Clifford

• Clifford 28 Nov 2014 10:39 UTC

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  on: Open thread 5

  Is there an audio recording of Holden’s “Altruistic Career Choice Conference call”? If so, can someone point me in the right direction. I’m aware of the transcript:

  http://​​files.givewell.org/​​files/​​calls/​​Altruistic%20career%20choice%20conference%20call.pdf

  Thanks!

• Clifford 8 Mar 2015 17:15 UTC

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  on: The Value of Start­ing a Giv­ing What We Can/​EA Chapter

  I’m a big fan of starting new chapters as I’ve discussed with Jon.

  Just thought I’d flag that this seemed over optimistic:

  “we think it is reasonable to expect a new Giving What We Can Chapter to produce 3-5 new members in their first year”

  In my experience of working with GWWC chapters the median chapter produced 0 members a year because it’s hard to get things off the ground. Even the chapters who are putting a lot of effort in do well to get 1 or 2 people to pledge.

  I don’t say this to undermine the article—I think the points can still apply if you get one person to pledge. I just want to make clear that if you start a chapter and one person pledges in a year that’s awesome and you’ve probably done a v good job.

• Clifford 11 Mar 2015 10:06 UTC

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  in reply to: jonathancourtney’s comment on: The Value of Start­ing a Giv­ing What We Can/​EA Chapter

  Maybe I was being too negative in counting the chapters that make a go of trying and then end up fizzling out. If you manage to run a year of events with consistent effort then perhaps getting one or two pledges is fair.

  3-5 is higher than when I was working with chapters, but great that it’s that high now.

  Yep, completely agree with the overarching point. Keep up the top work.

In­tro­duc­ing the EA Assembly

• Clifford 30 Sep 2015 8:02 UTC

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  in reply to: number42’s comment on: The last 3 months in EA projects

  Yes, it’s still ongoing. We had our second meetup last night. Sign up for email updates on events here: https://​​tinyletter.com/​​eastartups

• Clifford 6 Jun 2018 18:07 UTC

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  on: In­tro­duc­ing Char­ity En­trepreneur­ship: an In­cu­ba­tion and Re­search Pro­gram for New Charities

  Awesome! So pleased this is finally happening.

• Clifford 6 Jun 2018 18:11 UTC

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  in reply to: Joey’s comment on: In­tro­duc­ing Char­ity En­trepreneur­ship: an In­cu­ba­tion and Re­search Pro­gram for New Charities

  This seems high compared to the startup equivalent. For example, I know at Entrepreneur First they take on 100 people and they form about 20 companies—don’t know how many get seed funded but 50% seems too high.

[Question] Does giv­ing to char­ity make it more likely you‘ll be al­tru­is­tic in fu­ture?

• Clifford 15 Jun 2019 21:51 UTC

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  on: Can/​should we define quick tests of per­sonal skill for pri­or­ity ar­eas?

  Really cool idea. If this were possible would we expect to see big companies using similar tests to recruit undergraduates early before competitors do?

• Clifford 2 Aug 2019 22:39 UTC

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  on: Con­ver­sa­tion on fore­cast­ing with Vaniver and Ozzie Gooen

  Is there a copy of the audio available? Sorry if I missed an obvious link!

• Clifford 23 Aug 2019 11:36 UTC

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  on: Effec­tive Altru­ism Lon­don Strat­egy 2019

  Do “software for good” have a online presence? Hadn’t heard of them and would be interested to read more. Thanks!

• Clifford 29 Jan 2020 14:14 UTC

  14 points

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  on: How we pro­moted EA at a large tech company

  This is awesome—thanks for writing up!

  For people working in the UK and keen to do something like this, I’d love to chat: ben@tyve.org

  We launched an employee giving tool (Tyve.org) which promotes recommended charities from GiveWell and Founders Pledge’s research.

• Clifford 29 Feb 2020 2:10 UTC

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  on: EA Up­dates for Fe­bru­ary 2020

  Love reading these David—thanks.

  Was particularly interested to read the Anthropocene article—cool to read conservationists taking EA approach seriously and seeing it as a way to unlock more funding.

• Clifford 24 Aug 2020 17:05 UTC

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  on: Re­view: What works to pro­mote char­i­ta­ble dona­tions?

  Awesome—thank you!

• Clifford 12 Jan 2021 12:57 UTC

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  on: How we pro­moted EA at a large tech com­pany (v2.0)

  Haha, thanks for the hat tip! Delighted with this outcome! Well done!

• Clifford 1 Apr 2021 11:10 UTC

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  on: An­nounc­ing “Nam­ing What We Can”!

  Toby Ordering is really good.

• Clifford 1 Oct 2021 8:19 UTC

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  in reply to: Jamie_Harris’s comment on: What we learned from a year in­cu­bat­ing longter­mist entrepreneurship

  Hey Jamie—Ben Clifford here, thanks for flagging this.

  I think your second bullet captures the idea well. I don’t think being good at EA community building and associated ideas requires deep domain expertise in areas like AI or Bio.

  There would be an argument for thinking about bullet 3 as well but it wasn’t what I was thinking.

• Clifford 1 Oct 2021 8:20 UTC

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  in reply to: An1lam’s comment on: What we learned from a year in­cu­bat­ing longter­mist entrepreneurship

  A quick thought on having a YC-style programme and taking risks on more junior talent:

  Domain expertise is important—I think YC would agree on this. If taking on a deep tech startup they would look for someone on the team who had domain expertise in the field.

  I think early YC Internet startups like Dropbox or Airbnb make it look like domain expertise is less important and it’s more about just getting stuck in. The difference is that when Dropbox started there was no expert in “files on the internet” so the founders could basically become the world experts just by getting stuck in and working on it.

  The difference with Longtermist areas like AI and Bio is you can’t just become the expert by working on it and (yes, you guessed it) the downside risk means we don’t want to take bets on people to just go for it and try it out (unlike Dropbox where it doesn’t really matter if it fails catastrophically).

• Clifford 1 Oct 2021 8:21 UTC

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  in reply to: hrosspet’s comment on: What we learned from a year in­cu­bat­ing longter­mist entrepreneurship

  Glad to hear!
  
  Roughly this would mean having worked in a relevant area (e.g. bio, AI safety) for at least 1 − 2 years and able to contribute in some capacity to that field. To be clear, some ideas would require a lot more experience—this is just a rough proxy.

• Clifford 1 Oct 2021 8:22 UTC

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  in reply to: Rory Greig’s comment on: What we learned from a year in­cu­bat­ing longter­mist entrepreneurship

  Hi Rory, thanks for the comment! We haven’t published those ideas. In terms of classes of organisation, one way to carve up the space is to think about Object-level and Meta-level approaches to generating ideas.

  Object-level approaches focus on doing direct work to solve the problem at hand. For example:

  • developing and deploying technologies

  • conducting research

  • advocating for policy change

  The main type of impact here comes in the form of tangible changes in actions taken in the real world, in whatever form that might take.

  Meta-level approaches focus on improving the capacity for others to solve the problem. This can be done on the EA/​longtermist wide-level (building up the movements) or in a specific domain, e.g. building a talent pipeline specifically for bio policy experts. Concrete types of meta work include, for example:

  • community and field building

  • the dissemination of ideas and knowledge and values

  • increasing the resources available to work on object-level approaches

  The main type of impact here comes in the form of the change in likelihood that object-level approaches will be impactful.

  Hope that’s useful!