Joseph Lemien

Karma: 2,986

I have work experience in HR and Operations. I read a lot, I enjoy taking online courses, and I do some yoga and some rock climbing. I enjoy learning languages, and I think that I tend to have a fairly international/cross-cultural focus or awareness in my life. I was born and raised in a monolingual household in the US, but I’ve lived most of my adult life outside the US, with about ten years in China, two years in Spain, and less than a year in Brazil.

As far as EA is concerned, I’m fairly cause agnostic/cause neutral. I think that I am a little bit more influenced by virtue ethics and stoicism than the average EA, and I also occasionally find myself thinking about inclusion, diversity, and accessibility in EA. Some parts of the EA community that I’ve observed in-person seem not very welcoming to outsides, or somewhat gatekept. I tend to care quite a bit about how exclusionary or welcoming communities are.

I was told by a friend in EA that I should brag about how many books I read because it is impressive, but I feel uncomfortable being boastful, so here is my clunky attempt to brag about that.

Unless explicitly stated otherwise, opinions are my own, not my employer’s.

Joseph Lemien 17 Jan 2025 20:56 UTC
4 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: titotal’s comment on: What are we doing about the EA Forum? (Jan 2025)
I’m not sure if “fun” is quite what I would want on the EA Forum… but maybe something like “friendliness” or “welcomingness”? It is possible that the best situation would be have the EA Forum be ²⁄₁₀ on this metric, and various EA Facebook groups or Slack workspaces be ⁵⁄₁₀ on this metric, and in-person meetups be ⁸⁄₁₀ on this metric.
I do think that the reactions on the EA Forum of heart, helpful, insightful, and changed my mind have made the EA forum a bit more friendly. It makes it easy for people to give small compliment or to express gratitude.

Joseph Lemien 17 Jan 2025 20:56 UTC
4 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: ZY’s comment on: What are we doing about the EA Forum? (Jan 2025)
I want to provide a little bit of narrative. At an AVA Conference I took some silly pictures with people; we still wanted to cause change in food systems and reduce the number of animals that suffer, and we took 60 seconds to giggle and pose for pictures. At an EA book discussion group folks were smiling and friendly while discussing moral philosophy and career issues. At an EAG conference I got a group of people together to have afternoon tea and we had light-hearted chitchat, even through we all desperately wanted to reduce suffering in the world. At an EAGx conference folks got together for drinks and dinner, with lots of laughter and non-serious topics.
Tentatively, I want to say that it is possible for serious pursuits and for enjoyment/fun to co-exist, although I’m less confident if is is realistic to expect a large number of strangers to do so on an internet forum. The type of fun probably matters a lot: I don’t want to see the EA Forum become filled with memes and jokes, even if they are EA-relevant.

Joseph Lemien 17 Jan 2025 16:28 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Toby Tremlett🔹’s comment on: Joseph Lemien’s Shortform
I try not to do too much self-promotion, but I genuinely think that the book clubs I run are good options, and I’d be happy to have you join us. Libraries sometimes have in-person book clubs, so if you want something away from the internet you could ask your local librarian about book clubs. And sometimes some simple Googling is helpful too: various cities have some variation of ‘book club in a bar,’ ‘sci-fi book club,’ ‘professional development book club,’ etc. But I think it is fairly uncommon to have a book club that is online and relatively accessible, so I think that mine are a bit special (although I am certainly not unbiased).
I’ve browsed through bookclubs.com a bit, but my memory is that the majority of the book clubs on there seem to be some combination of fiction, local to a specific place, focused on topics that aren’t interesting to me, or defunct.
Another option that I haven’t really tried: instead of having a regular club, you could just occasionally make a post “I want to read [BOOK] and talk about it with people, so I’ll make a Google Calendar event for [DATE]. If you want to read it and talk about it, please join.” At least one person is doing that in the EA Anywhere Slack workspace in the #book-club channel. The trick is to find a book that is popular enough, and then to accept the fact that 50% to 80% of the people who RSVP simply won’t show up. But it could be a more iterative/incremental approach to get started.

Joseph Lemien 17 Jan 2025 15:59 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 1
in reply to: David Mathers🔸’s comment on: Should we try harder to appeal to conservatives?
I’d be curious to learn a little more about this. Do you have any vague impressions about leftist perceptions of EA as conservative? Would these be perspectives like the following? (none of the following are real quotes, nor are things I believe; they are my simplistic minimum viable attempt to have a placeholder for leftist perceptions of EA as conservative)
EAs think it is okay to eat meat if you don’t cause any pain to the animal (such as dumpster diving or eating roadkill), and eating meat is inherently a conservative-coded thing.
EAs don’t focus on identity politics as much as I think is appropriate, and thus they are conservative.
EAs allow people to speak even if they disagree with the perspectives, and any good liberal would protest and de-platform a speaker with contrary opinions.
EAs like Peter Singer, who I interpret as saying we should kill disabled people because their lives are worth less
EAs are associated with Bay Area progressive tech culture, which is often conservative and regressive.

Joseph Lemien 17 Jan 2025 15:47 UTC
4 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Ceegee’s comment on: Open thread: January—March 2025
Welcome to the forum, Christopher. Glad to have you here. It is pretty rare to find people who have been following EA (or EA-like ideas) for such a long time, even if it is a fairly loose/broad following.
There are lots of good writings around here for rekindling interests and efforts, although sometimes it can be hard to take a broader view if you are following the ‘daily news.’ I am personally a fan of the forum favorites on this page: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/recommendations

Joseph Lemien 16 Jan 2025 21:32 UTC
18 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Joseph Lemien’s Shortform
Best books I’ve read in 2024
(I want to share, but this doesn’t seem relevant enough to EA to justify making a standard forum post. So I’ll do it as a quick take instead.)
People who know me know that I read a lot, and this is the time of year for retrospectives.^[1] Of all the books I read in 2024, I’m sharing the ones that I think an EA-type person would be most interested in, would benefit the most from, etc.
Animal-Focused
There were several animal-focused books I read in 2024. This is the direct result of being a part of an online Animal Advocacy Book Club. I created the book club about a year ago, and it has been helpful in nudging me to read books that I otherwise probably wouldn’t have gotten around to.^[2]
- Reading Compassion, by the Pound: The Economics of Farm Animal Welfare was a bit of a slog, but I loved that there were actual data and frameworks and measurements, rather than handwavy references to suffering. The authors provided formulas, the provided estimates and back-of-the-envelope calculations, and did an excellent job looking at farm animal welfare like economists and considering tradeoffs, with far less bias than anything else I’ve ever read on animals. They created and references measurements for pig welfare, cow welfare, and chicken welfare that I hadn’t encountered anywhere else. I haven’t even seen other people attempt to put together measurements to evaluate what the overall cost and benefit would be to enact a particular change in how farm animals are treated.
- Every couple of pages in An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us I felt myself thinking “whoa, that is so cool.” Part of the awe and pleasure in reading this book was a bunch of factoids about how different species of animals perceive the world in incredibly different ways, ranging from the familiar (sight, hearing, touch) to the exotic (vibration detection, taste buds all over the body, electrolocation, and more). The author does a great job of weaving it all together, and it really was fun to read. Almost every day I read this book I wanted to walk up to people like an annoying kid who won’t stop feeding you facts about their favorite thing: “Did you know that [X]? Isn’t it cool that some animals can [Y]. I just learned that [Z].” I almost felt giddy reading this book. Highly recommended.
- I often enjoy reading things that make me feel humble (either as an individual or as a member of a broader civilization/culture), and reading Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? did that. I’m interested in measurement and assessment broadly, and this describes a variety of ways in which our attempts to measure and assess intelligence in other species have failed. Sometimes these were very simplistic anthropocentric failures, such as testing monkeys on their ability to differentiate human faces rather than on monkey faces, or showing elephants a mirror that was too small for the elephant to see itself fully. A lot of the research into animal intelligence seems to have come from a stance in which starting assumptions are believed true, rather than a more exploratory stance.
Sociological
Many of the books I read are what I would roughly categorize as sociology focused on injustice (or inequality, or unfairness, or lack of equal opportunity, or something along those lines).
- The short summary of The Algorithm: How AI Decides Who Gets Hired, Monitored, Promoted, and Fired and Why We Need to Fight Back Now would be that tools with serious flaws are being used improperly to make decisions that affect people’s livelihoods. The author did interviews and also did test runs with a wide variety of algorithms and “AI” tools involved in the world of work, and exposed flaws that would make me embarrassed if I was on a sales team for any of these products. An algorithmically assessed video interview tool gave her a fairly good score when she spoke in a foreign language. People got fired based on technical errors in the assessment systems rather than based on any problem with their work. Tools are implemented without any oversight by under trained staff, who have been specifically instructed that this tool should inform one aspect of their broader decision, and who instead simply “outsource” their decision to the tool. People are discriminated against for a variety of unjust reasons. I’m interested in decision-making, measurement, and selection in general, as well as hiring broadly; I’m an easy sell for this book. I recommend this not just to people involved in hiring or performance management, not just to people who make career-impacting decisions about other people, but to anyone who is interested in how technology is misused/misapplied, and anyone interested broadly in how decisions are made.
- If you want to read about challenges faced by poor students at fancy schools, read The Privileged Poor: How Elite Colleges Are Failing Disadvantaged Students. I’ve read several books about higher education in America, but this book had the most micro perspective and the most specific details. Other books focused on broad strokes, while this book was based on a few dozen interviews the authors did with students at Harvard College.^[3] Some aspects relate to institutional policies (such as closing the cafeteria for spring break, which is negligible to wealthy students but incredibly challenging for poor students), and some relate to culture more generally (many wealthy students have no idea what it is like to be poor, and demonstrate a blasé lack of empathy and awareness). I know that I was pretty blasé when I was 20 years old, but it still stings to see a wealthy heiress casually mention buying all-new designer furniture for her dorm room while the student sitting next to her doesn’t even have a warm coat for the winter.
- The Stigma Trap: College-Educated, Experienced, and Long-Term Unemployed is one of the best books I’ve read about sociological unfairness stuff, and I’m surprised that it hasn’t gotten more publicity. If I had to boil it down to a few ideas it would be that people who evaluate you for employment assume that any gap is because you are a bad employee, so if you had a misfortune (illness, family issue, industry downturn/downsizing) people will stigmatize you as an individual rather than attributing the cause to a broader, non-personalized issue. This book isn’t about your cousin who never finished high school and whose main hobby is smoking weed; this book is about people who have degrees from good schools, who have had white collar and managerial job titles, and who are able and willing to work. This also isn’t a book of practical tips and tricks. Instead, it is a sociologist highlighting the biases that people have and highlighting the systematic issues preventing people from getting good work. The “myth of meritocracy” is pervasive, which leads many people to assume that if someone is facing hardship it is because they are somehow deserving of it. Even friendships and romantic relationships suffer because people make the assumption that someone who is out of work is somehow broken, flawed, or toxic. Networking is hard, too, because people ask “what do you do” and if your response is “I used to be a director of finance, but for the past eight years I’ve worked in retail at Walmart to pay bills” people will make all kinds of assumptions about what you are capable of doing. The book also highlights many of the frustrations of being the victim of (what they perceive as) a fundamentally unjust system, and how the recognition or acknowledgement of those frustrations is in itself penalized. I’ve been involved in hiring and I read a lot about personnel selection, and many aspects of this book resonated with me: people are selected or rejected on things that are often trivial, which have very little to do with how well they would perform, or things that are falsely assumed to be predictive.^[4] The other point the author drives home is that this could happen to any of us (although this is somewhat limited to an American context). Much like disability advocates say that many of us are temporarily able-bodied, any of us who are working and earning an income now could be laid off or downsized at any point, and all except for the very elite could very easily struggle to find a next job.^[5]
Fiction
A few works of fiction that I think EAs might appreciate, related to civilizational resilience, artificial intelligence, and immoral actions.
- Service Model is about artificial intelligence (a robot) seeking meaning and purpose after the collapse of human civilization. The author pokes satirical fun at broad swaths of current society, mainly through the various robots continuing their jobs long after it makes any sense to do so (such as a robot who rings a doorbell, and then stands there for twenty years waiting for someone to open the door). It feels fairly lighthearted and silly, while still maintaining a sense of authenticity and genuineness over the whole story.
- Children of Time is about civilizational resilience, about a future in which humanity is attempting to seed and terraform exoplanets. Without major spoilers, while the terraforming missions are part-way through, bad stuff goes down on earth, and suddenly the remnants of earth life need to start from scratch on a new planet, while different remnants of earth life try to find a home and salvage what they have left. Lots of new ideas, and some of the best speculative fiction I’ve read in years. It also won the Arthur C. Clarke Award.
- Yellowface is not particularly related to EA in terms of cause areas or topics, but I think that there are some themes that can serve as great fodder for thought experiments and considerations of morality. It is also really fun. It is something of a satire, something of a thriller, and also slightly autobiographical (although in a highly fictionalized sense). EAs who read it might enjoy considering the nature of truth/honesty, the idea of what harm is actually caused or who is actually hurt by our actions, what we owe each other, self-interest and justifying our actions to ourselves, and how power relations (and especially reputational power) influences behavior.
Generic
These are books that I would expect to see on a list of bestsellers, or perhaps on a list of books that got a lot of publicity/press.
- Reading Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will was kind of a slog. It was interesting, but it was still hard to work through due simply to how much of it there is. If you think that you have free will, I recommend you read this book. The idea that we can make choices free from any impact of what has transpired previously is very tempting, and it simply doesn’t seem realistic on the societal level nor on the neurological level. But this has plenty of uncomfortable implications related to how we treat people, especially in regards to rewarding or punishing people’s actions if people didn’t really ‘choose’ to take those actions.^[6] It is easy to look at people doing things and make some sort of moral judgement about the person, but considering the broader influences we should question to what extent that makes sense.
- Conversely, reading Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention- and How to Think Deeply Again was easy. It is written by a journalist,^[7] and the smoothness of the narrative is noticeable. It is very easy to digest. Nothing in the book is particularly novel if you are familiar with the broad strokes of how people get addicted to news feeds and similar tools, but since people are still getting addicted to news feeds and similar tools it feels justified to repeat. It was nice to get a bit more context and detail about some of the effort that goes into grabbing your attention. There are a few tidbits on how to focus better, but they are things that I’ve picked up from here and there over the years from blog posts, journalistic long-form pieces, LifeHacker, and whatever other miscellaneous resources. The thing is, I can’t be angry at him for sharing true, accurate, and useful information. But I’d view this book sort of as ‘beginner-level’ or as ‘introductory’ content. My impression is that my peers know that social media algorithms show us content designed to keep us engaged. People know that working while distracted is suboptimal. People know that you shouldn’t lay in bed playing with your phone for an hour before falling asleep. People know that kids who get access to social media tend to form warped views of reality. But overall, it is really smoothly written, and the information is true and useful to people who haven’t explored these kinds of topics previously. I cannot understate how much I think this author is a very good writer. He crafts the narratives so well. His authorial tone/voice is excellent. It was literally a pleasure to read this book. Even the parts where I was annoyed by the author^[8], I really wanted to keep reading because reading this book was such a great experience.
- If you are interested in project management, you should read How Big Things Get Done: The Surprising Factors That Determine the Fate of Every Project, from Home Renovations to Space Exploration and Everything In Between. Most of us will never manage the type of mega-projects this author describes, but the lessons are applicable to smaller projects as well. The usual suspects show up: planning fallacy, ego, organizational culture, sales people over promising, etc. The author researched project management practices, and has assembled a big dataset. This book is full of good recommendations, so even if your projects are simply running a performance review for an organization or updating a website’s design, you should still find useful principals in here. For most people, I think this is helpful to remind you of all the ways things could go wrong, sort of similar to doing a pre mortem, and that awareness serves as a vague kind of “tips and tricks” in itself.^[9]
Miscellaneous
These books don’t quite fit into any of the above categories, nor do they have anything clearly in common that would justify a group, so I’m just clumping them together under the heading of “miscellaneous.”
- Although I might be stretching the definition of “book,” reading Two Arms and a Head: The Death of a Newly Paraplegic Philosopher was a challenging book to read. In brief, a young man has a motorcycle accident and becomes Paraplegic, he details the many ways that his existence is now full of frustration and annoyance and pain, and he then decides to kill himself. There was a lot of frustration and suffering in this, and I couldn’t bring myself to read more than a few pages at a time. The author is understandably bitter, and it is hard to read about so much bitterness. I’m sure that I would also feel very bitter if I was in his situation. There are so many things that he can no longer do, which he so desperately desires to do. Not just climbing trees or riding bikes, but very basic things, such as eating dinner without falling over, or being able to get ready in the morning in under two hours. In a certain sense, it feels morally beneficial to see the details of an existence full of suffering, almost as if I am training my empathy muscles. It is so easy to wave a hand and refer to malaria,^[10] but so few of us really delve into the details. I also found it notable that the author seemed like such an obnoxious person: while being reflective and intelligent, he was also a prototypical highly confident young American man, obsessed with performative displays of masculinity^[11], writing about how he is so much more wise and intellectually developed than normal people. He was a total bro, in all the worst connotations of that term. I would probably really dislike this guy if I met him. And, at the same time, that does nothing to diminish how miserable his existence was. Indeed, it make me wonder if he would have thought about his disability differently if it had happened to him at a later stage of his life, maybe in 2025, if he were middle aged with a loving spouse and a decade of having been a well-compensated lawyer and a part-time home health aide, maybe his situation would have had less suffering and he would have viewed it as more manageable.
- An EA friend recommended that I read Wild Problems: A Guide to the Decisions That Define Us, and I found it very enjoyable. It was a nice contrast from the online rationalist forum discourse that starts with the assumption that with sufficient data any problem is solvable. I enjoyed being reminded that sometimes we simply cannot know in advance, and there isn’t any roadmap or algorithm to lead to success. I’ll share an excerpt that gives the author’s definition: “Whether to have a child is what I call a wild problem—a fork in the road of life where knowing which path is the right one isn’t obvious, where the pleasure and pain from choosing one path over another are ultimately hidden from us, where the path we choose defines who we are and who we might become. Wild problems are the big decisions all of us have to deal with as we go through life… the big decisions we face in life, the wild problems—whether to marry, who to marry, whether to have children, what career path to follow, how much time to devote to friends and family, how to resolve daily ethical dilemmas—these big decisions can’t be made with data, or science, or the usual rational approaches.” This book felt very practical in the sense of how to approach life. It isn’t practical in the sense of teaching you a specific, isolated skill, but it is practical in that it helps nurture a mindset, an approach, a perspective that will ultimately lead to better choices, better relationships, and (I suspect) a better life. It is uncommon that I encounter a book that actually gives advice on a life well-lived.
- I was pleasantly surprised by the essays in Horizontal Vertigo: A City Called Mexico. It felt like it was a mixture of memoir and love letter to Mexico City. Lots of tidbits were lost on me,^[12] simply because I haven’t lived in Mexico City, and I don’t understand many of the allusions or references that I am sure were embedded. But it was pleasure to allow those unknown tidbits to wash over me. It doesn’t have advice for visitors, nor even advice for people who live in Mexico City. This is not a book to give you a better experience when you visit Mexico City; it is a book to give you a better sense of Mexico City. The essays were beautifully crafted and beautifully translated (I read it in English, my Spanish isn’t good enough to read a book this complex), and it gives a sense of the atmosphere of the city.
1. ^
  Although maybe I’m a week or two late.
2. ^
  If you are curious of the other books we read, I put them all here.
3. ^
  The author doesn’t state that it is Harvard, but it is pretty easy to deduce.
4. ^
  I’m sure you’ve all heard advice about doing video interviews that mentions having good lighting and having an uncluttered background; but that has nothing to do with your ability to perform on the job.
5. ^
  If you think to yourself that it couldn’t happen to you, imagine that you shift from whatever you are currently doing to a new job. Maybe it is in a new city, so you don’t have a network there. Then after three months something bad happens. Maybe your spouse tells you that they want a divorce, which causes your work performance to fall. Maybe you get hit by a car and are in the hospital for a few months. Maybe you get a cancer diagnosis, and treatment prevents you from doing your work. Maybe your CEO mismanaged the company and it closes down. Maybe your manager threatens or assaults you. Maybe your parent is dying and needs you nearby. Or maybe you just make a mistake in your job and your boss fires you. So you loose your new job and your good income, spend a few months dealing with whatever issue you encountered and emotionally picking yourself up. You start job hunting, but your resume now shows that you’ve been out of work for six months and that your most recent job lasted only for three months, so people who look at your resume or meet you at networking events assume that you are not a good employee.
6. ^
  If you borrow a shirt from me, and then you are assaulted and the shirt gets damaged, can I really blame you for damaging the shirt? What if borrow your car, and while responsibly driving it some damage occurs that I didn’t cause and am not responsible for (such as a screw that had been loose for weeks finally falls out, which causes a side mirror to fall off). Or if you want something more personalizable, what if John Doe vomits on some possession of mine? He didn’t choose to vomit, his body did it without him willing it. We certainly can’t assume that people have complete control over their bodies.
7. ^
  A journalist who has had issues with plagiarism.
8. ^
  During specific anecdotes I did find the author’s tone somewhat obnoxious, as if he were trying to say “I am so much better than these peons. I appreciate gazing deeply at the Mona Lisa for hours while these buffoons simply snap a pic and move on.” Those are not his exact words, but he really does write about gazing at the Mona Lisa while other people just take a picture and move on. He tells a story about lashing out at people who are looking at an iPad rather than looking at the world around them, and that story doesn’t make the author look great. But overall he strikes a great balance between citing facts, interviews with experts, and anecdotes of his own experiences.
9. ^
  Along the lines of “Oh, maybe we have a planning fallacy here, so we should set aside 15% of the budget as a management reserve” or “we should be aware of cultural pressure within the organization to respond positively to requests, even if the request is unrealistic.”
10. ^
  Or factory farming, or severe depression, or whatever other situation that we use as a common shorthand for bad things happening in the world.
11. ^
  He boasts more than once about how how popular he was with women, and how many fistfights he has won, how excellent his athletic prowess was, how his peers looked up to him.
12. ^
  I don’t remember any specific examples, which is to be expected for things that I didn’t have the contextual knowledge to understand. But they were things such as the author stating that a particular person looked a person from Neighborhood_A of Mexico city, but acted like a person from Neighborhood_B. If you are local and you know the feel and style and reputation of those neighborhoods, then you understand what the author is saying. But if you don’t have that knowledge, you know that the author is pointing to a concept but you don’t know what that concept is. I often only get that when I read things that aren’t intended for me, but intended for a different audience (an audience that all has some tacit knowledge in common). Again, it is kind of a humbling experience.

Joseph Lemien 16 Jan 2025 17:52 UTC
5 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Joseph_Chu’s comment on: Joseph_Chu’s Shortform
It can be tough to see things you’d like do do and to feel that they aren’t accessible to you. (although I think you are correct that 80k, and most of the larger EA orgs place focus primarily on elites)
It seems that you’ve already hit on the major points, so maybe you just need to take time to process it and accept it. But I do what to provide two alternatives:
First, people make tradeoffs and sacrifices. Some of the people you see writing impressive essays about animal suffering or creating a project that gets respect and funding, there are a lot of things that they are choosing to not do. This ranges from the simple (they don’t get the fun of following that new show) to the profound (they don’t spend time cultivate a good relationship with a sibling, or they leave a girlfriend to move to a new country).
Second, some of the people on the EA forum aren’t actually so talented or intelligent or thoughtful or kind. We may seem that way sometimes, and maybe sometimes we are, but we also have times when we are foolish or selfish or blundering. A few different framings:
- An academic way to think of it is that we are all engaging in impression management.
- A casual way to think of it is that we are all cosplaying as intelligent and thoughtful people.
- A analogy is to think of a photographer who takes 1,000 pictures, and 900 of them are bad, 90 are okay, and 10 are excellent; but you only see the 10, because that is what gets published.
- To use real, anonymized examples
  - “John Doe” is a real person, who I have met, and is one the top posters here. I consider him kind and intelligent and thoughtful, and he was thoughtless and inconsiderate once, lacking sympathy for another person’s situation. Does that make him a bad person? No. It makes him human.
  - “Jane” works hard to reduce the suffering in the world and is well known in her cause area. I also observed her (in-person, not online) being inconsiderate of others and deprioritizing them in a way that benefited her organization and her cause. Does that make her a villain? No. She was stressed and busy and focused on other things and trying to accomplish stuff. It just makes her human.
  - “EA org with funding and respect” had simple typos on their website
  - “Anonymous ORG_XYZ” posted sloppy inaccurate/misleading information.
  - A fairly well-known EA org insisted that they will only hire people for a generalist role with both a specific professional background and several years of leadership/management experience at an EA organization. (which is somewhat ridiculous, as there are only a handful of people in the world who meet this standard)
  - Job applications (an area I am somewhat familiar with) are often rejected for reasons unrelated to the person’s ability to do the job. Maybe you’ve heard of the idea that candidates get rejected if the decision-maker wouldn’t want to spend time stuck in an airport with them. I haven’t heard anyone specifically reference this heuristic, but I’ve seen similar things: people are rejected because of vibes.
So what I’m saying here is that people (and the organizations that people work for) make mistakes, some trivial, and some major. It is possible that you are looking at other people’s highlight reels, and assuming that it represents their normal performance.

Joseph Lemien 14 Jan 2025 16:04 UTC
12 points
8 ∶ 2
in reply to: titotal’s comment on: What are we doing about the EA Forum? (Jan 2025)
I’m reminded of how certain subreddits allow you to add tags/flair your posts. These serve often as metadata about the type of post (serious, venting, question, discussion, silly, etc.), and roughly informs people on how they should engage with the post. I know that the EA Forum has ‘topics,’ but that is about the topic of the post rather than the style/register.
Do you think it would help if the EA forum had tags like “fun/silly,” “serious discussion,” “butterfly thought,” and so on, as a way to specifically indicate that a post should/shouldn’t be interpreted in a dry and somber manner?

Joseph Lemien 14 Jan 2025 15:57 UTC
7 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: geoffrey’s comment on: What are we doing about the EA Forum? (Jan 2025)
drive-by professional posts
Thanks for giving me a term (or perhaps a concept handle?) for this thing. I was vaguely aware of it, and it feels sort of spammy when I see it, but I didn’t have a clear vocabulary to describe it previously.
I see these kind of “drive-by posts” a lot in subreddits and Slack workspaces, and even a few WhatsApp group chats that I’m in: people will join, post one advertisement/announcement, and then never be heard from again (unless they end up posting another advertisement/announcement after a few months).

Joseph Lemien 6 Jan 2025 15:22 UTC
3 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: Pat Myron 🔸’s comment on: Pat Myron’s Shortform
Nice job bringing up an interesting idea. Having not read any of the research, here are some naïve ideas and musings:
- It would be interesting to a see a quick-and-dirty cost-benefit analysis: what would it cost to replace 99% of “traditional” lawnmowers with autonomous mowing robots? How much money (or QALYs) would be gained/saved? What price would a robot mower have to be for a person with a one acre lot to justify buying it. Or maybe alternative models exist, in which I rent the robotic mower for two hours rather than purchasing it.
- We could make a clear argument that people simply shouldn’t spend money/time/effort moving their lawns, as the risks/costs aren’t worth it. But many people (in the USA at least) would continue to do so because they place social value on the appearance of a well-kept home.
- If there are about 82 million homes in the USA (this is from quick Google search, so I trust the number about as much as I ought to for having not looked at the sources), that implies ^85,000⁄_82,000,000 that about 0.1% of homeowners go to the ER each year for mowing injuries. This is of course completely ignoring non-home mowing, such as sports fields, corporate/office landscape, etc. This is also ignoring all the people that get injured but don’t end up in an ER visit.
- Safety features have presumably improved in movers during the past few decades. I wonder what the distribution is of the injuries in relation to how safe/new the mower is. Maybe a majority of the injuries are caused by half-broken mowers, or mowers from the 1980s, or from mowers that don’t have an dead man’s switch.
- I wonder if there are other, more important causal factors. Maybe most of those 85,000 involved people mowing the lawn while drunk, or elderly men insisting they they are still “man enough” to take care of the yard, or teenagers goofing around. To the extent that is accurate, the narrative might change from ‘mowers are dangerous and should be replaced’ to ‘drunk people operating machinery are dangerous.’ The parallels to cars are petty obvious: cars don’t cause accidents, people cause accidents. But that doesn’t deny the fact that a robotic car can avoid many of the accidents.
- I’m guessing (again, I want to emphasize that this is a naïve guess rather than a well-informed guess) that a majority of the injuries occur in situations that a robotic mower wouldn’t be very suitable for. I’m mainly thinking of small lots and areas with steep angles, such as the picture below. There are strong parallels to Roomba-style vacuums: they are great for houses with particular layouts, but many homes exist that are simply not practical/feasible for that type of robot vacuum.

Joseph Lemien 5 Jan 2025 18:36 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Suggestions for getting retiree / second career folks interested in AI Safety?
There are a variety of organizations that hire for remote roles, and from your brief description of “analytically and in terms of people skills and business acumen” this person might be capable of a variety of things: operations, technical, strategy, people management, etc. My off-the-cuff recommendations for some options would be:
- Check the job boards once a week, and keep an eye out for part-time roles, full-time roles that might be flexible, or anything else that might work. 80,000 Hours job board and Probably Good Job Board are both good, but EA NYC’s Job board is also good.
- Email a few people at a few different organizations to ask if he can volunteer, intern, or do some modestly paid work.
- participate in and then be a coordinator for the virtual programs.
- Join Blue Dot’s AI safety courses.
- offer mentorship, coaching, etc.
This is all assuming that he has some understanding of the content and the context that is relevant. If he isn’t familiar with some basic ideas relating to AI safety (or to more broad EA-type ideas, like impact, expected value, utilitarian ethics, etc.) then doing some reading about that kind of stuff might be the first step.

Joseph Lemien 5 Jan 2025 18:26 UTC
4 points
2 ∶ 0
in reply to: Ian Turner’s comment on: SofiiaF’s Quick takes
It means highly-engaged EA. I think that the term isn’t used as much as it was a few years ago, but it can be helping in a movement-building/strategic context for folks that are very central to effective altruism, and it still serves as a convenient label to differentiate different stages in the ‘funnel.’ But I think that it isn’t terribly common these days, and I expect that plenty of people who are quite involved in EA wouldn’t recognize “HEA” it or know what it means.

Joseph Lemien 28 Dec 2024 1:22 UTC
9 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Five years of donating
Thanks for sharing.
I really appreciated that you shared the sources of the money and the tidbit about how much of it came to you without needing to work for it and somewhat unbidden or underserved. As a reader, I appreciate seeing that level of self-awareness or reflection.^[1]
Also, cute/fun poem! That brought a smile to my face.
1. ^
  As opposed to reading that someone donated large amount of money within a year or two of starting working, which would make me wonder “how the heck did they get all this money?”

Joseph Lemien 25 Dec 2024 14:58 UTC
12 points
2 ∶ 0
in reply to: Christoph Eggert🔸’s comment on: How Much to Give is a Pragmatic Question
You’ve put into clear words the struggle that I have always had. If I had a guaranteed income or some high level of confidence that I would always be able to find employment and gain income of a certain level, then I’d find it quite easy to give away money. It wouldn’t be as scarce of a resource.
There are certain parallels to the idea of put on your own oxygen mask first, as we do need to make sure we are okay before helping others. But I also suppose that the really tricky part is considering what is okay ‘enough’ for us.

Joseph Lemien 19 Dec 2024 18:12 UTC
13 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Joseph Lemien’s Shortform
I’m going to repeat something that I did about a year ago:
A very small, informal announcement: if you want someone to review your resume and give you some feedback or advice, send me your resume and I’ll help. If you would like to do a mock interview, send me a message and we can schedule a video call to practice. If we have never met before, that is okay. I’m happy to help you, even if we are total strangers.
To be clear: this is not a paid service, I’m not trying to drum up business for some kind of a side-hustle, and I’m not going to ask you to subscribe to a newsletter. I am just a person who is offering some free informal help. I enjoy helping people bounce ideas around, and people whom I’ve previously helped in this way seemed to have benefited from it and appreciated it.
A few related thoughts:
- There are a lot of people that are looking for a job as part of a path to greater impact, but many people feel somewhat awkward or ashamed to ask for help. If I am struggling in a job hunt, I don’t want to ask friends or professional contacts for help due to shame; I worry that they will think less of me for not being competent. So asking a stranger that you’ve never met and that isn’t connected to your life can be a nice option.
- There is a lot of ‘low-hanging fruit’ for making a resume look better, from simply formatting changes that make a resume easier to understand to wordsmithing the phrasings. Sometimes you just need a helpful person to look with a critical eye.
- There is also something about ‘playing the game.’ I think of this something like informal coaching. Some people don’t know that when you are asked about a time you had an interpersonal conflict, instead of telling about a time you had an interpersonal conflict you should instead tell about a time you had an interpersonal conflict and you resolved it and it makes you look good.

Joseph Lemien 19 Dec 2024 14:50 UTC
4 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Karthik Tadepalli’s comment on: Karthik Tadepalli’s Quick takes
I have a thought on this. It related to the level of effort from the advice giver, and the willingness to understand the recipient’s context. Often advice is given with only a few seconds of effort, or with the giver applying a sort of cookie-cutter template to their understanding of the recipient. That is when useless advice comes from. When the giver dedicates some time minutes toward understanding and exploring the receiver’s context, toward actually paying attention, then the advice is able to be of much better quality.
This is specifically fresh in my mind because a few days ago I helped John Doe review his resume. John told me that I was not the first person to help, several other people had looked at his resume and told him that is was pretty good. But I did more than merely glance at his resume; I read through it with a critical eye. I had a page full of notes for him. Some of the notes were preference/stylistic things, but plenty of the notes were ‘errors’ that other people hadn’t bothered to notice: the text used two different shades of dark blue, there was inconsistent formatting in the dates. John was amazed that multiple people had reviewed his resume, and nobody had noticed or bothered to tell him that he was using two different colors (it was not intentional on his part to use two different colors).
In contrast, I’ve heard and (heard of) plenty of career advice within EA that simply isn’t apt. Recommending a recipient with no interest in an area to pursue that area, or ignoring a recipient’s visa/legal status, ignoring a recipient’s financial constraints, etc. I was once told to treat people to coffee and to use my parents’ professional networks. Both of those things are true in general, but I don’t live within a hundred miles of a place where I could treat networking contacts to coffee, and my retired working class parents don’t have professional networks. It reminds me a little bit of trying to try; how much effort do people actually put into the act of giving helpful advice.

Joseph Lemien 16 Dec 2024 23:22 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Joseph Lemien’s comment on: Joseph Lemien’s Shortform
Meandering and exploratory follow-up.
Even if the justification is reasonable, it is quite exclusionary to candidates outside of the required time zone. Think of a company who wants to hire a data analyst, but instead of the job posting listing ‘skilled at data analytics’ it instead lists ‘MA in data analytics.’ It is excluding a lot of people that might be skilled but which don’t have the degree.
I think the broader idea I’m trying to get at is when X is needed, but Y is listed as the requirement, and they are two distinct things. Maybe I need someone that speaks German as a native language for a job, but on the job describing I write that I need someone who grew up in Germany; those are distinct things. I’d reject all the German expats that grew up abroad, as well as the native-German speakers who grew up in Switzerland or Austria.
There might also be something here related to the non-central fallacy: applying the characteristics of an archetypical category member to a non-typical category member. Most people in distant time zones probably wouldn’t be able to manage an abnormal working schedule, but that doesn’t mean we should assume that no people in distant time zones can handle it.
Of course, the tradeoffs are always an issue. If I would get 5 additional candidates who would be good and 95 additional candidates who are poor fits, then maybe it wouldn’t be worth it. But something about the exclusion that I can’t quite put my finger on strikes me as unjust/unfair.

Joseph Lemien 16 Dec 2024 23:19 UTC
4 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: lincolnq’s comment on: Joseph Lemien’s Shortform
There is a reasonably high base rate (off the cuff: maybe 30 percent?) of candidates claiming overconfidently in interviews that they can meet a work schedule that is actually incredibly impractical for them and end up causing problems or needing firing later on.
That is a very real concern, and strikes me as reasonable. While I don’t have a good sense of what the percent would be, I agree with you that people in general tend to exaggerate what they are able to do in interviews. I wonder if there are good questions to ask to filter for this, beyond simply asking about how the candidate would plan to meet the timing requirements.
For the time zones, I had been thinking of individuals that had done this previously and can honestly claim that they have done this previously. But I do understand that for many people (especially people with children or people who live with other people) it would be impractical. Maybe my perception of people is fairly inaccurate, in the sense that I expect them to be more honest and self-aware than they really are? 😅

Joseph Lemien 16 Dec 2024 16:10 UTC
3 points
2 ∶ 3
on: Joseph Lemien’s Shortform
I want to try and nudge some EAs engaged in hiring to be a bit more fair and a bit less exclusionary: I occasionally see job postings for remote jobs with EA organizations that set time zone location requirements.^[1] Location seems like the wrong criteria; the right criteria is something more like “will work a generally similar schedule to our other staff.” Is my guess here correct, or am I missing something?
What you actually want are people who are willing to work “normal working hours” for your core staff. You want to be able to schedule meetings and do collaborative work. If most staff are located in New York City, and you hire someone in Indonesia who is willing and able to do a New York City working schedule, for the organization and for teamwork that isn’t different than hiring someone in Peru (which is in the time zone as New York City).^[2]
I’ve previously spoken with people in Asian time zones who emphasized the unreasonableness of this; people who have the skills and who are happy/able to work from 9pm to 4am. If someone who lives in a different time zone is happy to conform to your working schedule, don’t disqualify them. You can disqualify them because they lack the job-relevant skills, or because they wouldn’t perform well enough in the role, but don’t do it due to their location.^[3] If they have stable internet connection and they state that they are willing to work a particular schedule, believe them. You could even have a little tick-box on your job application to clarify that they understand and consent that they need to be available for at least [NUMBER] hours during normal business hours in your main/preferred time zone.
1. ^
  Such as must be located between UTC and UTC +8, or must live in a time zone compatible with a North American time zone.
2. ^
  You might make the argument that the person in Indonesia would be giving themselves a big burden working in the middle of the night and (presumably) sleeping during the day, but that is a different argument. That is about whether they are able to conform to the expected work schedule/availability or about how burdensome they would find it, not about whether they are physically located in a similar time zone. Lots of people in low income countries would be happy to have a weird sleeping & work schedule in exchange for the kinds of salaries that EA organizations in the UK and USA tend to pay; that is a good tradeoff for many people.
3. ^
  There are, of course, plenty of other reasons to care about location. There are legal and tax reasons that a organization should only hire people in certain locations. Not all employers of record can employee people in all countries. And there are practical reasons related to the nature of the job. If you need someone to physically be somewhere occasionally, location matters. That person should probably shouldn’t be located a 22-hour trip away if they need to be there in-person twice a month; they should be able to travel there in a reasonable amount of time.

Joseph Lemien 8 Dec 2024 14:54 UTC
8 points
3 ∶ 0
on: NYT—What if Charity Shouldn’t be Optimized
Overall, not one of the stronger critiques that I’ve read.
The “how could anyone put a numerical value on a holy space” snippet struck me. I’m no expert in measurement, but the answer to this question seems to be similar to “how do you measure how extraverted a person is?” or “how do you measure the sum total of all economic activity in a country?” or “how do you measure media censorship?” The answer is that you do it carefully, with the use of tools/assessments, proxies, parametric estimating, etc.
There is plenty of research that basically involves asking people “Would you rather have A or B,” and with clever research design you really can measure how much people value various intangible things.^[1] And I don’t even study or specialize in that area. So it stuck me as odd to have such an established set of solutions which weren’t even mentioned. How to Measure Anything is great, but there is also lots written about willingness to pay.
1. ^
  For anyone not familiar with that kind of research, a simplistic version would basically be asking people “Would you rather have an extra $100 each week or have a local art museum,” and by varying the numbers you can get an idea of what dollar value people put on that specific experience. For anyone familiar with the research, please forgive me for my vast simplifications.

Joseph Lemien

Animal-Focused

Sociological

Fiction

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