I founded and work at Magnify Mentoring.
KMF
Karma: 1,556
Definitely not—this would be total nightmare fuel for me ;) Thanks!
Hey :) Just a data point that I downvoted this because:
a. I would like to encourage environments in EA which are mutually supportive and kind. I think that there is already significant social pressure to be okay with receiving feedback at any time and in any form.
b. I think feedback is very important but generally, we want to prioritize results. How will the person getting the feedback best use it as a tool to learn and grow? What I have read seems to suggest that feedback is most effective in a pre-existing relationship of trust, and emotional, and relational security and with concrete and actionable support after and goals.
c. I can see a hundred ways this goes really wrong. The incentives are to provide harsh critique to appear novel and insightful of the other person. On the flip side, the incentives are to be/ appear to be okay with the feedback being provided. My general read is that consent is key here but that the social dynamics/incentives do not lend themselves well to allowing people to opt-in/ opt-out freely.
d. I know this is super unfair but… you work at CEA running events. I am worried this might seem prescriptive to the newer members of the Forum given your status in EA.
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I will flag I don’t like this on a gut level which may be clouding my judgment. The framing of what causes your doom feels very icky and just generally a bad framing for something that should be positive and mutually supportive. I can imagine this being fantastic for some people but I thought I would add some notes on why I feel concerned here.
You are amazing! Warmest Congratulations! :)
Update: New section added on the role of feedback in mentorship relationships. I additionally highlighted our recent Status Update:
WANBAM released their blog post “WANBAM: Successes and challenges from our first two years.” The post summarizes their activities, initial results, and their risk mitigation steps.
I really love this article, thank you for taking the time to put it together. Obviously, I am biased, but I think a potentially strong second conclusion is that we should continue to take seriously building a community that has strong norms around making sure we attract and retain the best possible people from a diversity of approaches and expertise. I worry much more about our failure mode being we inadvertently form an echo chamber and miss or overlook how to weigh the importance or likelihood of potential ways we might be wrong/ potentially doing harm than I worry about overt bad faith.
Just popping up to say that I am continually amazed by your work :) I get the best mentees and mentors from you and I am blown away by your hardwork. Thank you so much!
FINAL CHANCE TO APPLY FOR THIS ROUND. Applications for mentees will close on the 30th. We are delighted by the applications so far and will be in touch with everyone who applied on the closing date with the next steps. Thank you so much! 🙂
Absolutely :) Sky Mayhew <sky@centreforeffectivealtruism.org> and <media@centreforeffectivealtruism.org>. Sky is incredibly kind and has always given me brilliant feedback when I’ve had to do external-facing stuff before (which I find intensely nerve-wracking and have to do quite a lot of ). I can’t speak more highly of their help. The people who have given me feedback on my sharing your video have mainly done so in the form of WOW face reactions on Slack FWIW- I’ll let you know if I get anything else. My husband also loves this type of stuff and was psyched to watch your video too. :)
Hey- Don’t be sad. It’s really brave to do work like this and make it public—thank you :) I’d definitely recommend this to newcomers (Indeed, I just did! Edited to add: The animations are so cool here!). You might consider sending future drafts through to CEA’s press team- they have a large network of people and I have always found the quality of their feedback to be really high and helpful! Thanks again for this!
To add to Barry’s point, WANBAM has interfaced with over 500 people in the first two years of our operations, so a smaller pool than this survey (more here). Our demographics (setting aside gender of course) are quite different from the EA Survey findings. 40% of our recent round of mentees (120 people in total this round) are people of color. There is also significant geographic diversity with this round of mentees coming from the US, UK, Australia, Germany, Philippines, France, Singapore, Canada, Switzerland, Belgium, Norway, Netherlands, Spain, Brasil, Denmark Mexico, India, Hong Kong, New Zealand, Ghana, Czech Republic, Finland, and Sweden.
Mentees most frequently selected interest in emerging technologies (67%), Research (59%), Public Policy, and Politics (56%), International development (49%), Cause prioritization (49%), Community Building (43%), High impact philanthropy (41%), mental health and wellbeing (40%), Philanthropic education and outreach (33%), Operations (33%), Animal advocacy (30%), Women in technology (29%), and Earning to Give (20%).I suspect there are subtle dynamics at play here around who is completing the survey. What’s your phrasing on the external communications around who you want to take it? Do you specify a threshold of involvement in EA? Happy to put our heads together here. Thanks! Warmly, Kathryn
Yes! We have a couple of pieces a bit like this, notably our career profiles and a blog I put together /update around once a round of resources recommended by our mentors/mentees and indeed the piece above. In our post-survey, I ask mentees what was a particularly useful piece of advice their mentor gave them, and plan to create a blog in that vein when it hits a critical mass (we have a large cohort this time so I think that might be next round). Thank you, John! :)
I agree. Next in the production line as our capacity (hopefully) grows! I can give my intuitions based on the program on the question of:
”Local group leaders like me often have to weigh a tradeoff of whether one-off calls like 80K’s or regular mentoring calls like WANBAM works better, so being able to view deeper impact data would be good!”Commenting on the models: I would say it depends on what your program user is looking to achieve and your capacity. At WANBAM, we have experimented both with one-off calls (now combined with access to our Slack and all our events) and our standard model of an average of monthly meetings for six months. To make this concrete, if I had someone who was interested in lots of different career paths but whose plans were still in the process of developing, I might connect them to a handful of people for a one-off call and then invite them to our events. If I have someone who is building their leadership skills with the aim of being promoted at work to management, I might connect them to one person who excels in this field to work with them over a period of six months. Essentially, capacity allowing, I work out (and this is not to say flawlessly- I am learning!) what we can concretely help with and try and tailor to do so. Thanks so much, Brian! Always happy to have a call with Group organizers if I can help :)
Yes to both questions. We are still discussing exactly what this could look like. My guess is parallel streams, i.e. myself and a team would run a WANBAM round then at the mid-point of that round we might kick off the second pool of mentees. My early intuitions would be to advertise to a restricted pool to maintain the quality of current service to all users. We might do something like WANBAM/”Longtermist Entrepreneurs”/WANBAM/”Effective Animal Advocates” and so on, depending on the demand. It is early stages and we would need more money and time but I feel excited about exploring this idea and cautiously optimistic thus why I worded it carefully in our update ;) Thanks as always, Brian!
Strong upvote for fantastic introductory opportunities that are paid! :)
Note that I just updated this :) I hope it’s useful!
The movie isn’t very accurate to the source material ( I still like it a ton though!!) but the book is amazing- it does a ton of accurate state modeling which is so good that I went to a panel with the author and everyone was commenting on how he got it so right!! :)
This is so excellent. Thank you :) Cannot wait to watch more of these. A strong endorsement from me on Pandemic, and Contagion! I wish they had done an accurate rendition of WorldWarZ it is such an amazing book!
When we calm down a bit post the launch of Round 3, I will do a deep dive into our feedback and make a mini-post for the Forum. I think we are seeing some emerging themes after 2 rounds: Peer-to-peer seems to be surprisingly helpful and highly rated, accountability/encouragement to apply for opportunities when job-seeking is potentially very useful and high-impact for excellent hires who may struggle with their confidence when applying to highly regarded orgs, having an optional structure seems good to ensure engagements don’t fizzle off due to social awkwardness, but one-offs can also be the best tool in certain cases, a diversity of activities (mentoring, ice-breakers, peer-to-peer, training) appears to make both mentors and mentees happier and more engaged, mentoring seems better when approached as a community-building exercise not just a way to facilitate a 1-1 engagement, individual mentor and mentee experience matters a lot, if you reach 1 excellent person and they have an excellent experience and tell 5 other excellent people you reach communities you wouldn’t otherwise necessarily reach through marketing or whatever, be super clear who you are serving and listen to them, make sure they feel welcome and heard because even the best-intentioned plans have blind spots :) The list goes on but those are my top lessons learnt so far.
Chi: We used an external trainer but I think we should make our own materials on Imposter Syndrome and I am hoping to get more bandwidth to do so with help. I have my eyes on some potential partners for this but it’s all about time right now. With that said, I think there is impact gold if we could do this and do it well because I see confidence as a huge bottleneck right now! Big thanks to both.
Great post- Kathryn of WANBAM here. I would be very happy to share insights on what I have found has and hasn’t worked with mentorship projects with anyone considering exploring this area. We have provided similar insights to emerging mentorship programs over the last 6 months or so. You can find me at <eamentorshipprogram@gmail.com>. Thank you.
I am super pleased to hear that. Seems like, despite the scary-sounding name, people have had positive experiences with this which is great! :)