Give Work at Star­tups In­stead of Big Com­pa­nies?

  (I’m considering writing more about “textbook optimizations”, things that software developers can often do to optimize earnings and other good-things in our jobs, but this seems highly out of scope for your post)

• Yonatan Cale 16 Nov 2021 0:01 UTC

  1 point

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Should Earn­ers-to-Give Work at Star­tups In­stead of Big Com­pa­nies?

  Here are my financial thoughts and questions from your post.

  [I wasn’t sure how to format this to make it easy to comment on, I’m open to changing it]

  1. If I was only trying to optimize earnings for myself (regardless of EA), would you still recommend this? [not sure I understood this part]

  Do you think that:

  • Optimizing earnings for myself = work at big tech

  • Optimizing earnings for EA = work at startup

  ?

  If so, then do I understand correctly that the value of working for a startup is:

  1.1. Diversifying the EA portfolio, and

  1.2. The value of money is not logarithmic for EA as a whole

  ?

  If so, 1.1. seems like a small consideration to me, given the importance of this life decision for the individual, and 1.2. seems like it’s maybe false, given EA currently has a ton of money. But anyway, I’d put this explicitly and let each person decide for themselves. (or maybe I didn’t understand correctly? This is my biggest uncertainty)

  2. Funding options exercising—this exists

  There is a company that does this in Israel.

  If this doesn’t exist somewhere else, perhaps it can be started as a for-profit, I don’t think it necessarily needs to be an EA org. (It can donate profits)

  3. EAs picking stocks better than VCs

  A main failure mode is, I think, developers who THINK they can pick good startups, but they’re actually just hearing the same things that all the founders say. “We have the best people”, “The market is billions of trillions”, and so on. I’ve been there myself.

  I think it’s important to put some clear disclaimer here that most developers won’t manage to beat VCs (in case they think of trying).

  4. Opening an EA VC (because we have smart people)

  My default answer would be “if it’s possible, why doesn’t it exist?”, but my actual answer is “if some people think they can do it—I think that would be amazing”.

  btw it sounds like a dream job to me

  5. Liquidation preference and other fishy terms

  The real world problem here is that employees won’t know about these fishy terms. Do you live in a place where if the founders sign an agreement giving the investors a 10x liquidation preference, the employees will surely hear about it? I think it’s not the situation in Israel [but this is not my expertise]

  6. Meta Options are worth an extra 16 percentage points

  First of all, this is really interesting, I have been struggling to build some model around it and I can’t wait to see what was proposed.

  6.1. My push back:

  At least here, startup workers (and especially founders!!) work a lot more than big-tech workers. I hear people saying “it’s hard so some people won’t want it”, but I don’t think I saw anyone put a number on that “hard” figure.

  Do you think it’s reasonable to say that a startup employee works 20% more than a big-tech employee? And founders—way more. (I wonder if a better metric would be “count how much free time they still have” to express that if founders work 13 hours per day instead of 9, they might be working “double” in some sense)

  6.1.1. Your push back (?)

  I imagine you’d reply and say “those estimations for how much time people spend working at different companies varies a lot between companies, way more than it does between startups-as-a-whole and big-companies-as-a-whole”.

  I’d agree.

  My point is “there might be even bigger considerations, like how much time you spend at work, which weren’t counted”, and I’m saying all this because I was surprised to see “16 percentage points” as the value that is so big that it seems to tip the scale.

  Don’t get me wrong—it is significant, and I’m especially happy to have it modeled explicitly. Maybe I could have done a better job setting up my titles here, sorry

  7. Who are the top VCs?

  If I understood correctly from you: “who is the top VC” changes over time, and the parameter that has predictive power is “who was the top VC last year”. I’d find it useful to have an updating list of top VCs. Beating the market is always fun!

  (Or is Y Combinator always on top?)

  8. Transferring the risk /​ helping EAs who’s startup failed

  If the global EA org is more risk tolerant than individual EAs (who need money to live), and also startups are high-expected-return but also high-risk, then maybe we can use existing financial tools to transfer this risk:

  We could have the EA org pay money to the employee, and get the employee’s options in return (early on, way before an IPO/​exit). [Would this be legal? Why doesn’t it already happen?]

  This will also allow the EA org to run the complicated calculation of “which startup options to buy”. Perhaps you could be part of this org, and use calculations such as you did here to find the most promising startups, and use EA employees to get access to their options. I think there’s value in having some centralized org with expertise and skin in the game run this calculation.

  9. “Most people overvalue startups and underestimate risk”

  This is absolutely my impression, I just wanted to say how much I agree.

  I don’t think we can learn much about the “free market” value of startup options by observing that individual developers want these options very much.

  I don’t know if this seems obviously true to you: You do sometimes compare how much EAs would value startup options compared to other people. I agree the comparison holds, but I don’t think “the other people” are a reasonable baseline. Let me know if we seem to disagree here, I could also elaborate

  What links here?

  • Why fun writ­ing can save lives: the case for it be­ing high im­pact to make EA writ­ing entertaining by Kat Woods (11 Nov 2021 22:17 UTC; 125 points)
  • Yonatan Cale's comment on Why fun writ­ing can save lives: the case for it be­ing high im­pact to make EA writ­ing entertaining by Kat Woods (16 Nov 2021 13:01 UTC; 3 points)
  • Yonatan Cale's comment on Give Me Ca­reer Advice by Yonatan Cale (16 Nov 2021 21:58 UTC; 1 point)

• Yonatan Cale 16 Nov 2021 11:37 UTC

  18 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Ngo and Yud­kowsky on al­ign­ment difficulty

  Feature request for the Nonlinear Library: Use different voices for each person?

• Yonatan Cale 16 Nov 2021 13:01 UTC

  3 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Why bor­ing writ­ing is un­eth­i­cal: the case for it be­ing high im­pact to make EA writ­ing entertaining

  Don’t you think there is a tradeoff between “writing well*” and “publishing at all”?

  For me

  I’m trying to write-at-all as a strategy for improving long term. If I’d have an imaginary bar such as “write at least 30% as well as Scott Alexander” which is also emotional (I’d feel posting otherwise is potentially “unethical”, omg), I wouldn’t publish anything. Many of us are already perfectionists beyond what is effective, don’t you think?

  Something that would help me is feedback on how my drafts could be better. Right now, I see no upvotes sometimes, 71 upvotes other times, and this isn’t so actionable for me. For example, do you have feedback on this or this? Is it just that I commented late?

  Other creative ways of resolving this tradeoff

  • The LW team is trying to tackle the “people are too hesitant to publish” problem by giving free reviews.

  • The Nonlinear library [edit: Oh, that’s you!] is reaching more people by turning articles into audiobooks.

  • There was a post (I can’t find) about how to write rigorously without spending too much time on research. That one really affected me personally.

  My intuition is that going for some creative 3rd solution would be better than making an emotional barrier to posting.

• Yonatan Cale 16 Nov 2021 21:58 UTC

  1 point

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Linch’s comment on: Give Me Ca­reer Advice

  Hey!

  Negotiation advice

  I’d be excited to see a career advising service helping tech EAs earning-to-give select, interview at, negotiate with, and read the equity terms of, top startups

  I (A) do this (except for the equity-terms part!), and (B) agree this is a really low hanging fruit, there is so much optimization that can be done in most job searches.

  Training for good

  I talked to them (to Steve) at EAG and we exchanged a few emails since, comparing our approaches. Thank you for the advice, indeed relevant.

  Equity terms:

  I don’t read them since I’m not a lawyer and don’t even know how those things work outside of Israel. I give my mentees my priors, and for the Israeli ones, I offer them to talk to a lawyer I trust (my lawyer. Though he does charge. I don’t get percents or anything of course).

  I don’t know Michael Dickens [edit: Ah, he wrote the earning-to-give post], but if I could maybe refer people to him for reviewing equity terms, I think this would be useful

  Aiming for startups instead of BigTech

  I’m not convinced, and this is very relevant for me so I’d be really happy to discuss it [edit: I see you replied to some of it, thanks!].

  Here is my main kind-of-objection, and here are some thoughts about the financial calculations (though I defer to you/​michael on anything financial).

  I’m also curious to explore the Meta Options model, which I didn’t yet.

  P.S

  I am convinced enough to point people to the post. Also, calculations such as you he did there are really good tools/​resources for me, just so you know I actually care about it

• Yonatan Cale 17 Nov 2021 18:41 UTC

  4 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Ben Williamson’s comment on: Sleep: effec­tive ways to im­prove it

  >2 hours as that’s what was used in the literature cited

  Are you talking about that single study?

  My current prior is that the optimal time for melatonin before bed changes between people, and I suggest that my friends experiment with it in nights that aren’t so important first, in case it doesn’t work well. [The reason is that I’m confused about Scott’s recommendation to take it mid-day or to take it just-before-sleep]

  Regarding the recommendations you saw—I’d want to dig into “what are they based on”. The article Thomas linked to gives the best review I’ve seen about what we know about Melatonin (as Scott Alexander often does when he summarizes scientific topics)

  Adding: The same article recommends a supplier, and I also check suppliers here.

  And while I’m at it, gwern also writes quality in depth reviews, including about melatonin

• Yonatan Cale 17 Nov 2021 18:50 UTC

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Lakin’s comment on: Sleep: effec­tive ways to im­prove it

  I have a friend who did this and discovered they stop breathing multiple times per night. Later they ordered an OuraRing and confirmed this.

  Easy way to check: The Sleep As Android app has a snoring-recording feature.