Founder of Overcome, an EA-aligned mental health charity
John Salter
Karma: 2,338
I regret that particular phrasing. I wish I instead wrote:
”Heuristics for coming up with ideas for how to spend your time, and then prioritizing between them”
Neglectedness is often a trap.
If nobody is working on a problem, there’s usually a reason:It’s not a real problem
It’s already solved—you just don’t know it yet
There’s some other reason not to work on it (e.g. nobody will fund it)
Heuristics for finding good problems others will miss
You could realistically be the best in the world at it, even with 100+ people working on it. Rewards (money, status, influence) go disproportionately to the best people in a space. You can channel those rewards into impact.
It’s high-risk, high-reward. Most people are overly risk-averse.
It takes a long time (people overly discount the future) and has a strong feedback loop, so you know you’re actually making progress.
Solving it would cost the incumbents money. Permanent solutions threaten expensive, recurring short-term ones e.g. if Ozempic’s makers had a one-shot vaccine with the same effect, they wouldn’t sell it.
You can otherwise establish that people avoid it for non-impact reasons (e.g. it’s low status, boring)
Only powerless entities have the problem e.g. animals, people in extreme poverty).
Existing solutions are terrible but still widely used. strong validation that it’s a big problem.
We operate a mental health coaching service for charity founders. We’ve worked with 40 or 50 now. We get the inside details people don’t share publicly for PR / relationship reasons.
Looking back, almost everyone agrees retrospectively that their co-founder breakups happened too slowly. You won’t hear about this publicly because it’s a terrible career / PR move to be anything but freakishly civil towards your current and former co-founders.
Especially if you’re pairing co-founders as part of your programme, I’d urge you to consider the opposite stance. If it’s not working out, make it easier for people to break up amicably and quickly.
Two practical things you can do as an incubator:
1. Above all else, prioritise founder selection and pairing. This the only fuck-up that cannot be repaired. Good duos can self-train or learn from experience, raise their own money, pivot out of a shitty TOC.
2. Encourage them to express disagreements / unhappiness promptly. Of the co-founder breakups that seemed preventable in retrospect, almost all involved feelings getting bottled up and hardening into irrecoverable resentment. The more agreeable the founders, the greater the risk this happens.
Sorry for the unsolicited advice. Best of luck!
I think something like this could work:
0. Consider only enterprises that wouldn’t be appealing to purely for-profit investors
1. Model the business’s existence as being the creation of a stream of lives saved per year.
2. Model it’s effectiveness by using the philanthropic equivalent of discounted cash-flow analysis
3. Model the cost of investment as the difference between the returns generated by this business and what your money would otherwise have been doing.
4. Divide the present day equivalent by the cost of investment to get the cost-effectiveness.
Below are two toy examples. Opus 4.8 can one-shot the relevant calculations, so I’ll skip their explanations. Use the prompt “What is the Net Present Value of [something valuable] per year, starting Y years from now. If philanthropic, use GiveWell’s current discount rate? (4%). If financial, use a 6% discount rate.”
AMF Vs Social Enterprise
Q: Say AMF saves a life for £4k. A social enterprise could saves 1 life a year forever if you donate £200k to it right now. Which is better?
A: AMF
1 life saved a year = 25 lives right now. 25 lives right now would cost you £4k per life * 25 lives = £100k. Therefore, donating to AMF is twice as good.
AMF vs Startup
Q: Donate to AMF or invest $500k in an a YC startup that, if it works, would return 10x over 5 years and save 100 lives a year every year. If it doesn’t work though, nothing of value is created whatsoever.
A: Probably Startup
YC success rate = 5%
100 lives a year * 5% chance of happening = 5 lives per year saved on average.
5 lives per year, starting from 5 years from now-> 107 lives saved right now.
10x return / 0.05 chance of materialising / 5 year worth of discounting = ~$200k dollars
Cost to invest = $500k - $200k = $300k
107 lives for $300k dollars; $2.8k dollars per life. So, better than $4k via AMF.
In my view, this one of EA’s biggest problem. Even GiveWell rarely bothers to verify numbers if it’s boring or manual to do so (e.g. number of people vaccinated, number of bednets delivered). Even when past charity evaluations could be calibrated against third party data sources, nobody bothers. We’re allocating billions using tools we’ve never bother to calibrate.
Without anyone establishing anything resembling ground truth, there is no accurate feedback signal for leaders, grantmakers, donors. When the only signal is what LOOKS impactful, and that’s how all money and status is awarded, that’s what everyone will clamour after. We’re going to learn the wrong lessons, fund the wrong projects, hire the wrong people, and then never find out.
Tons of money. Zero verification. Every fraud’s wet dream come true.
Write convincingly about it then get it featured prominently somewhere the donors, or people they trust, already read.
Sounds like you’ve been doing really incredible work. Going from incubated to GiveWell funded so quickly is a hell of an accomplishment! A few questions that spring to my mind having read quickly through your docs.
The Drug Itself
1. What is it called?
2. How much does it cost?
3. Roughly how does it work?
4. What’s the side-effect profile like?
Growth
5. How’d you get the government so excited so quickly as total outsiders? (asking for a friend)
6. How much do you reckon you’ll benefit from economies of scale?
7. Are funding and target population size the only real constraints that you see at present?
Outside the box
8. At least in rural areas, where getting there is the majormost cost, why not do other things beyond TB screening / prevention too e.g. delivering under-supplied medicines / vitamins / goods (assuming you / your partners aren’t already doing that)
We’re GoalsWon’s biggest competitor for EA accountability. People using their service actively undermines my case for funding, so I’d love to discourage you from signing up.
Annoyingly, I’ve heard nothing but positive things about them. While most people maybe only become a few percent more productive, which still thoroughly pays for the time invested in it, a substantial minority progress make literally 10-100x faster on their most important long-term goals as a result.
It’s free. Sign-up takes 5 minutes. What the fuck do you have to lose?
Option D: dont attend any university and just get to work. The value of university degrees, even purely for signalling, are at an all-time low and descending. For learning, you can do free online video courses.
There are highly valuable tasks AI researchers dont do because they are low status / boring / hard to fund. You could get started on them independently.
You’d need a mentor at some point to avoid wasting time on irrevelant things / to hold you accountable.
I think if you are highly self-motivated, independent, and creative, this could be the best option by an order of magnitude.
Who’s going to tell him?
I’ve spoke to half a dozen or so founders within global wellbeing- all are scrambling for non-donor ways of making money or accepting that if their next grant proposal fails they have to shut down / fire most their staff. Nobody mentioned having seen an influx of interest from Anthropic staff, or anyone else, preparing their plans for who to donate to. If anything, there’s fewer donors and less money.
I’d been keen to hear from people in other cause areas on whether they’ve observed any evidence of increased funding ahead.
They have a helpful FAQ at the bottom of this page:
https://africajobsfund.com/
Re 2 vs 3 - I didn’t want to have to literally whip a calculator out and crunch some stats before making a comment so I just put a squiggly.
Re 100, I think you’re absolutely right. I think I’m off by an order of magnitude or two. I wouldn’t be surprised if there were around 1000 individual incidents, but then I’d only expect a few % to be reported and for them to be grouped together. Tbh, I kinda scimmed the post and didn’t read it throughly enough before commenting :S
Thanks for questioning the common narrative even though it’s awkward! I think it’s great you delayed until things got less heated.
I think one big question is whether you’d also need to consider all the complaints made to all the HR departments in EA and not just CEA’s CH team. I imagine you’re only going to CH if it’s someone from some workplace besides your own, and that you’d go to your manager / HR team if it was someone you actually work with. If that’s right, you might also need to talk to the people who run groups / coworking spaces.
If that’s the best estimation strategy, I’m guessing you’d need to bump up your estimate by ~100x or so. Another thing is EA has far fewer women than these other places, so you might need to raise it by another factor of ~3.
I would be willing to delay technological innovation by up to 100 years to significantly reduce existential risk
I think the question is too imprecise phrased to be answered precisely. When would the delay start? Over what time period would it be felt? (e.g. a 100% delay for 100 years is very different than 1% delay over 10,000 years)
I’m thus giving a directional answer assuming we’re talking about whether seeking to dramatically reducing technological progress in exchange for safety is a feasible way to make the world a better place. I don’t think this is, but I’m not sure.
My biggest gripe is that any attempt to reduce technological innovation dramatically would entail a bunch of side-effects that would degrade the quality of existence (e.g. requiring authoritarianism, moving power from cooperators to defectors, to people skilled at deception to people less skilled, incentivises fighting for a larger slice of the pie instead of expanding it as expanding it is far harder without improved technology)
Strongly upvoted because:
1. I think Shamiri model is worth replicating in other places
2. Recent regulatory changes are fantastic times to start new orgs
That being said, your presentation of the idea here and in your longer pdf is weak.
1. There’s lots of typos / formatting mistakes.
2. The information density is too low—I can’t quite bring myself to read it for more than a few minutes.
3. Your call to action is a 50 page PDF. That’s too larger first commitment. The type of people who’d fund this or want to collaborate don’t have that type of time.
We don’t have a public page for it; people sign-up via word-of-mouth and invite via incubators. We handpick and train mental health coaches for EA founders from the people who got the best results for regular EAs. The thesis was that people who’re founding or scaling an EA charity founders face a ton of mental health challenges and that can be resolved quickly and help them and their charity succeed.
I figured getting the results would be the hard part, or convincing founders you could, but no. Within ~2 years, over half of AIM incubated charities have had one or more founders successfully resolve one mental health problem with us. ~90% of people who do the first session complete the programme and ~50% decide to keep going after it ends to work on their next most pressing problem. This is waaaaaaaay better than our stats for regular EAs and regular people—Founders underinvest in themselves so hard, and are so focussed on making their organisation succeed, that tons of low hanging fruit remain.
The problem is getting someone to fund it long-term:
- Early stage founders are broke, irrationally self-sacrificial, and time-poor
- Mental health funders, for good reason, care mostly just for LMICs
- Meta funders, for good reason, don’t want to choose for others what service would work best for them / their incubatees.
So, while finding seed funding to demonstrate POC was really easy, getting something durable isn’t. Donors think incubators should fund it. Incubators think donors should, after all, it’s an ecosystem wide service.It only costs ~$80k a year to run, I’ll figure out a way to do it, it’s whether I can do that in time to avoid losing talent I can’t replace. I have one coach with a ~90% success rate, who only costs ~$33k a year, considering quitting because they don’t believe the job will exist in 2 years. The founders she supports collectively have a budget in the tens of millions and several are widely used as examples as EA’s most successful ever charities. We can’t replace her: she’s dramatically better than anyone else we employ, miles better than me, and neither she nor I understand how she does it.
I don’t really want a grant. I want some mechanism whereby we can be paid by results or just compete in an open-market that isn’t so distorted by the expectation that donors will cover everything.
We’re sadly no longer accepting sign-ups for our founder’s programme. We’ve had an influx of demand and we’re now fully at capacity for the foreseeable future. Its funding situation is precarious and I’ve sadly got to focus on that now. Results are nuts, but mental health funders are focussed on LMICs, meta funders don’t like mental health interventions, so it’s a challenging category to even survive in.
For now, I’ve got to focus on doing a good job for our existing clients. I’m sorry!
Hi there, Angel here, John’s co-founder who ran the study.
Intervention
The four-week, one-to-one coaching programme combined motivational interviewing and cognitive behavioural therapy techniques, delivered via weekly 60-minute video calls by trained volunteer coaches following a manualised guide.
Session 1 focused on identifying procrastination triggers and building personalised action plans. Sessions 2-3 reviewed progress and addressed unhelpful thoughts and emotions through cognitive restructuring, behavioural activation, and self-monitoring. Session 4 consolidated learning and built a long-term maintenance plan.
Coaches
Outside of this RCT, Overcome runs a three-month internship programme to aspiring mental health professionals to get training and hand-on experience delivering coaching. The first month of this internship is a full-time training programme on techniques from MI, CBT, and acceptance and commitment therapy, including workshops, readings, role-plays, and assessments. In the later two months of the internship, the interns then coach adults across the globe to build healthy habits or manage low mood/worries.
For this RCT, five volunteer coaches from Overcome were trained and delivered the procrastination coaching programme. The selected coaches performed strongly in their initial training and had promising client outcomes.
To prepare the selected coaches, they received two hours of study-specific training, including a workshop on the intervention protocol and a role-play session. They also attended weekly one-hour group supervision with a counselling psychologist to discuss and troubleshoot client cases.
Based