Current: doctoral candidate (law) / lecturer (humanitarian aid & human rights practice) / global operations advisor (nonprofits)
Former: NSF research fellow (civil conflict management & peace science) / US Department of State youth rep (Russia & Turkey) / global resiliency & risk / etc.
Disclosure: I worked with Open Phil’s CJR team for ~4 months in 2020-2021 and was in touch with them for ~6 months before that.
I’m very concerned by the way this post blends speculative personal attacks with legitimate cost effectiveness questions.
Chloe and Jesse are competent and committed people working in a cause area that does not meet the 1000x threshold currently set by GiveWell top charities. If it were easy to cross that bar, these charities would not be the gold standard for neartermist, human-focused giving. Open Phil chose to bet on CJR as a cause area, conduct a search, and hire Chloe anyway.
I genuinely believe policy- and politics-focused EAs could learn a lot from the CJR team’s movement building work. Their strengths in political coordination and movement strategy are underrepresented in EA.
I bought the idea that we could synthesize knowledge from different fields and coordinate to solve the world’s most pressing problems. That won’t happen if we can’t respectfully engage with people who think or work differently from the community baseline.
We can’t significantly improve the world without asking hard questions. We can ask hard questions without dismissing others or assuming that difference implies inferiority.
[I only got back on the forum to reply to this post.]