MichaelA

Karma: 7,496

I’m Michael Aird, a Staff Researcher at Rethink Priorities, Research Scholar at the Future of Humanity Institute, and guest manager at the Effective Altruism Infrastructure Fund. Opinions expressed are my own. You can give me anonymous feedback at this link.

With Rethink, I’m currently mostly working on nuclear risk research. I might in future work on topics related to what I’m calling “Politics, Policy, and Security from a Broad Longtermist Perspective”.

Previously, I did longtermist macrostrategy research for Convergence Analysis and then for the Center on Long-Term Risk. More on my background here.

I also post to LessWrong sometimes.

If you think you or I could benefit from us talking, feel free to message me or schedule a call. For people interested in doing EA-related research/writing, testing their fit for that, “getting up to speed” on EA/longtermist topics, or writing for the Forum, I also recommend this post.

MichaelA 12 Jun 2021 17:53 UTC
2 points
on: Overview of Rethink Priorities’ work on risks from nuclear weapons
[A meta comment I forgot to add earlier] I currently, personally think that:
- When a researcher or research organisation is writing a set of posts that “fit together”, they should often consider also writing an “overview post” (like this one) which gives readers context on what this set of posts is and why it exists
- These overview posts should be published before the set of posts
  - (This particular case is unusual because parts of the overall research project had been completed before I joined the organisation or thought to make “overview posts”)
- These overview posts should be ~300-1000 words
- The same sets of posts should probably also have “research summaries” (for example), but those would be published later and fill a different role
- The same sets of posts should probably also be made into sequences, and the sequence description and the overview post might be similar
I’d be interested in people’s thoughts on how useful they think that’d be and whether they’d suggest tweaking the approach.

MichaelA 12 Jun 2021 16:12 UTC
2 points
on: Career advising
It may be useful for this entry to draw on the following passage from What is meta Effective Altruism? (and my commentary on it):
A subset of EA movement building that is cross-cutting is research specific to the allocation of talent. Other effective uses of one’s time could be included within this such as volunteering, although this has not historically been a focus of this kind of research.
There are three main types of carer advice research:
1. Movement-level career advice research: “Which career paths are especially impactful, overall, for people to join?”
This research identifies bottlenecks in top causes and makes recommendations on how to address those bottlenecks, such as specific actions (e.g. career paths, jobs) movement actors can take to pursue them.
Examples : 80,000 Hours cause profiles, Animal Advocacy Careers’ skills profiles, Probably Good, Local Priorities Research (see below), Studies predicting which jobs get automated
1. Individual-level research: “How can a given person find an impactful career that is a good fit for them?”
This research identifies best practices, frameworks and tips on how to have a successful, fulfilling career. It could help people find a career that is the right choice for them: that is aligned with their values, that they can excel at, and that they are motivated to stay in in the long-term.
Examples: 80,000 Hours’ 2017 Career Guide, Career Profiles, So Good They Can’t Ignore You by Cal Newport
1. Career advice intervention research: “What can we do to help more people find impactful careers?”
This research identifies specific interventions (e.g. career 1-1s, articles, events, headhunting) which can help achieve 1) and 2).
Examples: Animal Advocacy Careers pre-registering a study of their career 1-1 calls, Research on the effectiveness of coaching.
My commentary on that:
I found the distinctions you drew between types of career advice research interesting—I hadn’t really thought of those distinctions before and expect to find that useful in future. I’ve also suggested that that section be drawn on for the new EA Wiki entry on career advising.
That said, I think it should really be a four-part (or maybe five-part) distinction, with the parts being:
1. Movement-level (or “generic”) career choice research: “Which career paths are especially impactful, overall, for people to join?”
2. Generic career success research: “What can a person do to maximise their chance of getting into the jobs they want, doing well in them, remaining productive and happy, not burning out, etc.?”
  (Along the lines of https://80000hours.org/career-guide/how-to-be-successful/ )
3. Individual-level career choice research: “How can a given person find an impactful career that is a good fit for them?”
4. Career advice intervention research: “What can we do to help more people find impactful careers?”
Currently your “individual-level research” category kind-of implies that it includes a bit of work on what would make someone successful, but really that’s something fairly different and something that can be researched in a more generalised way.
I say “or maybe five-part” because one could also add “Individual-level career success research”. But I’m guessing that that wouldn’t add much.

MichaelA 12 Jun 2021 16:11 UTC
2 points
on: What is meta Effective Altruism?
I found the distinctions you drew between types of career advice research interesting—I hadn’t really thought of those distinctions before and expect to find that useful in future. I’ve also suggested that that section be drawn on for the new EA Wiki entry on career advising.
That said, I think it should really be a four-part (or maybe five-part) distinction, with the parts being:
1. Movement-level (or “generic”) career choice research: “Which career paths are especially impactful, overall, for people to join?”
2. Generic career success research: “What can a person do to maximise their chance of getting into the jobs they want, doing well in them, remaining productive and happy, not burning out, etc.?”
  - (Along the lines of https://80000hours.org/career-guide/how-to-be-successful/ )
3. Individual-level career choice research: “How can a given person find an impactful career that is a good fit for them?”
4. Career advice intervention research: “What can we do to help more people find impactful careers?”
Currently your “individual-level research” category kind-of implies that it includes a bit of work on what would make someone successful, but really that’s something fairly different and something that can be researched in a more generalised way.
I say “or maybe five-part” because one could also add “Individual-level career success research”. But I’m guessing that that wouldn’t add much.

MichaelA 12 Jun 2021 16:03 UTC
2 points
in reply to: MichaelA’s comment on: What is meta Effective Altruism?
Vaguely relevant:
- My attempt to distinguish “fundamental research” from “intervention research”
- A framework distinguishing between values research, strategy research, intervention research, and implementation
(I think neither of those things attempts to explain where movement building fits in.)

MichaelA 12 Jun 2021 15:59 UTC
2 points
in reply to: vaidehi_agarwalla’s comment on: What is meta Effective Altruism?
I think I had a similar confusion to bwildi, or more specifically I wondered while reading this what wouldn’t count as meta EA. Your comment helps clarity that, but I think there’s still an issue, which is essentially that (almost?) all impacts will only occur indirectly. Some examples:
- “implementing vaccine programs” is unusually close to being direct, but arguably still indirect, as what we have in mind is probably something more organisational rather than literally being the person giving out the injections
- “lobbying for animal rights” is of course only impactful if the lobbying changes policies, and then the policies change behaviours
- likewise for “research on x-risk”
- likewise for other policymaking or policy advising work (which came to mind as one of the candidates for “not meta EA” when reading this)
I still think like there’s a useful category in this vicinity, which includes the examples you give but doesn’t include things like researching specific AI safety ideas or doing policy advising. But I don’t think that the definition you give by itself makes it clear what’s in and what’s out of scope.
I think maybe I’d see it as cleaner to have a concept for “building effective altruism”, and a concept for “global priorities research”, and then everything else (e.g. technical AI safety research, policy advising). Rather than trying to merge building effective altruism and global priorities research under the meta EA banner and then explain why those things fit together but everything else doesn’t fit as part of them.
(All that said, I found this post interesting, and I think this sort of mapping seems hard so I’m not saying I’d have done a better job.)

MichaelA 12 Jun 2021 15:33 UTC
2 points
on: Career advising
Wishlist for some heroic editor:
- Tag a bunch of posts
- Expand the entry to say brief things about things like:
  - How useful do various forms of career advising tend to be?
  - What are best practices for career advising?
  - What orgs work in that space?
    E.g., 80k, Animal Advocacy Careers, Probably Good, presumably some others
  - How can one test fit for or build career capital in career advising?
- Add this entry to the Related entries section for some other entries (e.g., 80,000 Hours), and maybe add an internal link to it in the bodies of those entries too

MichaelA 12 Jun 2021 15:29 UTC
2 points
on: Career advising
Possible alternative names:
- career coaching
  - Seems slightly worse to me, since it seems a less intuitive name for this thing
- career advice
  - This seems worse to me; it seems like it’d make the distinction between this and the entry on career choice less clear
- something else?

MichaelA 12 Jun 2021 15:26 UTC
2 points
on: Charter cities
I think ideally this entry would cover special economic zones and seasteading as just as much in-scope as charter cities. I say this because each of those topics plausibly warrant discussion, they’re all similar in some ways, I don’t think there should be 3 entries (one for each), and I don’t see a strong reason why charter cities are especially noteworthy. (I think they’ve been discussed in EA circles more than the other things, but I’m not sure that that’s actually for good reasons; see also.)
So ideally the name would be changed to something that covers all three concepts. But I’m not sure if there’s a good term for that.

MichaelA 12 Jun 2021 15:24 UTC
2 points
on: Charter cities
Prophecy tells that someday some scattered notes shall be planted on this earth.

MichaelA 12 Jun 2021 15:17 UTC
4 points
on: Why EA meta, and the top 3 charity ideas in the space
We have published a summary of the survey, but we only plan on publishing deeper reports on the top ideas we recommend. Due to the lack of preexisting research, we would be less confident in the robustness of the shallow reports. We think it’s quite likely we will find exciting-sounding but ultimately less impactful ideas, and do not want people to found charities based on our reports on non-recommended areas.
I think it’d be reasonable to not publish the shallow reports because of associated time costs, but I’m not sure I really see the logic for not posting due to downside risk.
- I think you could just have strong caveats, clear epistemic statuses, reasoning transparency, etc.
- And then to a decent extent, you can trust readers to update their beliefs and behaviours appropriately.
  - If they update wildly inappropriately, this may also suggest what they would’ve done otherwise isn’t great either (maybe they’re just not great at choosing careers), so the “lost impact” is lower (though actual downsides caused by what they do could still be important).
- I don’t think people will found charities at the drop of a hat—that’s a big commitment, and essentially requires funding or large savings, so they’ll presumably want and have to talk to people for advice, funding, hires, etc.
- Your shallow reports might also suggest why an idea doesn’t seem promising, and there’s at least some chance someone else would’ve spent time thinking about the idea themselves later.
Again, I’m not necessarily advocating you try to publish those shallow reports, nor even necessarily saying I’d read them. I’m just not sure I understand/buy the argument that publication would be net negative due to the chance that (a) the idea is bad, (b) you fail to realise or convey this, and (c) someone actually takes the big step of founding a charity due to this, and this is notably worse than what they would’ve done otherwise.

MichaelA 12 Jun 2021 15:11 UTC
4 points
on: Why EA meta, and the top 3 charity ideas in the space
Thanks, I found this post interesting.
When implementing their career advice program, for example, AAC pre-registered a study to evaluate the effects of career advising calls on animals because of a lack of systematic evidence for this intervention (5). This study would not only help AAC evaluate their impact, but provide valuable data to other EA meta charities.
Yeah, this sounds useful. Currently my independent impression is that it’s weird that EA orgs don’t do (lower-effort) versions that sort of thing more often—e.g., for a subset of applicants to receive advice or go through a program or whatever, randomise who gets it, then send out surveys afterwards to both groups. (I think this has been discussed—maybe including by me? - in various places before, but I can’t remember where.)
But maybe there are good reasons I’m not aware of. And I know EA orgs do often at least do things like sending out surveys, just not necessarily hearing from people they didn’t end up giving the “treatment” to with (for comparison) nor randomising who gets the “treatment”.

MichaelA 12 Jun 2021 14:49 UTC
4 points
on: Propose and vote on potential tags
Update: I’ve now made this entry
career advising or career advice or career coaching or something like that
We already have career choice. But that’s very broad. It seems like it could be useful to have an entry with the more focused scope of things like:
- How useful do various forms of career advising tend to be?
- What are best practices for career advising?
- What orgs work in that space?
  - E.g., 80k, Animal Advocacy Careers, Probably Good, presumably some others
- How can one test fit for or build career capital in career advising?
This would be analogous to how we have an entry for donation choice but also entries for grantmaking, intervention evaluation, and charity evaluation.

MichaelA 12 Jun 2021 14:42 UTC
4 points
in reply to: MichaelA’s comment on: Propose and vote on potential tags
Just discovered Vaidehi made a collection of discussions of constraints in EA, which could be helpful for populating whatever entries get created and maybe for deciding on scopes etc.

MichaelA 12 Jun 2021 14:20 UTC
4 points
on: Propose and vote on potential tags
Charter cities or special economic zones or whatever the best catchall term for those things + seasteading is
From a quick search for “charter cities” on the Forum, I think there aren’t many relevant posts, but there are:
Maybe there are other posts that would come up for “special economic zones” or “seasteading”.
Maybe this is too niche a topic to warrant its own entry, given that we already have entries like global health and development and economic growth?

MichaelA 12 Jun 2021 13:43 UTC
2 points
on: Grantmaking
Random notes on / wishlist for this entry:
- This entry could briefly discuss things like how useful grantmaking is, how to test fit for it, best practices for grantmaking, what people/orgs are involved in grantmaking on EA-related areas
  - I think it should probably list a bunch of grantmaking bodies, like EA Funds, with internal links to their EA Wiki entries where relevant
    It’s possible that those links should also be included in Related entries, but I think there’s a weak policy against including an org tag in a Related entries section unless there’s an unusually good reason (though I can’t remember for sure)
    And I do think that that might “clog up” the Related entries section unnecessarily
- The tag could also cover posts on those things
- I’m not sure if this tag should cover posts that just report on a specific instance of grantmaking, or that just discuss whether specific funding opportunities should receive grants?
  - I weakly lean against
  - I think the entries for donation writeup and donation choice may be sufficient for that?
- If and when an entry on vetting constraints is made, that should be added to Related entries here and vice versa

MichaelA 12 Jun 2021 13:36 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Pablo’s comment on: Propose and vote on potential tags
I think I agree that we should either have three separate entries or one entry covering all three. I’m not sure which of those I lean towards, but maybe very weakly towards the latter?

MichaelA 12 Jun 2021 13:04 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Linch’s comment on: EA Infrastructure Fund: May 2021 grant recommendations
Until a couple years ago, I read a lot of fiction, and also wrote poetry and sometimes short stories and (at least as a kid) had vague but strong ambitions to be a novelist.
I now read roughly a few novels a year, mostly Pratchett. (Most of my “reading time” is now either used for non-fiction or—when it’s close to bedtime for me—comedy podcasts.)

MichaelA 12 Jun 2021 9:47 UTC
4 points
in reply to: Linch’s comment on: EA Infrastructure Fund: May 2021 grant recommendations
(FWIW, I’m almost finished reading Strangers Drowning and currently feel I’ve gotten quite little out of it, and am retroactively surprised by how often it’s recommended in EA circles. But I think I’m in the minority on that.)

MichaelA 12 Jun 2021 7:08 UTC
2 points
in reply to: MichaelA’s comment on: Propose and vote on potential tags
Update: I’ve now made this entry
Grantmaking
Overlaps with EA funding and probably some other entries. But that entry is quite broad, and this entry could also cover things like how useful grantmaking is, how to test fit for it, best practices for grantmaking, etc. (which I’m not sure fit perfectly in EA funding).
Would overlap with vetting constraints if we make that entry (I proposed it elsewhere on this post).

MichaelA 12 Jun 2021 5:57 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Linch’s comment on: Intervention options for improving the EA-aligned research pipeline
I roughly agree, though would also note that the step could be useful by merely speeding up an overdetermined career move, e.g. if Allan would’ve ended up doing similar stuff anyway but only 5 years later.