Founder of Overcome, an EA-aligned mental health charity
John Salter
Karma: 1,160
Was a little sus on HLI before I got the chance to work a little with them. Really bright and hardworking team. Joel McGuire has been especially useful.
We’re planning on evaluating most if not all of our interventions using SWB on an experimental basis. Honestly, QALYs kinda suck so the bar isn’t very high. I wouldn’t have ever given this any thought without HLIs posts however.
200K seems excellent value for money for the value provided even if the wellby adoption moonshot doesn’t materialise.
I think the preliminary takeaway is that non-linear are largely innocent, but really bad at appearing that way. They derailed their own exoneration via a series of bizarre editorials, which do nothing but distract, borne out of (seemingly) righteous indignation
I think the best thing for readers to do is to await Ben Pace’s response, which he aims to have done in week or two.
This whole fiasco has wasted enough EA time as it is. Whether it continues to is in the hands of each reader. Let’s put down the popcorn / pitchforks and get back to work.
Upvoted. It’s great when people put their requests on the forum so they can be scrutinized thoroughly by the community.
I know nothing about community building. Regardless, here are some things I think would make your case stronger to the average reader:Listing some notable Polish EAs, especially if your outreach brought them into the movement. You’ve mentioned some organisations, but it’s costly for the reader to figure out who exactly you’re referring to and what your role was.
There are some places where vagueness could be concealing strength/weakness. For example, you’ve referred to your slack participants doubling. This could be from two people to four or from 10000 to 20000.
It seems as though you’re pursuing five strategies at once as a fairly small organisation. This is generally a bad idea, because doing one thing well is hard as it is. Can you elaborate on why you think such a broad focus is called for? (e.g. perhaps they are synergistic, or other similar orgs have had success with this approach)
It’s not clear why your plans for 2024 have been made. Can you comment a little on each and why you feel they are high EV?
I suppose your major competitor for this type of funding is Meta Charity Funders themselves. Why should the reader donate to you rather than to them? After all, they are supposedly the experts on what meta charities deserve funding. Wouldn’t it be better to give them the money and letting them choose the best charity that’s gone unfunded from their applicant pool?
Y-Combinator wants to fund Mechanistic Interpretability startups
“Understanding model behavior is very challenging, but we believe that in contexts where trust is paramount it is essential for an AI model to be interpretable. Its responses need to be explainable.
For society to reap the full benefits of AI, more work needs to be done on explainable AI. We are interested in funding people building new interpretable models or tools to explain the output of existing models.”
Link
https://www.ycombinator.com/rfs (Scroll to 12)
What they look for in startup founders
https://www.ycombinator.com/library/64-what-makes-great-founders-stand-out
Strongly upvoted. It’s really important that people talk about their failed projects publicly and talk about what went wrong.
We spoke a little at EAG London about how people underestimate the mental health challenges people face in EA, especially among the most senior people. You indicated a willingness to talk about it publicly. If you’re still up for it, could you tell us more about your own personal mental health over the past few years and your perceptions of what mental health is like amongst other effective altruists in leadership positions?
I think a good question to ask is, what work do you wish someone else would do?
Horrible career moves e.g. investigating the corrupt practices of powerful EAs / Orgs
Boring to most people e.g. compiling lists and data
Low status outside EA e.g. welfare of animals nobody cares about (e.g. shrimp)
Low status within EA e.g. global mental health
Living in relatively low quality of living areas e.g. fieldwork in many African countries
It seems that we’re spending 2 million a year on a glorified subreddit. What’s the donors case for this being a good use of funds? Isn’t the forum good enough as is? Some reddit mods handle ~100x the content, with 100x more traffic, for 0% of the cost.
What have you accomplished that justifies the spend on the forum to date? Couldn’t 99% of this have been accomplished by forking lesswrong and making minor tweaks?
Strongly upvoted. Posts like this are painful to write, but really valuable to read. Thanks for putting it together
Things that would make this post more compelling
1 - A more clear vision of the good this project would achieve if it gets the money, e.g. a cost-effectiveness analysis
2 - Why donors ought believe in the teams ability to execute
3 - A clearer vision for how the next few years would pan out if you got the money
Funders are likely to judge you based on whether you can clearly and concisely get these ideas across. Directing to a long blog post is unlikely to cut it. They’ll probably not read it. I’d strongly suggest modifying the original post to include this information, or make it more apparent. There’s 69420 people, just like you and me, vying for their attention at any given time; they aren’t going to do much additional work to understand your application. If they can’t find these answers very quickly, they’ll click off and look elsewhere.
For what it’s worth, I’d love to have more people like you, a local person actually doing the work on the ground (pun intended), getting the funding they need to make their vision reality.
How much is spent, total, on the EA forum each year?
Some great things about this post:
Concise and concrete; is quick to understand precisely what you did and why
Scout mindset; just presents the data without shilling for an idea
Directly relevant to doing good effectively
I’d love to see this exact experiment done on a larger scale with more robust outcome data. Kudos to the author. I hope they post more stuff like this.
~65% of charity entrepreneurship charities are at least moderately successful, with half of those being very successful. They’re probably a closer reference class, being donor-funded organisations run by EAs for impact.
What did the conferences cost to run?
Consider hardcore volunteers as well; some EAs unironically volunteer 30 or 40 hours a week while working part-time to support themselves. I did that for 3.5H years or so.
There’s an annoying trend of funders using non-descriptive names. It makes it harder to remember what they do. It seems mutually negative for a bunch of reasons.
1. Makes you appear lower down search rankings for relevant terms e.g. “Farmed Animal Welfare Funder”
2. Makes it harder to remember what they do, so people forget and have to click on their website over and over to remind themselves
→ more relevant people forgetting what you do and thus not applying & more irrelevant people viewing your information (thus wasting their time)
Compare and contrast to something like “Mental Health Funding Circle” or “EA Animal Welfare Fund” where it’s immediately apparent to both the relevant and irrelevant.
I think schlep blindness is everywhere in EA. I think the work activities of the average EA suspiciously align with activities nerds enjoy and very few roles strike me as antithetical. This makes me suspicious that a lot of EA activity is justified by motivated reasoning, as EAs are massive nerds.
It’d be very kind of an otherwise callous universe to make the most impactful activities things that we’d naturally enjoy to do.
Is perhaps testable by RCT amongst earn-to-givers because we could quantitatively measure their impact more easily.
Perhaps one group is coached on taking more small altruistic actions, the other is coached to preserve their resources for the big moments / decisions. I think six months to one year with yearly followups would be a suitable length.
I think limiting factor would be number of earn-to-givers willing to partake. Any other ways this could be tested objectively? It does seem very important to know, and it seems there’s little compelling evidence either way.
1. Get a pilot up and running NOW, even if it’s extremely small.
You will cringe at this suggestion, and think that it’s impossible to test your vision without a budget. Everyone does this at first, before realizing that it’s extremely difficult to stand out from the crowd without one. For you, maybe this is a single class delivered in a communal area. 30 students attending regularly, demonstrating a good rate of progress, is a really compelling piece of evidence that you can run a school.
- Do you have the resilience and organisation skills it takes to independently run a project?
- Will people actually use it?
- Can you keep your staff?
- Can you cost-effectively produce results?
It can compelling prove the above, whilst having a ton of other benefits.
2. YOU need to be talking to funders NOW
Don’t fall into the trap of trying to read their minds. Get conversations with them. Get their take on your idea. Ask what their biggest concerns would be. Go address them. Repeat. Build relationships with them and get feedback on your grant proposals before submitting them.
As the founder, its YOUR job to raise money. Don’t delegate it. It’ll take forever to get them to understand your organisation well enough, they won’t be as sufficiently motivated to perform, and you won’t learn. This is going to be a long-term battle that you face every year. You need to build the network, skills & knowledge to do it well.
3. Be lean AF
The best way to have money is not to spend it. Both you and your charity may go without funding for months or years. Spend what little money you have, as a person and as a charity, very slowly. The longer you’ve been actively serving users, the easier fundraising gets. It’s about surviving until that point.
4. Funders will stalk your website, LinkedIn, and social media if they can
As much as possible, make sure that they all tell the same story as your grant application—especially the facts and figures.
5. When writing your proposals, focus on clarity and concreteness above all else
Bear the curse-of-knowledge in mind when writing. Never submit anything without first verifying other people can understand it clearly. Write as though you’re trying to inform, not persuade.
- Avoid abstractions—
State exact values (“few” → “four”, “lots” → “nine”, “soon” → “by the 15th March 2024″)
- Avoid adjectives and qualifiers. Nobody cares about your opinions.
- Use language that paints a clear, unambiguous image to the readers mind
OLD: mean student satisfaction ratings have increased greatly increased since programs began and we believe it’s quite reasonable to extrapolate due to our other student-engagement enhancements underway and thus forecast an even greater increase by the end of the year”
NEW: When students were asked to rate their lessons out of 10, the average response was 5. Now, just three months later, the average is 7⁄10. Our goal is to hit 9⁄10 by 2025 by [X,Y,Z].
Good luck!