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 do very much agree with Nathan’s sentiment here.
I appreciate the original post announcing this forum is aims to expectation manage and temper potential concerns people will have about this group producing a ‘grand strategy’ for EA or similarly agree solutions to all the big problems. However, there is also acknowledgment that the event is aiming to help plan the next two years and set the trajectory going forward.
These are important topics and issues (as reflected by the significant senior time involved in the event), and pretty much all of them require a lot of individual and group reasoning under uncertainty. As such I do think there is a very beneficial role for robust methods to help facilitate discussion and decision-making.
I don’t know what things you may already be planning to implement, so I’m mostly just putting a flag down to say if you haven’t already, it’d be worth investing in such methods. So I’m not entirely ‘talk and no suggestion’, some very basic things to introduce (if not already) at low/cost and effort could be:
Clear framework for all attendees on how uncertainty and predictions should be communicated during the event to ensure consistency and transparency of reasoning between attendees, to help reduce misinterpretation errors which is always a risk in such forums/events.
External/third party (to the attendees but could still be EA) to provide a mediation and challenge function (similar to what Nathan suggested).
Collection of prior positions on key topics, with confidence %’s provided before the event. With updating rounds during and at the event of the event, with short notes on what contributed to any % change (one to show impact of the event, but also helps identify where and with whom the more intractable differences lie—which can help more focused action/discussion later).