Joseph

Writ­ing About My Job: Re­search Manager

• Joseph 1 Oct 2025 15:19 UTC

  4 points

  4 ∶ 1

  in reply to: ChanaMessinger’s comment on: ChanaMess­inger’s Shortform

  Would you be willing/​able to share a bit more detail or context about this? I’m somewhat interested, but there isn’t enough information here for me to feel comfortable to step forward and raise my hand.

• Joseph 30 Sep 2025 18:14 UTC

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Strug­gling to Tran­si­tion into an EA-Aligned Job — Seek­ing Advice

  If you want, I’d be happy to have a conversation, give you feedback, review your resume, etc. I’ve been involved in hiring for quite a few years, including at multiple EA organizations. I also know from personal experience how rough it is to send out many, many applications without success.

  What links here?

  • Aaron Gertler 🔸's comment on Strug­gling to Tran­si­tion into an EA-Aligned Job — Seek­ing Advice by Taylor Grogan (14 Oct 2025 3:52 UTC; 6 points)

[Question] (More) recom­men­da­tions for non-tech­ni­cal read­ings on AI?

• Joseph 14 Jul 2025 15:58 UTC

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Did You (or some­one you know) got re­jected from “EA roles”, gath­ered ex­pe­rience/​skills in for-profit, later tran­si­tioned into a high im­pact role?

  I got two out of three, if that is enough. I worked in for-profit organizations for several years, developing various professionally-relevant skills and interests. Then I later learned about EA and was able to use my non-EA background to get employment at what I view as fairly high impact organizations. I’ve also applied to many roles and been rejected (both within EA and outside of EA).

• Joseph 11 Jul 2025 14:54 UTC

  6 points

  1 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Benevolent_Rain’s comment on: Ulrik Horn’s Quick takes

  I read the book a while back and I enjoyed it. It was kind of fun to get some juicy details about bad things inside Facebook. My main takeaway was something along the lines of “a fish rots from the head.” Leaders of an organization set priorities, direction, culture (to a great extent), and this books served as sort of a case study of leadership that has a fairly narrow focus. Poor social skills and poor common sense, entitlement, and the general idea that you get everything you want all stood out to me. The levels of sycophancy and self-interest were a bit surprising, but not terribly so.

  Trying to apply ideas from this book to an EA context involves a bit of contortion, but in a sense I think that I’m not too concerned. The culture/​values of EA tend to have a very different focus than Facebook did/​does, and the leaders of the organizations often^[1] tend to have better common sense than what was displayed in Careless People. I would find it hard to imagine most senior leaders at EA orgs throwing fits because of a McDonald’s meal or aggressively pushing for the promotion of their personal projects using company resources. If anything, the book left me thinking that EA orgs will probably avoid many of the issues described in Careless People due to the focus on ethics and morality.

  1. ^

     This is certainly not always true, and the level of common sense or general knowledge is noticeably lower than I would like. I’ve seen many people with very little or very narrow life experience ask about or propose things that I found silly or poorly considered. But my impression is that this is an eye-catching minority, and it is much more common for organizations to have leadership teams are more mature.

• Joseph 29 Jun 2025 17:46 UTC

  6 points

  1 ∶ 0

  in reply to: MildAbandon’s comment on: Who Are Your EA Role Models?

  show me your role models who have directly improved the world

  This somewhat related to mainanence and operations and how credit/​respect is apportioned, but often the people doing the work are lower level employees who aren’t famous or well-known. They aren’t necessarily acknowledged at an annual organizational celebration, or in the local media. As an example, we might think that Rob Mather is great for founding/​running the Against Malaria Foundation, but we don’t know the names of the people who manufactured or delivered those anti-malaria bednets.

  But here are some examples of people that I sort of, vaguely ^[1] consider moral role models:

  • There is a guy in Oakland, California who goes by PengWeather online, and he cleans up trash in his free time. From an EA perspective we could certainly criticize his actions by claiming that they aren’t effective, and that it might be better for the world if he instead donated $20 a week for a high-impact cause area. But I take inspiration from his initiative: he saw a problem, nobody was doing anything about it, so he decided to take action and make things better. People in EA talk about agency a lot, but it is rare that I see somebody doing things on their own.

  • Esther Duflo. She is somewhat of a celebrity among people who care about development economics, but she is also a doer. She (and the teams of people she worked with) discovered what was an wasn’t effective in a variety of situations, improving the popularity and visibility of using randomized control trials for economic field research.

  • Jeff Kaufman. I’ve never met him, but he chose to earn to give, and boy did he give! He has a blog, and he posts on the EA forum as well.

  1. ^

     Generally I don’t really have role models. I’ve seen enough people express good traits and bad traits that I try to focus on specific behaviors/​actions rather than on people as a whole. Think of all the people who work in virtuous fields/​vocations who are also real assholes.

     For example, Jeff Kaufman seems like a great guy from what I’ve read. But imagine that he has really bad emotional regulation, or he is really rude to strangers, or he isn’t considerate to others, or he is a compulsive liar. If any of those things were true, that wouldn’t change the fact that his earning to give is admirable. I try to not boil people down to a simple god/​bad judgement, and instead look at people as a collection of their actions.

• Joseph 29 Jun 2025 17:21 UTC

  3 points

  1 ∶ 0

  in reply to: MildAbandon’s comment on: Who Are Your EA Role Models?

  the suggested role models are all thinkers rather than doers

  At least some of the people listed are either doers, or are a sort of combination of thinkers and doers. I’m do view these people mostly as thinkers, but I also have a sort of bias in that I didn’t know about Hans Rosling in the 80s or about Paul Farmers work in the 90s. These people have done much more than simply give talks and write blog posts; they have also done things to directly improve the world.

  Some of the people on the list

  • Changed their careers in order to generate more donations for the global poor (Holden Karnofsky)

  • Founded/​created/​ran organizations (William MacAskill)

  • Volunteered at a hospital in Haiti (Paul Farmer)

  • Counselled and provided guidance/​advice to many, many people (Julia Wise)

  • Studied the outbreak of disease across multiple African countries and worked for Sweden’s International Development Agency (Hans Rosling)

• Joseph 23 Jun 2025 3:10 UTC

  5 points

  3 ∶ 0

  in reply to: JWS 🔸’s comment on: JWS’s Shortform

  I’ve enjoyed reading your writing over the past few years, and I’ll miss you. Good luck with whatever you will be focusing on!

• Joseph 18 Jun 2025 2:40 UTC

  4 points

  1 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Ian Turner’s comment on: What’s your ex­pe­rience with elitism in EA? [Sur­vey]

  What do you have in mind when you’re thinking of those who are not “able to donate”?

  I was thinking about people who don’t have any income, or who have significant uncertainty/​stability in their futures, or who have large financial burdens/​commitments.

  More broadly, if you want to read more of my thoughts on this topic, I’ve made a few comments over the years about living in high cost of living areas, about general feelings of financial insecurity/​instability, and about not pledging to donate. Those might provide a bit more insight into my throught and perspectives.

• Joseph 16 Jun 2025 15:18 UTC

  8 points

  3 ∶ 1

  in reply to: Yi-Yang’s comment on: What’s your ex­pe­rience with elitism in EA? [Sur­vey]

  this allows them to accumulate moral status and recognition more easily than those of us without such advantages.

  This feels very salient to me. I’ve seen EA job applications ask about how much money I donate, and that feels like evaluating people on outcomes rather than on inputs. I’ve definitly noticed the status/​recognition given to people that are able to donate.

  Conversely, I’ve definitly chosen to not pursue opportunities that advertise low payment; those have felt vaguely similar to the culture of unpaid (or poorly paid) internships in publishing: often only people who have other sources of money or similar safety nets are able to pursue them.

• Joseph 13 Jun 2025 22:30 UTC

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: bhart’s comment on: The Curse of Not Be­ing Seen: A Note on EA Hiring and Distance

  I may benefit from taking an online training bootcamp, is there something specific I should look out for, something in the project bit?

  The appropriate advice would depend on what your career goals are.

  • If you don’t have any technical or computer programming skills and you want to start learning, I would find some intro-level courses on HTML, CSS, SQL, and Python. There are also good playlists on YouTube that are suitable for beginners, such as Sentdex or thenewboston. Automate the Boring Stuff with Python is also very popular.

  • If you want to learn more about management and operations, there are plenty of links in this EA Forum post.

  • Spreadsheets are always helpful, so you can just Google for around for what are the most useful or valuable spreadsheet fermulas and then make sure you understand how to use them all.

  • Maybe you have money that you can spend, so you decide to to an eCornell course, or a paid course on project management, or maybe you want to take a college course online for credit.

  Most online courses (such as through Coursera, EdX, or other platforms) will involve some level of projects, but these will usually be very small and somewhat artificial projects. I suggest that you search for ways to combine the skills you are learning/​developing with real world situations. Maybe your sister runs a bakery and you can use your new CSS and HTML skills to make a little website. Maybe you can use the spreadsheet skills for a class project in your Anthropology 101 in college to display the word frequency of a religious text and compare two different translations. So as you do these things, think of two different ideas: 1) am I learning a useful skill, and 2) how will I be able to describe this in a job interview or in a cover letter or in a resume so that it sounds impressive.

• Joseph 13 Jun 2025 22:08 UTC

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: bhart’s comment on: The Curse of Not Be­ing Seen: A Note on EA Hiring and Distance

  I’m having trouble joining the book club that you host; could you please help me?

  I don’t think I can help you, because I don’t know what sort of a problem or difficulty you are encountering. 😂 This is the link to the Google Doc, which has all of the information: descriptions, links and instructions on how to join, links to lists of books, etc.

• Joseph 11 Jun 2025 21:07 UTC

  5 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: bhart’s comment on: The Curse of Not Be­ing Seen: A Note on EA Hiring and Distance

  where I need experience to get opportunities, but need opportunities to gain experience

  This is a very real issue, and it is a bit of a catch-22. The core of the advice is really to start with little steps.

  You need to have experience with projects, employers, or volunteer opportunities. These needs to be good enough that you can describe them on a resume or in a cover letter and they sound decently impressive. They also need to give you stories that you can use to answer questions like “what is the most logistically complex event or project you’ve been involved in” and “a time when you had to solve a difficult problem.” Ideally, these experiences will be at least somewhat relevant to the context/​industry of the organization you are applying for, such as if you volunteered for a vegan advocacy organization and later you apply to the Good Food Institute.

  Basically, you need to be able to (honestly) appear as an impressive candidate. The details of what ‘impressive’ means will vary in different contexts: an impressive candidate for event management for existential risk organizations will be different than an impressive candidate for a researcher role focused on animal welfare. But there are general commonalities (clear communication, time management, teamwork, etc.) that exist for almost all roles.

  There are also some limited opportunities for building a network if you aren’t located in New York, San Francisco, London, or some other city with a good EA network. CEA runs some online programs, I run a couple of book clubs, and many EAG and EAGx conferences offer heavy discounts for people who are students, unemployed, travelling, etc. I think that it isn’t as good as living in an EA hub, but there are some options that help a bit. I also perceive a big location-focused bias.

  There might also be other skills that could be helpful for professional growth:

  • doing self-study through Coursera, EdX, and similar MOOC providers.

  • Joining toastmasters

  • Doing some sort of paid training course on professionally-relevant skills (such as as a coding bootcamp, a product manager training course, or even just a ‘management for beginners’ seminar). Many of these are available remotely, but most of them cost a lot of money.

  • Reading books and listening to podcasts. I benefited a lot from listening to many, many podcasts from Manager Tools and Career Tools.

  Finally, I want to argue that a large number of small steps are more realistic than a small number of big steps. Rather than getting some experience, then getting an impressive job, think of it like an incremental process in which you get a little experience, and then you get a low-quality job, and that job allows you to build your experience a little more, which allows you to get a slightly better job, etc. Here is my sloppy attempt at a visualization from MS Paint.

  

• Joseph 30 May 2025 18:16 UTC

  4 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Benevolent_Rain’s comment on: Should EA In­tro­duc­tions Be More Trans­par­ent About the State of Cause Pri­ori­ti­za­tion?

  To a certain extent, I think that local/​city groups might fit this description. The EA communities in NYC, DC, and Chicago each have their own Slack workspace, and they also do in-person events. For people not in big cities, EA Anywhere’s Slack workspace offers a discussion space. None of those are perfect substitutes for the EA Forum, but my vague impression is that each of them is less AI-focused than the EA Forum. There is also an EA Discord, but I haven’t interacted with that much so I can’t speak to it’s style or quality.

  As far as events go, there is an online book club in the EA Anywhere’s Slack workspace (full disclosure: I organize it, and I think it is great).

  Depending on what you are looking for, there is also an Animal Advocacy Forum, although it is far less active than the EA Forum.

• Joseph 24 May 2025 13:26 UTC

  10 points

  1 ∶ 0

  on: Joseph Lemien’s Shortform

  A bit of nice discussion/​exploration about longtermism over on the AskPhilosophy subreddit. The short summary might be something like ‘don’t conflate longtermism with caring about future generations.’ Since the EA forum seems to be mostly focused on things other than helping people understand philosophy, I thought it might be nice to share some stuff focused on that.

  https://​​www.reddit.com/​​r/​​askphilosophy/​​comments/​​1ktiqm8/​​i_dont_get_the_controversy_with_longtermism

• Joseph 23 May 2025 12:59 UTC

  3 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Clara Torres Latorre 🔶️’s comment on: Clara Tor­res La­torre ️’s Quick takes

  Tentatively and naively, I think this is accurate.

  I’m wondering if there would be any way to target/​access this population? If this campaigns existed, what action would it take? Some groups of people are relatively easy to access/​target due to physical location or habits (college-aged people often congregate at/​around college, vegan people often frequent specific websites or stores, etc.).

  I imagine that someone much more knowledgeable about advertising/​marketing than I am would have better ideas. All I can come up with off the top of my head is targeted social media advertisements: people who work at one of these several companies and who have recently searched for one of these few terms, etc.

• Joseph 19 May 2025 17:45 UTC

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: calebp’s comment on: A widely shared AI pro­duc­tivity pa­per was re­tracted, is pos­si­bly fraudulent

  Not obvious at all, and useful/​helpful to share and remind us all of. 🙂

Marginal Gains Are Still Gains

• Joseph 19 May 2025 15:36 UTC

  6 points

  2 ∶ 0

  on: A widely shared AI pro­duc­tivity pa­per was re­tracted, is pos­si­bly fraudulent

  In the spirit of encouraging skepticism and critical thinking, I want to encourage everyone to remember how easy it is to believe false/​inaccurate or fraudulent research if you don’t have contextual expertise. Even well-known and well-respected academics like Acemoglu can endorse things without fully digging into the details.

  I almost feel obligated to link to the blog post Beware The Man Of One Study (a good reminder to wait for meta analyses and to only update in a “Bayesian” sense) and to the book Science Fictions (excellent for learning about falsehoods in the culture and method of science).