I founded and work at Magnify Mentoring.
KMF
WANBAM: Successes and challenges from our first two years
Insights into mentoring from WANBAM
Hey :) I was raped before I was involved in EA. I normally find these discussions hard and frustrating. I feel we often talk past one another and that the people with similar experiences withdraw because it’s still painful/ they get frustrated and hurt. I would like people like me to know: 1. There are a lot of people who have similar experiences to me who are active in the EA community. You may not see them here because of the aforementioned issue but we are here. 2. There are a lot of people who take these issues very seriously, including me, 3. I trust and endorse Catherine Low entirely. She has seen it all with me and has been kind, empathetic, and not unilateral. 4. To the extent possible, please consider reporting either to Catherine, the community health team or the police, or both. Kirsten is entirely right, this is horrifically unfair and you have no obligation to do so, but it is very important that people with a track record of sexual (any) violence not be in positions of power in any institutions or communities for the safety of other community members. 5. If there is anything whatsoever I can do, including talking openly about my experiences (I do have a blog draft actually about how I coped with my rape) which I am happy to share, an adamant vouch for Catherine and CEA’s team, or just generally a cup of tea, you should hit me up.
Lilly: I am so pleased to read this- thank you for sharing your experiences with our network.
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I hope it is appropriate to mention here, on the note of EA funding, that Magnify Mentoring got close to the wire funding-wise this time. Thanks to incredible individuals from our network, we now have enough funding to open rounds for applications in May to coincide with EAG London. We are not yet at our total fundraising 2023 goals. We are so excited to be able to welcome our new cohort of mentees though! :) If I can do anything at all to help in the meantime, please reach out to me at Kathryn (kathryn@magnifymentoring.org). If you are reading this and find our work compelling, we would love to hear from you. Thank you so much!
Magnify Mentoring is hiring and our mentee rounds are open!
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!
FWIW: I’ve known Julia for nearly 10 years. She is scrupulously honest and careful. I would bet
all the money I have (literally not figuratively)that she just made an honest mistake. I also don’t understand how this is relevant to the current complaint (FTX). This happened years ago and she’s already publically commented on it and apologized.Edited to add: I am seeing a pattern where commentaries lately pull out individual mistakes from any time frame and of any type to support a broader image of EA as committing malfeasance. I think this is epistemically shaky and beneath the standard of kind and collaborative criticism, I broadly hope for from members of this community.
Second edit: I’ve added a strikethrough after my husband pointed out some language in our Terms of Service.
Magnify mentee applications open!
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.
Thanks so much, Richard! :) Correct link. All of this is what I would have said 10 days ago. These are *MY* thoughts they are not Magnify’s thoughts- any controversies are mine alone.
(1) Not specific to the EA community but I wish people were kinder to one another and took more time to learn about each other’s experiences, why they may have the feelings, and thoughts that they do, and where it is coming from. I think spaces that prioritize empathy and understanding are more conducive to working on fixing these problems together:
There are small things like “be careful with the jargon you use”, “be careful to greet everyone and engage with them at your meet-up” and supercharge your empathy when dealing with topics that might disproportionately affect people from underrepresented groups (such as racial and ethnic discrimination, gender-based harassment and violence, etc.) We want to get to the right answer quickly and efficiently but the most productive conversations I’ve had in this space adopt a team mindset and a heightened level of compassion.
The EA community’s online spaces in particular need to work on strengthening empathy and compassion in all dialogues. For example, I was name-checked online a while back about how Magnify’s description of our program participants (“women and non-binary”) was discriminatory against trans people. My initial reaction was to be hurt and mad but I forced myself to hear them as a person- she was hurt, and I was hurt- her underlying motivation was to make sure trans people felt comfortable and welcome- I wanted this too -we reached a resolution together without publically taking chunks out of each other and causing further harm.
I believe the EA community should have a ZERO asshole policy and stick to it bravely. The ideas of the person may be great but if the cost is driving excellent people out I don’t believe it’s worth it. For me personally, Robin Hanson is an example of this.
(2) A mentee recently asked me if she could be an EA if she liked justice-shaped dialogues. I want to see EA as a toolkit where we all work together and bring in lots of different ideas, tools, and traditions to create excellent outcomes that positively shape the world and reduce suffering. A monolith or single identity is not conducive to this.
(3) I’m biased but I’d also love to see people spend more time mentoring. I think the focus on time optimization is great but it sometimes backfires in that people are not as willing to invest in newer EAs, particularly those who are undercooked. I believe I have had a large impact simply by having chats with people, pointing them at resources, and touching base with them in 6-months.
(4) I’d love to identify some better questions to accurately identify the “seeds” of what we now call value alignment. I think we are still using low-accuracy proxies such as who people know and books they have read. I’d love to deconstruct what we mean (I think it’s prioritization clarity) by “value alignment” and how we can measure it correctly.
(5) These topics (power dynamics) are vitally, vitally important. I’ve been involved in EA for the better part of a decade so I have many people I genuinely love who are working in this space along with me. This network of affection is great, but it is also a very good reason to supercharge adopting best practices on declaring conflicts of interest and raising awareness of power dynamics on grants, hiring, etc. Julia Wise and the community health team have done some excellent work here but this emphasis needs to spread. (To be clear, I think over time EA organizations have significantly professionalized. Every time I have applied for funding I have needed to declare a conflict of interest because a couple of our board members work/ed at CEA. They also asked me to publicly display this on our website. This is to me a sign of a maturing movement and has helped in my opinion.) Thank you very much.
We can’t take on everyone who applies so we are not the whole answer but I as an individual am always happy to chat with people from underrepresented groups Magnify Mentoring the organization continues to take on hundreds of people (currently women, non-binary and trans people of all genders) for mentoring per 6-months which we will continue doing as long as the average results continue to support such an initiative (which thus far they do). We welcome support and as an individual and possibly as an organization, I welcome the opportunity to support efforts and further productive attention in this space. Thanks :)
It started with a sense of injustice, that so many people were suffering so I went into international development and was shocked by how expensive and ineffective it was. I burnt-out really badly, and I don’t now get much in the way of emotional reaction to many forms of suffering (unless it’s personalised and even then it’s quite dulled in the moment). I’d seen so much suffering, I knew it was really, really bad, and I wanted to find effective ways to continue to prevent that. When I knew there were routes to actually do this, it seemed impossible not to prioritise that from a moral perspective or an emotional one. Hope that helps!
FWIW: I want to offer a strong dissenting voice that I do not like how this has been handled in this comment section. Saying something isn’t intended to be harsh and mean doesn’t make it not harsh and mean. You can point out things that concern you without singling out individual people and I think the average person would have found this incredibly hurtful and off-putting.
Organizational Update: Magnify Mentoring Applications Open
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!
Hi, I am the CEO of WANBAM. I would be delighted to welcome and support emerging EA mentorship programs with lessons learnt and advice. You can reach me at eamentorshipprogram@gmail.com. One of the things I love about WANBAM is we are experimenting with what works (and doesn’t)! I hope as we dial it in we will add value to emerging projects with lots of different communities and purposes. Be in touch! :)
Quick update from us :) The reception to the mentorship program has been incredible. In the space of two weeks, we have received 71 applications. We were delighted with the quality of the applicants and are now working with our mentors to finalize matches! More to follow.
This is going to be so useful for WANBAM. Thanks so much :) Your work is very impressive!
Hi hi :) Are you involved in the Magnify Mentoring community at all? I’ve been poorly for the last couple of weeks so I’m a bit behind but I founded and run MM. Personally, I’d also love to chat :) Feel free to reach out anytime. Super Warmly, Kathryn