I am currently the Director of Impactful Government Careers—an organisation focused on helping individuals find, secure, and excel in high impact civil service careers. My main interests are in improving institutional decision making as I believe even small changes could have substantial benefits for humanity.
I’ve spent the last 5 years working in the heart of the UK Government, with 4 of those at HM Treasury. My roles have included:
Head of Development Policy, HM Treasury
Head of Strategy, Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation
Senior Policy Advisor, Strategy and Spending for Official Development Assistance, HM Treasury
These roles have involved: advising UK Ministers on policy, spending, and strategy issues relating to international development; assessing the value for money of proposed high-value development projects; developing the 2021 CDEI Strategy and leading the organisational change related to this.
I have recently completed an MSc in Cognitive and Decision Sciences at UCL, where I have focused my research on probabilistic reasoning and improving individual and group decision-making processes. My final research project involved an experimental study into whether a short course (2 hours) on Bayesian reasoning could improve individual’s single-shot accuracy when forecasting geopolitical events. On the side, a colleague and me run a small project helping to improve predictive reasoning: https://www.daymark-di.com/
I agree—though not so much on everything gets funded anyway point.
I think there is also a wider meta question which is what is the best use of EA’s marginal time/energy/money. My (highly unjustified) judgement would be that people donating for such causes aren’t motivated by effectiveness, or at least are motivated much more by emotion. So the likelihood of changing their donation based on an argument around effectiveness may be quite hard to achieve.
I’m also not sure on the scale of difference between the worst and best charities for such causes (i.e. is the best cancer charity 100x better than the worst)? It’d be great to know, but assuming not, this would also reduce the benefit of any success.
A more effective solution achieve the same goal by proxy would seem to be just influencing the existing major funds or initiatives to focus more on the marginal impact of every £ they receive.