I work as head of the one on one team for 80,000 Hours and Fund Manager at the Effective Altruism Infrastructure Fund. Previously I worked at the Global Priorities Institute and ran Giving What We Can.
Comments here are my own views only, not my present or past employers’, unless otherwise specified.
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That’s amazing news, thank you for sharing!
Thank you all!
This is wonderful news. Thank you very much for getting that up and running.
Thank you for posting this. It very much speaks to how I’m feeling right now. I’m grateful you’ve expressed and explained it.
Thanks for sharing!
Happy to share! I forgot to say, I think I got this idea from Tara Mac Aulay
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Pretty rarely—just whenever I remember, which is probably only every couple of months
Whenever I feel like it, though most often just after I’ve gone through my other anki decks, which I do around twice a week.
Anki goes up to really long time scales. If it’s a memory you don’t want to see too often you can click ‘easy’, and then its default time sequence will be something like: first day, 5 days later, a month later, a year later.
I also have things in there for which I like seeing them pretty often, like baby photos of my son. It’s not dissimilar to having a photo displayed in the house, except that instead of it being on show all the time it’s brought to your full attention periodically.
Tbc, I’m still a big fan of Lord Martin Rees’ work!
When I read ‘On the Future’ I wasn’t that much of a fan. My memory is pretty hazy of it because I read it a few years ago, but my feeling about it was that it wasn’t very content dense and some of it didn’t seem quite correct to me. I was reading expecting to want to recommend it to others, but actually decidedly preferred the Precipice (and they cover fairly similar things, so I’m unlikely to recommend both). Not sure if others feel that way, but if they do it might contribute to (at least this book) being relatively less mentioned in introductory materials.
This is really sad to hear. Thank you for sharing.
Brenton Mayer runs internal systems at 80k. That basically means operations and impact evaluation, ie the parts that don’t really get visibility or interact with the outside world. He’s been doing that extremely competently for years. Him and his team make it feel easier to work to a high standard (eg through making sure we get more of a sense of how we’re impacting users and setting an ambitious but sustainable culture), keep the lights on (figuratively by fundraising and literally) and make 80k a lovely place to work.
Done
I agree with the premise that it seems great to talk to a broader range of people than we might naturally be tempted to at EAGs!
Personally, I find large informal gatherings pretty intimidating (particularly when sober...). So I prefer getting some randomness by reaching out to some different people for 1on1s than I usually would. I love how Swapcard allows you to select for different things, so you can think about what types of people / interests you don’t get to meet much in EA, and then find people like that and ask if they’d be up for chatting. I find it much less intimidating to talk to people one on one, so I can focus on just getting to know them, rather than balancing whether multiple people are interested in a particular conversation topic.
I’m guessing other people would find it more intimidating to reach out to random people on swapcard than go to a social event. But for those that don’t, it could be worth trying out!
Thirteen years last week, and counting