jared_m

Karma: 526

jared_m 15 Aug 2020 16:37 UTC
8 points
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on: When Planning Your Career, Start Early
This is very thoughtful, and I would completely echo the argument that in school/university time has a much lower “shadow price” than post-university time does. To extend the argument, in a U.S. context, I wish that I had taken the AP Economics exam in high school to allow me to take one more higher-level economics class in university. One conversation we watched recently is this interview with author David Epstein of “Range.” His discussion of people who are happier/more successful in their career by cycling through more career alternatives earlier in their lives (excerpt below) could be good food for thoughts for those reading this post: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jd6QQBP3rO8
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Dark horses were on the hunt for match quality. “They never look around and say, ‘Oh, I’m going to fall behind, these people started earlier and have more than me at a younger age,’” Ogas told me. “They focused on, ‘Here’s who I am at the moment, here are my motivations, here’s what I’ve found I like to do, here’s what I’d like to learn, and here are the opportunities. Which of these is the best match right now? And maybe a year from now I’ll switch because I’ll find something better.’” Each dark horse had a novel journey, but a common strategy. “Short-term planning,” Ogas told me. “They all practice it, not long-term planning.” Even people who look like consummate long-term visionaries from afar usually looked like short-term planners up close.

jared_m 15 Aug 2020 16:54 UTC
23 points
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on: Why I’ve come to think global priorities research is even more important than I thought
Thank you for sharing more about GPI’s priorities and non-Open Phil fundraising goals for this year. Our family will plan to contribute in November or December, after focusing on some other non-profit investments in the next few months.
To borrow a page from political fundraising in the U.S., it could make sense to create formal or informal recognition strategies (along the lines of 80,000 Hours’s “Our donors” page) or social opportunities for donors to GPI—whether on the GPI site or on a Medium page a supporter might roguely maintain if that’s easier. Perhaps a fundraiser “Zoom” for $500 or $1,000 a head, where guests could have the chance to meet each other and ask questions of one or more game members of the GPI team? I’d be happy to help organize one of those if helpful.
Also: one suggested edit for the GPI team, in the tiny chance it has an infinitesimal impact on someone’s decision re: how much or whether to give to GPI. On the following page, ” We are very greatful for any support!” should read “grateful.” https://globalprioritiesinstitute.org/supporting-gpi/

jared_m 16 Aug 2020 17:32 UTC
5 points
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on: Are some SDGs more important than others? Revealed country priorities from four years of VNRs
Those who focus on the climate SDG may enjoy interviews with renewable investors Jane Mendillo of Harvard’s endowment and Reuben Munger as much as I did.
Pairing the two illustrates how rigorous investment firms like Munger’s bring deal-structuring expertise that can fashion profitable investments in renewables that otherwise wouldn’t attract profit-seeking capital like that of Harvard, Anthony Sabia’s CDPQ, or Bernard Looney’s BP (fourth link). The first link includes an interview with Mendillo and Sabia, which covers Harvard’s investments in replanting trees—a result of a labor supply of motivated financiers whose expertise enables them to structure complex but socially valuable deals, so natural resources capital can flow toward reforestation instead of (say) oil projects in Alberta.
All to say that, 80K team’s capacity allowing, it might be worth expanding the front-office finance career profile in link 3 to describe how finance careers could allow EAs to help fund climate or pandemic preparedness solutions at places like CDPQ, Harvard or In-Q-Tel, or to open their own shops like Munger did. Munger opened his $1B Vision Ridge fund (which he did at a concessionary salary versus his prior job as a value investor, but still at a healthy salary) in order to finance climate infrastructure that otherwise might not have come online absent his involvement.
1) Relevant Mendillo points (begins at 24:20): https://youtu.be/9XXJ-u-mFBs?t=1460
2) Fantastic Munger interview: https://capitalallocatorspodcast.com/2020/07/05/si9munger/
3) 80K profile on finance careers: https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/front-office-finance/
4) BP’s announcement: https://nyti.ms/311p7cw
*Note: both Mendillo and Sabia left their roles in recent years. I expect their endowments’ portfolios have not become less sustainable since they set high watermarks for sustainability

jared_m 1 Sep 2020 0:17 UTC
6 points
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on: Introducing the Legal Priorities Project
Congratulations on a great launch and a beautiful site!
Could this be a source of volunteer research help in the near term?
Amid the pandemic turbulence, many big firms pushed back first-year associates start times—which are ordinarily in September or early October—to January.
https://www.law.com/americanlawyer/2020/08/25 /as-big-firms-get-ready-for-first-year-associates-concerns-remain-over-training-retention/
Perhaps by reaching out to the career offices at T14 U.S. law schools and other top schools to offer to be in touch with intellectually ambitious recent law grads (including those finishing up clerkships) who are now “on ice” until January? Other AI-oriented faculty—like Jonathan Masur at UChicago—could be good talent spotters, as well.

jared_m 1 Sep 2020 2:01 UTC
1 point
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on: Careers (to help animals) in politics, policy, and lobbying
In the U.S. (and perhaps other countries) I expect there is an unrealized opportunity for animal welfare advocates to collaborate with libertarian organizations like Cato and R Street. There could be a productive “strange bedfellows” alliance in the fight against socially and ethically damaging subsidies—for both meat and feed stocks—that enable domestic meat industries to thrive rather than retract.
To quote the R Street link below: “For too long, American agriculture has been overly dependent on domestic subsidies… American farmers and ranchers want the chance to sell their products, not have to wait for a government handout.”

jared_m 5 Sep 2020 21:33 UTC
5 points
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in reply to: Arden Koehler’s comment on: Asking for advice
Yes, I agree clear deadlines are helpful! The two categories of deadlines I’m most responsive to are:
- “I’m sorry to ask on short notice, but I’d love your feedback this week...” The acknowledgment that this might result in some reshuffling of plans in order to get to giving feedback/landing a call makes it feel like you’re truly helping someone out, which can lead to some warm glow effects. It certainly goes over better than a terse “I’d like to get on the phone tomorrow or as soon as you can this week”—which feels a bit more like a burden.
- “Sometime in the next 3-5 months, as time allows.” The considerateness and flexibility in this sort of phrasing means I probably schedule these calls at least as quickly as the requests that are in the mode of a terse “sometime this month, please.”
All the other processes mentioned above seem very sensible to me and I don’t have much to add. Perhaps teeing up the key tradeoff you’re weighing. For example “I’d like to establish X as a process, but that will cause a lot of hassle in terms of setup time, etc. Are there other pros/cons that come to mind with you about this particular approach or phrasing?” Sometimes that will prime the person to start populating benefits or risks on the +/- ledger that you had missed, and you’ll get more-valuable feedback from a busy person than, say, “that sounds good to me!” or “hmm, that process does sound annoying. To be honest I can’t think of a better one at the moment, though.”

jared_m 10 Sep 2020 23:52 UTC
3 points
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on: Some extremely rough research on giving and happiness
Nick Epley at UChicago and Sonya Lyubomirsky at UC-Riverside have done research on how giving causes happiness. One pithy quote is:”Lyubomirsky: The answer is very clear… The research shows that it’s generosity that makes people happier, not selfishness or self-interest.” Here are a few links that popped from a short Google search.
Epley and Klein 2014 paper based on 11 experiments, The Topography of Generosity
Lyubomirsky interview

jared_m 11 Sep 2020 0:04 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: 96758’s comment on: Careers (to help animals) in politics, policy, and lobbying
Thanks for sharing! That is an incongruous pair—but I wouldn’t be surprised if the number of vocal conservative vegetarians grows over the coming years as the cost of coming out as a vegetarian or vegan loses its stigma in some corners of the conservative movement(s) In OECD countries, and the need for preference falsification erodes.

jared_m 11 Sep 2020 23:21 UTC
2 points
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on: 80,000 Hours user survey closes this Sunday
Done! Thank you to you and the 80,000 Hours team for building an extraordinary organization.

jared_m 16 Sep 2020 0:17 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: Renan Araujo’s comment on: Introducing the Legal Priorities Project
Makes sense—and I look forward to following your work!

jared_m 19 Sep 2020 19:01 UTC
3 points
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on: The two-minute EA Forum feedback survey
Submitted. With only four fields, can confirm this was fun and a cinch to complete in 2-3 minutes. Thanks for benevolently leading the EA Forum—and have a good weekend!

jared_m 5 Oct 2020 22:41 UTC
4 points
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on: No More Pandemics: a lobbying group?
Strong upvote. This all seems very well-reasoned. As someone who has worked in political organizing-adjacent roles in the US for most of 2010 − 2020 I think there is an opportunity to have an outsized impact by doing this well, and you’ve cogently outlined a way to do this well that I think would translate well to bipartisan federal advocacy in the US. I’d be happy to brainstorm more at some point, too.

jared_m 15 Oct 2020 16:23 UTC
21 points
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on: Longtermist reasons to work for innovative governments
Thank you for this post. I agree with the attractiveness of the opportunity! Two top-of-mind potential avenues for someone to explore this would be:
1) Nation state-level political innovation: one might become an e-resident (and an active one) of Estonia, and study upfront how its public sector innovations are or aren’t working. The country is small and public leaders are accessible. So even if it’s difficult for a foreigner to work for the Estonian government, I suspect it isn’t that difficult to become a moderately influential voice on their model as a digital nomad working in Tallinn and reporting on Estonia’s innovation under their new residency program. Other states that embrace well-educated foreigners in high-leverage public sector advisory roles under the right conditions include the Gulf States: Qatar, UAE, etc.
2) Local political innovation: City Halls in wealthy cities are great sources of innovation. For example, in NYC, Mayor Bloomberg’s former aides went on to advise Mexico City and many other cities on innovations piloted in New York. Hopefully de Blasio’s aides will distill and share the advantages and drawbacks to their Meatless Monday pilot in New York’s public schools. Toronto City Hall aides would have a front-row seat to which innovations were most promising and which were most problematic in Alphabet’s shuttered plan to remake part of the city. Anne Hidalgo’s climate and COVID policies will certainly lead to lessons for other big-city mayors, for a European example.
Thanks for framing this opportunity, and I look forward to hearing which approaches people pursue to run opportunities like this down!

jared_m 3 Dec 2020 14:25 UTC
5 points
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on: Make a $10 donation into $35
+$35 for Clean Air Task Force, and +1 that it’s a straightforward and very clean interface that took a pleasant 2-3 minutes. Thanks for sharing this here!

jared_m 2 Jan 2021 17:15 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: AMMA112’s comment on: Careers Questions Open Thread
If you DM me, I’d be happy to set up a quick Google Hangout to discuss a few internship options!

To Louis’s point, if you’re interested in climate or animal welfare issues, I think joining an alternative protein startup — Nature’s Fynd, or others — in a pre-MBA intern role or post-MBA full-time role would be a great step. Even if you aren’t planning to ETG via a non-EA career, there’s a good chance you’d earn attractive compensation between salary and a (potential) exit that could make high-impact but perhaps less financially stable subsequent EA career paths viable for you.

Knowing many PMF alumni who went on to high-impact policy roles, the PMF is also a great option for MPP and/or MBA students looking to begin policy careers.

jared_m 3 Jan 2021 18:35 UTC
6 points
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on: Social change happens one person at a time – so start multiplying your impact!
Great post, Luke! Here’s another favorite New Republic piece by Sunstein on preference falsification, reviewing a book by Timur Kuran, in case interesting to anyone: https://newrepublic.com/article/63480/true-lies

jared_m 3 Jan 2021 19:02 UTC
21 points
1 ∶ 0
on: Can I have impact if I’m average?
Individuals in common (or “average”) roles can also make having an impact seem to be more accessible — and a more-compelling moral necessity — to others who have typical, or even outstanding, resources to make a difference.

For example, the Washington Post noted that this waiter’s and part-time teacher’s financial support of low-income students in Ghana inspired both his friends and wealthy members at the country club where he works to also donate. While bed nets or other investments may be higher value from an EA perspective, this is still an interesting case study of an average-income person (from a U.S. perspective) having impact well beyond his own professional work or ETG capacity:
To help supplement his teaching salary, Quarcoo was working part time as a waiter at Woodmont Country Club, an exclusive golf and tennis club where initial membership costs $80,000.
When some of the members learned about his efforts to help students in Ghana, they asked if they could chip in, said Quarcoo, who has worked at the country club since 1975. He also is a part-time substitute teacher in Montgomery County.
“I have never asked for donations, but people are generous and wanted to help,” he said. “A member would say, ‘Hey, Sam, next time you go to Ghana, let me know. I will try to help you.’ By word of mouth, it took off from there.”
Quarcoo’s humble nature and desire to help is contagious at the country club, said Adrienne Maman, a donor who met him about 35 years ago when he waited on her family’s table.
“His heart is right in front of you — you can see his soul when you meet him,” said Maman, 67, who lives in Chevy Chase, Md.
“Sam is a genuine person who just took it upon himself to help these schools,” she added. “Single-handedly, he worked on his own for many years until people slowly began to find out. He has never wanted anything for himself — everything he does is for the children of Ghana.”
Even though Quarcoo has been furloughed from waiting tables since March because of the coronavirus pandemic, club members still donated $19,000 to his efforts this year, he said. The funds were used to buy supplies for nearly 2,000 students.

jared_m 3 Jan 2021 19:47 UTC
7 points
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on: Open and Welcome Thread: January 2021
He passed away four years ago this month — within a day of Derek Parfit — but I think John Berger’s writing and BBC documentaries could resonate with many in EA who might not have had a chance to come across Berger. Below are a few links in case others might find his work on migrant workers, gender inequality, and animal welfare thought-provoking.
1. Segment of his Ways of Seeing BBC program focused on inequality (starting at 22:00).
2. Excerpt from his New Yorker obituary:

...Hence one of the most striking aphorisms in “Brief as Photos”: “What we mourn for the dead is the loss of their hopes.”
Hope, Berger proposed, is what we counterpoise to the essential revelation of history—that we’ll decline, that we’ll die. “To decide to engage oneself in History requires, even when the decision is a desperate one, hope,” he writes in “Bento’s Sketchbook,” one of his last volumes. Hope names a commitment to change the world, against the fact of finitude. It was hope, I think, that allowed Berger to write so beautifully about death without eliding the tragedy of it...
Berger always returned to the possibility of proximity, seeking to cross the distances that divide us. Throughout his work, every way of seeing starts with a look, and every look promises to become a touch—fumbling hands reaching across the void. The thought of death brings us back to the body, calling on us to act, with and for one another.
3. Excerpt from his New York Times obituary.
The year 1972 was Mr. Berger’s most prolific, with “Ways of Seeing” and the publication of his most critically acclaimed novel, “G.,” …which was awarded the Booker Prize. (Characteristically, Mr. Berger criticized the company that sponsored the prize, saying that it exploited Caribbean workers, and announced that he would split his winnings with the Black Panthers.)
In 1974, when his critical influence was probably at its height in Britain, he left London for Paris and then Geneva. He later decided to leave cities altogether, moving to a remote peasant community, Quincy, in the French Alps, where he lived with his wife, Beverly Bancroft, who died in 2013, and their son, Yves. (Besides his son, he is survived by another son, Jacob, and a daughter, Katya, from a previous marriage.)
In the Alps, where he learned to raise cattle, he wrote a trilogy of unconventional books called “Into Their Labors” — comminglings of short story, poetry and essay — examining the migration of peasants away from their traditions and into cities.
He also successfully dabbled in screenwriting, collaborating with the director Alain Tanner on three films, including the critically praised “Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000” (1976) about a group of radical idealists trying to stay true to their principles.

jared_m 5 Jan 2021 12:05 UTC
8 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Some Scattered Thoughts on Operations
This is a very good point:
Many EAs are fairly intellectual, and as such may feel like they’re missing out on something by working in operations roles. Although these positions are often challenging, they tend not to be academically or intellectually stimulating in the same way as school or university.
As an undergrad liberal arts major, it was only in the last 2.5 years that I grew to love the intellectual depth (and fun) of operations research/ops-oriented economic analysis, and project management practices and courses. To pick two examples addressing food insecurity, there’s this work by an economist and this work by operations research faculty. It could be worth pulling together an informal Google Doc syllabus — akin to AI safety syllabi like this — including resources from:
- HBS Management readings
- INFORMS case studies
- INSEAD, MIT Sloan Ops Mgmt, and Princeton ORFE papers and primers (among others)
- PMI’s PMBOK^® and other, free materials
A more-digestible entry point is The Everything Store on Amazon, which highlights how Bezos recruited a number of ORFE and Sloan alumni to make logistics and operations AMZN’s core competency. See notable alumni here, this Jeff Wilke video, and this excerpt from the book for an example of the heated operational debates within Amazon during its first decade, which could be good food for thought for distributed EA organizations.
At a management offsite in the late 1990s, a team of well-intentioned junior executives stood up before the company’s top brass and gave a presentation on a problem indigenous to all large organizations: the difficulty of coordinating far-flung divisions.
The junior executives recommended a variety of different techniques to foster cross-group dialogue and afterward seemed proud of their own ingenuity. Then Jeff Bezos, his face red and the blood vessel in his forehead pulsing, spoke up. “I understand what you’re saying, but you are completely wrong, ” he said.
“Communication is a sign of dysfunction. It means people aren’t working together in a close, organic way. We should be trying to figure out a way for teams to communicate less with each other, not more.”
...At that meeting and in public speeches afterward, Bezos vowed to run Amazon with an emphasis on decentralization and independent decision-making.
“A hierarchy isn’t responsive enough to change, ” he said. “I’m still trying to get people to do occasionally what I ask. And if I was successful, maybe we wouldn’t have the right kind of company.”
Bezos’s counterintuitive point was that coordination among employees wasted time, and that the people closest to problems were usually in the best position to solve them. That would come to represent something akin to the conventional wisdom in the high-tech industry over the next decade.
The companies that embraced this philosophy, like Google, Amazon, and, later, Facebook, were in part drawing lessons from theories about lean and agile software development. In the seminal high-tech book The Mythical Man-Month, IBM veteran and computer science professor Frederick Brooks argued that adding manpower to complex software projects actually delayed progress.
One reason was that the time and money spent on communication increased in proportion to the number of people on a project.
What links here?
- What are some good online courses relevant to EA? by EdoArad (14 Apr 2020 8:36 UTC; 16 points)
- jared_m's comment on Training Bottlenecks in EA (professional skills) by Michelle_Hutchinson (18 Jan 2021 0:29 UTC; 3 points)

jared_m 5 Jan 2021 16:34 UTC
6 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Aaron Gertler’s comment on: Can I have impact if I’m average?
Thanks so much for the kind feedback, Aaron! Here’s one involving a cataloguer at a library in the “unexpectedly significant financial impact from a person with average income, in a U.S. context, category” — in case anyone finds it interesting: Librarian Quietly Saved $4 Million, Left It to School Where He Worked. Some might see it as a cautionary tale, since Morin’s alma mater was then criticized for spending $1M on a video scoreboard for its college football team. Of course I think many of us would’ve wished he’d encountered EA and saved >1,000 lives in expectation from the gift (by offering it to AMF or an EA charity of your choice) instead.
A brief synopsis of his humble life and outsized impact comes from this CNBC report:
New Hampshire resident and librarian Robert Morin led a simple life.
He lived alone, drove a 1992 Plymouth and never went out.
“He would have some Fritos and a Coke for breakfast, a quick cheese sandwich at the library, and at home would have a frozen dinner because the only thing he had to work with was a microwave,” Morin’s longtime financial advisor Edward Mullen told the Boston Globe.
You wouldn’t know it from his lifestyle, but Morin — who graduated from the University of New Hampshire before working in the school’s library for nearly 50 years — was a multimillionaire. In fact, very few people did know, until he died in March 2015 at age 77 and bequeathed his entire $4 million fortune to his alma mater.
It was a complete “surprise to the university community,” Erika Mantz, director of media relations at UNH, told CNBC. ”People were honored and excited to learn of his generous bequest.”