Michelle_Hutchinson

• Michelle_Hutchinson 10 Apr 2019 15:56 UTC

  11 points

  in reply to: Jonas Vollmer's comment on: Long Term Fu­ture Fund: April 2019 grant decisions

  This sounds pretty sen­si­ble to me. On the other hand, if peo­ple are wor­ried about it be­ing harder for peo­ple who are already less plugged in to net­works to get fund­ing, you might not want an ad­di­tional di­men­sion on which these harder-to-eval­u­ate grants could lose out com­pared to eas­ier to eval­u­ate ones (where the lat­ter end up hav­ing a lower min­i­mum thresh­old).

  It also might cre­ate quite a bit of ex­tra over­head for granters hav­ing to de­cide the op­por­tu­nity cost case by case, which could re­duce the num­ber of grants they can make, or again push to­wards eas­ier to eval­u­ate ones.

• Michelle_Hutchinson 10 Apr 2019 14:02 UTC

  42 points

  in reply to: Ben_Kuhn's comment on: Long Term Fu­ture Fund: April 2019 grant decisions

  I strongly agree with this. EA funds seemed to have a tough time find­ing grant mak­ers who were both qual­ified and had suffi­cient time, and I would ex­pect that to be partly be­cause of the harsh on­line en­vi­ron­ment pre­vi­ous grant mak­ers faced. The cur­rent team seems to have im­pres­sively ad­dressed the wor­ries peo­ple had in terms of donat­ing to smaller and more spec­u­la­tive pro­jects, and pro­vid­ing de­tailed write-ups on them. I imag­ine that in depth, harsh at­tacks on each grant de­ci­sion will make it still harder to re­cruit great peo­ple for these com­mit­tees, and mean those serv­ing on them are likely to step down sooner. That’s not to say we shouldn’t be dis­cussing the grants—pre­sum­ably it’s use­ful for the com­mit­tee to hear other peo­ple’s views on the grants to get more in­for­ma­tion about them. But fol­low­ing Ben’s sug­ges­tions seems cru­cial to EA funds con­tin­u­ing to be a use­ful way of donat­ing into the fu­ture. In ad­di­tion, to try to en­gage more in col­lab­o­ra­tive truth­seek­ing rather than ad­ver­sar­ial de­bate, we might try to:

  • Fo­cus on con­struc­tive in­for­ma­tion /​ sug­ges­tions for fu­ture grants rather than go­ing into depth on what’s wrong with grants already given.

  • Spend at least as much time de­scribing which grants you think are good and how, so that they can be built on, as on things you dis­agree with.

• Michelle_Hutchinson 9 Apr 2019 14:00 UTC

  5 points

  on: Why an­i­mal char­i­ties are much more effec­tive than hu­man ones

  You might also want to take longer-run effects into ac­count, as is dis­cussed in this ar­ti­cle: http://​​globalpri­ori­tiespro­ject.org/​​2014/​​06/​​hu­man-and-an­i­mal-in­ter­ven­tions/​​

• Michelle_Hutchinson 26 Mar 2019 17:23 UTC

  29 points

  in reply to: richard_ngo's comment on: The ca­reer and the community

  I ac­tu­ally don’t agree that the ma­jor­ity of of roles for our first 6 pri­or­ity paths are ‘within the EA bub­ble’: my view is that this is only true of ‘work­ing in EA or­gani­sa­tions’ and ‘op­er­a­tions man­age­ment in EA or­gani­sa­tions’. As a cou­ple of ex­am­ples: ‘AI policy re­search and im­ple­men­ta­tion’ is, as you in­di­cate, some­thing that could be done at places like FHI or CSET. But it might also mean join­ing a think tank like the Cen­ter for Amer­i­can Se­cu­rity, the Belfer Cen­ter or RAND; or it could mean join­ing a gov­ern­ment de­part­ment. EA orgs are pretty clearly the minor­ity in both our older and newer ar­ti­cles on AI policy. ‘Global pri­ori­ties re­searcher’ in academia could be done at GPI (where I used to work), but could also be done as an in­de­pen­dent aca­demic, whether that sim­ply means writ­ing pa­pers on rele­vant top­ics, or join­ing/​build­ing a re­search group like the In­sti­tute for Fu­ture Stud­ies (https://​www.iffs.se/​en/​) in Stock­holm.

  One thing that could be go­ing on here is that the roles peo­ple in the EA com­mu­nity hear about within a pri­or­ity path are skewed to­wards those at EA orgs. The job board is prob­a­bly bet­ter than what peo­ple hear about by word of mouth in the com­mu­nity, but it still suffers from the same skew—which we’d like to work to­wards re­duc­ing.

• Michelle_Hutchinson 24 Mar 2019 12:06 UTC

  12 points

  on: A guide to im­prov­ing your odds at get­ting a job in EA

  Thanks for all these use­ful tips Joey. Some­thing I wanted to dis­agree with you on—the idea that it’s best only to ap­ply for a cou­ple of or­gani­sa­tions /​ jobs. In my ex­pe­rience, most or­gani­sa­tions aren’t put off by an ap­pli­cant also look­ing into work­ing at a broad range of other places. That makes sense to me for a cou­ple of rea­sons: there are a huge num­ber of very high im­pact roles out there and it’s re­ally tough to tell which are the very most high im­pact; and as an in­di­vi­d­ual it’s hard to know which job you’re go­ing to be best suited for and so it makes sense to ap­ply broadly.

  I think the idea that it’s sen­si­ble to ap­ply broadly both holds in the sense of ap­ply­ing for many differ­ent roles at EA or­gani­sa­tions, but also in the sense of ap­ply­ing for jobs out­side of EA or­gani­sa­tions. There are ul­ti­mately very few jobs at EA or­gani­sa­tions, so it’s un­likely any­one should be ex­clu­sively ap­ply­ing for those.

• Michelle_Hutchinson 23 Mar 2019 21:54 UTC

  58 points

  on: The ca­reer and the community

  [I work for 80,000 Hours]

  Thanks for your thoughts. I’m afraid I won’t be able to ad­dress ev­ery­thing, but I wanted to share a few con­sid­er­a­tions.

  There were a few points here I par­tic­u­larly liked:

  • Peo­ple should be think­ing about the im­pact they can have in their ca­reer over the pe­riod of decades, rather than just the next year or so. This seems re­ally use­ful to high­light, be­cause it’s pretty difficult to keep in mind, par­tic­u­larly early on in your ca­reer.

  • We need to avoid a sense in the com­mu­nity that ‘di­rect work’ means ‘work in EA or­gani­sa­tions’: the vast ma­jor­ity of the most im­pact­ful roles in the world are out­side EA or­gani­sa­tions—whether in gov­ern­ment, academia, non-prof­its or com­pa­nies.

  • The paths to these roles are very of­ten go­ing to be long, and in­volve build­ing up skills, cred­i­bil­ity/​cre­den­tials and a net­work.

  • I agree that the phrase ‘skill bot­tle­neck’ might fail to ad­e­quately cap­ture re­sources like cre­den­tials and net­works but we think that these forms of ca­reer cap­i­tal are as im­por­tant as spe­cific skills. How­ever, we think that they are most use­ful when they are rea­son­ably rele­vant to a pri­or­ity path. For ex­am­ple, we think Ja­son Ma­theny’s ca­reer cap­i­tal is so valuable largely be­cause his net­work and cre­den­tials were in na­tional se­cu­rity, in­tel­li­gence, U.S. policy, and emerg­ing tech­nol­ogy—ar­eas we think are some of the most rele­vant to our pri­or­ity prob­lems. If he had worked at a man­age­ment con­sult­ing firm or in cor­po­rate law he would still have ac­quired gen­er­ally im­pres­sive net­works and pres­tige but couldn’t have founded CSET.

  There are a few things I dis­agree with:

  You seem to be fairly pos­i­tive about pretty broad cap­i­tal build­ing (eg work­ing at McKinsey). While we used to recom­mend work­ing in con­sult­ing early in peo­ple’s ca­reers, we’ve up­dated pretty sub­stan­tially away from that in favour of tak­ing a more di­rected ap­proach to your ca­reer. The idea is to try to find the spe­cific area you think you think is most suited to you and where you’ll have the most im­pact, and then to try out roles di­rectly rele­vant to that. That’s not to say, of course, that it will be clear what type of role you should pur­sue, but rather that it seems worth think­ing about which types of role seem best suited to you, and then try­ing out things of that type. Often, peo­ple who are able to ac­quire pres­ti­gious gen­er­al­ist jobs (like McKinsey) are able to ac­quire more use­ful tar­geted jobs that would be nearly as good of a cre­den­tial. For ex­am­ple, if you think you might be in­ter­ested go­ing into policy, it is prob­a­bly bet­ter to take a job at a top think tank (es­pe­cially if you can do work on a topic that’s rele­vant to one of our pri­or­ity prob­lem such as na­tional se­cu­rity or emerg­ing tech­nol­ogy policy) than to do some­thing like man­age­ment con­sult­ing. The former has nearly as much gen­eral pres­tige, but has much more in­for­ma­tion value to help you de­cide whether to pur­sue policy, and will al­low you to build up a net­work, knowl­edge (in­clud­ing tacit knowl­edge), and skills which are more rele­vant to roles in pri­or­ity ar­eas that you might aim for later in your ca­reer. One heuris­tic we some­times use to com­pare the ca­reer cap­i­tal of two op­por­tu­ni­ties is to ask in which op­tion you’d ex­pect your ca­reer to be more ad­vanced in a pri­or­ity path 5-10 years down the line. It’s some­times the case that spend­ing years get­ting broad ca­reer cap­i­tal and then shift­ing into a rele­vant area will progress you faster than ac­quiring more tar­geted ca­reer cap­i­tal but in our ex­pe­rience, nar­row ca­reer cap­i­tal wins out more of­ten.

  I agree that it’s re­ally im­por­tant for peo­ple to find jobs that truly in­ter­est them and which they can ex­cel at. Hav­ing said that, I’m not that keen on the ad­vice to start your ca­reer de­ci­sion with what most fas­ci­nates you. Per­son­ally, I haven’t found it ob­vi­ous what I’ll find in­ter­est­ing un­til I try it, which makes the ad­vice not that ac­tion guid­ing. More im­por­tantly, in or­der to help oth­ers as much as we can, we re­ally need to both work on the world’s most press­ing prob­lems and find what in­puts are most needed in or­der to make progress on them. While this will de­scribe a huge range of roles in a wide va­ri­ety of ar­eas, it will still be the minor­ity of jobs. That makes me think it’s bet­ter to ap­proach ca­reer de­ci­sions by first think­ing through what prob­lems in the world you think most need solv­ing and what the biggest bot­tle­necks to them be­ing solved are, fol­lowed by which of those tasks seem in­ter­est­ing and ap­peal­ing to you, rather than start­ing with the ques­tion of which jobs seem most in­ter­est­ing and ap­peal­ing.

  I’m a lit­tle wor­ried that peo­ple will take away the mes­sage from your piece that they shouldn’t ap­ply to EA or­gani­sa­tions early in their ca­reers, or should turn down a job there if offered one. Like I said—the vast ma­jor­ity of the high­est im­pact roles will be out­side EA or­gani­sa­tions, and of course there’ll be many peo­ple who are bet­ter suited to work el­se­where. But it still seems to be the case that or­gani­sa­tions like the Open Philan­thropy Pro­ject and GiveWell are oc­ca­sion­ally in­ter­ested in hiring peo­ple 0-2 years out of uni­ver­sity. And while there seem to be some peo­ple to whom work­ing at EA or­gani­sa­tions seems more ap­peal­ing than it should, there are also many peo­ple for whom it seems less ap­peal­ing or cog­ni­tively available than it should. For ex­am­ple, while the peo­ple on this fo­rum are likely to be very in­clined to ap­ply for jobs at EA or­gani­sa­tions, many of the peo­ple I talk to in coach­ing don’t know that much about var­i­ous EA or­gani­sa­tions and why they might be good places to work.

  I think the thing to bear in mind is that it’s im­por­tant not only to ap­ply for jobs at EA or­gani­sa­tions. The to­tal num­ber of jobs ad­ver­tised at EA or­gani­sa­tions at any one time is only small, and new grad­u­ates should ex­pect to ap­ply to tens of jobs be­fore get­ting one. Typ­i­cally, the cost of ap­ply­ing to a valuable di­rect work job is fairly small rel­a­tive to the benefit if it turns out you learn that you’re already in a po­si­tion to start mak­ing large con­tri­bu­tions to a pri­or­ity area, as long as you’re at the same time ap­ply­ing to jobs that would help you gen­er­ate ca­reer cap­i­tal.

  Un­for­tu­nately, as you say, it seems very difficult to con­vey ac­cu­rate im­pres­sions—whether about how hard it is to get into var­i­ous ar­eas, or what kind of skill bot­tle­necks we cur­rently think there are. I think this is in part due to peo­ple hav­ing such differ­ent start­ing points. I both come across peo­ple who had the im­pres­sion that it was easy to get into AI safety or EA or­gani­sa­tions and then strug­gled to do so, and peo­ple who thought it was so com­pet­i­tive there was no point in them even try­ing who (when strongly en­couraged to do so) ended up ex­cel­ling. We’re hop­ing that fo­cus­ing more on the long-form ma­te­rial like the pod­cast will help to get a more nu­anced pic­ture across for peo­ple com­ing from differ­ent start­ing points.

• Michelle_Hutchinson 6 Mar 2019 9:58 UTC

  12 points

  in reply to: vaidehi_agarwalla's comment on: After one year of ap­ply­ing for EA jobs: It is re­ally, re­ally hard to get hired by an EA organisation

  I’m not sure if this is the kind of place you were think­ing, but the EA work club is linked to on the 80,000 Hours Job Board page (https://​80000hours.org/​job-board/​) - at the bot­tom un­der ‘Other places to find va­can­cies’

• Michelle_Hutchinson 2 Mar 2019 22:10 UTC

  3 points

  on: Lat­est Re­search and Up­dates for Fe­bru­ary 2019

  Love the good news roundup!

• Michelle_Hutchinson 28 Feb 2019 17:35 UTC

  42 points

  in reply to: Jon_Behar's comment on: After one year of ap­ply­ing for EA jobs: It is re­ally, re­ally hard to get hired by an EA organisation

  There ac­tu­ally is a list­ing like this: the EA Work Club (https://​ea­work.club/​). Although it’s aiming at EA com­mu­nity jobs, rather than all pos­si­ble jobs which could be defined as EA, which is maybe what you were af­ter.

• Michelle_Hutchinson 9 Feb 2019 18:35 UTC

  6 points

  on: EA grants available to in­di­vi­d­u­als (cross­post from LessWrong)

  Let’s Fund has re­cently set up to try to get fund­ing for ne­glected and spec­u­late pro­jects in effec­tive al­tru­ism. They seem to par­tic­u­larly fo­cus on re­search. It could be worth reach­ing out to them about whether your pro­ject is the kind they’d be in­ter­ested in fundrais­ing for.

• Michelle_Hutchinson 3 Feb 2019 20:33 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: thecommexokid's comment on: Si­mul­ta­neous Shortage and Oversupply

  In case you haven’t come across it yet, the 80,000 Hours job board has a filter for jobs which can be done re­motely, which you might find use­ful.

• Michelle_Hutchinson 10 Dec 2018 22:38 UTC

  11 points

  on: Re­quest­ing com­mu­nity in­put on the up­com­ing EA Pro­jects Platform

  It’s always great to see in­ter­est­ing new pro­jects like this to im­prove the EA com­mu­nity! There might also be learn­ings for the pro­ject from EA Ven­tures which tried to co­or­di­nate be­tween spec­u­la­tive EA pro­jects and fun­ders.

• Michelle_Hutchinson 24 Nov 2018 12:25 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: guzey's comment on: William MacAskill mis­rep­re­sents much of the ev­i­dence un­der­ly­ing his key ar­gu­ments in “Do­ing Good Bet­ter”

  That’s what I meant by ‘though it turns out to be cor­rect’. Sorry for be­ing un­clear.

• Michelle_Hutchinson 24 Nov 2018 11:31 UTC

  6 points

  in reply to: smithee's comment on: William MacAskill mis­rep­re­sents much of the ev­i­dence un­der­ly­ing his key ar­gu­ments in “Do­ing Good Bet­ter”

  I didn’t down­vote the com­ment, but it did seem a lit­tle harsh to me. I can eas­ily imag­ine be­ing for­warded a draft ar­ti­cle, and read­ing the text the per­son for­ward­ing wrote, then look­ing at the draft, with­out read­ing the text in the email they were origi­nally sent. (Hence miss­ing text say­ing the draft was sup­posed to be con­fi­den­tial.) As­sum­ing that Will read the part say­ing it was con­fi­den­tial seemed un­char­i­ta­ble to me (though it turns out to be cor­rect). That seemed in sur­pris­ing con­trast to the un­der­stand­ing at­ti­tude taken to Ju­lia’s mis­take.

• Michelle_Hutchinson 24 Nov 2018 11:13 UTC

  10 points

  on: Guide to Suc­cess­ful Com­mu­nity 1-1s

  Thanks, this seems like a re­ally use­ful guide!

  One thing I find im­por­tant in con­ver­sa­tions, par­tic­u­larly if I’m do­ing them back to back, is writ­ing down ac­tion points (eg peo­ple I want to in­tro­duce them to) as I go. Peo­ple some­times think it’s rude to do this on a phone, so prob­a­bly hav­ing a note book with you is the best ap­proach.

  Some­thing I strug­gle with is mak­ing sure that I build up enough rap­port with a per­son fast that they will feel com­fortable push­ing back on things, and in par­tic­u­lar bring­ing up more so­cially awk­ward con­sid­er­a­tions (eg I’ve heard that effec­tive al­tru­ists don’t think it’s par­tic­u­larly im­pact­ful to get a job do­ing x but I’ve been work­ing to­wards that goal for years, and hate the idea of never get­ting to do it). I’ve found it pretty use­ful watch­ing other peo­ple who are re­ally good at get­ting on with peo­ple meet new peo­ple, and see­ing what they do that makes peo­ple feel quickly at ease. Be­cause I know this is a weak spot of mine, I try af­ter some of my 1-1 con­ver­sa­tions to think through whether there was any­thing in par­tic­u­lar that went well/​badly on this di­men­sion (I waited a while for them to re­spond af­ter say­ing y, rather than bul­l­doz­er­ing on...; when I pushed back on z I ac­ci­den­tally got into ‘philos­o­phy de­bate’ mode rather than friendly dis­cus­sion mode). I also find read­ing books that get me to think through these kinds of dy­nam­ics use­ful: I’ve found ‘Charisma Myth’ use­ful enough to have read it a cou­ple of times, and right now I’m read­ing ‘Never Split the Differ­ence’. (A lot of these kinds of books sound like they’ll be about get­ting your own way and per­suad­ing peo­ple into things they don’t want to do, but they ac­tu­ally spend most of their time on how to make sure you prop­erly hear and un­der­stand the per­son you’re talk­ing to, and help them feel at ease.)

• Michelle_Hutchinson 21 Nov 2018 11:45 UTC

  18 points

  in reply to: Denise_Melchin's comment on: Take­aways from EAF’s Hiring Round

  This seems to be some­thing that varies a lot by field. In aca­demic jobs (and PhD ap­pli­ca­tions), it’s ab­solutely stan­dard to ask for refer­ences in the first round of ap­pli­ca­tions, and to ask for as many as 3. It’s a re­ally use­ful part of the pro­cess, and since aca­demics know that, they don’t be­grudge writ­ing refer­ences fairly fre­quently.

  Writ­ing fre­quent refer­ences in academia might be a bit eas­ier than when peo­ple are ap­ply­ing for other types of jobs: a su­per­vi­sor can sim­ply have a let­ter on file for a past stu­dent say­ing how good they are at re­search and send that out each time they’re asked for a refer­ence. Another thing which might con­tribute to academia us­ing refer­ences more is it be­ing a very com­pet­i­tive field, where large re­turns are ex­pected from differ­en­ti­at­ing be­tween the very best can­di­date and the next best. As an em­ployer, I’ve found refer­ences very helpful. So if we ex­pect EA orgs to have com­pet­i­tive hiring rounds where there are large re­turns on find­ing the best can­di­date, it could be worth our spend­ing more time writ­ing/​giv­ing refer­ences than is typ­i­cal.

  I find it difficult to gauge how off-putting ask­ing for refer­ences early would be for the typ­i­cal can­di­date. In my last job ap­pli­ca­tion, I gave a num­ber of refer­ees, some of whom were con­tacted at the time of my trial, and I felt fine about that—but that could be be­cause I’m used to academia, or be­cause my refer­ees were in the EA com­mu­nity and so I knew they would value the org I was ap­ply­ing for mak­ing the right hiring de­ci­sion, rather than ex­pe­rience giv­ing a refer­ence as an un­due bur­den.

  I would guess the most im­por­tant in ask­ing for refer­ences early is be­ing will­ing to ac­cept not get­ting a refer­ences from cur­rent em­ploy­ers /​ col­leagues, since if you don’t know whether you have a job offer you’re of­ten not go­ing to want your cur­rent em­ployer to know you’re ap­ply­ing for other jobs.

• Michelle_Hutchinson 20 Nov 2018 15:45 UTC

  5 points

  in reply to: aarongertler's comment on: Take­aways from EAF’s Hiring Round

  My im­pres­sion is that while speci­fi­cally *IQ* tests in hiring are re­stricted in the US, many of the stan­dard hiring tests used there (eg Won­der­lic https://​​www.won­der­lic.com/​​) are ba­si­cally try­ing to get at GMA. So I wouldn’t say the out­side view was that test­ing for GMA was bad (though I don’t know what pro­por­tion of em­ploy­ers use such tests).

• Michelle_Hutchinson 18 Nov 2018 0:08 UTC

  6 points

  in reply to: Gregory_Lewis's comment on: William MacAskill mis­rep­re­sents much of the ev­i­dence un­der­ly­ing his key ar­gu­ments in “Do­ing Good Bet­ter”

  I agree with this take on the com­ment as it’s liter­ally writ­ten. I think there’s a chance that Siebe meant ‘writ­ten in bad faith’ as some­thing more like ‘writ­ten with less at­ten­tion to de­tail than it could have been’, which seems like a very rea­son­able con­clu­sion to come to.

  (I just wanted to add a pos­si­bly more char­i­ta­ble in­ter­pre­ta­tion, since oth­er­wise the de­scrip­tion of why the com­ment is un­helpful might seem a lit­tle harsh)

Keep­ing Ab­solutes in Mind

• Michelle_Hutchinson 12 Oct 2018 8:55 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Peter_Hurford's comment on: Sur­vey of EA org lead­ers about what skills and ex­pe­rience they most need, their staff/​dona­tions trade-offs, prob­lem pri­ori­ti­sa­tion, and more.

  I don’t know how oth­ers an­swered this ques­tion, but per­son­ally I didn’t an­swer for how good I thought the last grants were to each other (ie, I wasn’t com­par­ing CfAR/​MIRI to Founders Pledge) or in ex­pec­ta­tion of chang­over in grant maker. I was think­ing about some­thing like whether I preferred fund­ing over the next 5 years to go to or­gani­sa­tions which fo­cused on the far fu­ture vs com­mu­nity build­ing, know­ing that these might or might not con­verge. I’d ex­pect over that pe­riod a bunch of things to come up that we don’t yet know about (in the same way that BERI did a year or so ago).