I work as an Advisor for 80,000 Hours, before which I worked at the Global Priorities Institute and ran Giving What We Can.
Michelle_Hutchinson
Karma: 3,833
Thank you for the recommendation!
Thanks for sharing! Your experience about losing interest in sports is really interesting. I wonder whether part of what’s going on is my baby still only being 10 months. I look forward to knowing what the coming years will bring!
This sounds so intense. I have no idea how you guys handled not taking leave while looking after a newborn. Great work getting through all that!
How frustrating to not be able to get back to breastfeeding when she was hoping to and doing a bunch of pumping instead.
Thanks for sharing your experience.
Yes, these seem like reasonable things to ask for (though I don’t know feel like I have enough information to know if they’d be right to comply with the request) - emailing GW about them seem like sensible things to do. It seems like quite an escalation of the request to write a blog post in this vein though.
I very much agree with the sentiment that our community should aim to be both honest and kind, and that this forum is a good place to discuss how we can work together to better embody those ideals. But this post strikes me as being itself deeply unkind. It engages with a blog post written in 2007 in a way which will predictably lead readers to infer that as far as public evidence goes, this is still Holden’s view / style. On the contrary, GiveWell’s and OpenPhil’s styles are now wildly different from this post. The helpful points in your post could surely have been made without going back to a nearly 15 year old blog post to call it disingenuous, unkind, condescending and unprofessional, amongst other things.
I think part of being kind in feedback is being somewhat sparing with it. It seems preferable to critique people for mistakes they still seem to be making and can fix going forward, rather than ones made many years ago which they’re likely already aware of as mistakes.
Parenting: Things I wish I could tell my past self
Thanks for writing these out. I don’t remember people having cancelled calendly times on me, so I assume it hasn’t happened at a higher rate than other types of meetings. Really useful to know that that’s typically the case, since it understandably puts people off them.
FWIW, I do have this kind of tech aversion. Not to calendly, which I use a lot, but to other similar (and similarly easy to use) interfaces.
Asking for advice
I agree that setting up new orgs is really challenging. I think this maybe oversells the difficulty of getting buy in from existing orgs in a way that might unduly put people off trying to set up new projects though.
My main experience with this is setting up the Global Priorities Institute. GPI does fairly different work from other EA orgs (though some overlap with FHI), and is much more foundational/theoretic than typical ones. You might expect that to get extra push back from EAs, given that the theory of change is of necessity less direct than for orgs like openphil. I was in the fortunate position of already working with CEA, which ofc made things easier. And getting funding from OpenPhil was definitely a long process. But I actually found it really helpful. The kind of docs etc they asked for were ones that it was useful for us to produce (for example pinning down our vision going forward, including milestones that would indicate we were or weren’t on track), and their comments on our strategy and work was helpful for improving them.
I think some things that helped, and that others might find useful, were:
Doing a bunch of consultation early on in the process. That improved the idea and the project from the start, and (I expect) meant that others who I hoped would support the project had a better sense of what it was trying to achieve, and that we would be open and responsive to their feedback. This latter seems like it could go some way to allaying people’s worries about new projects, by giving people a sense that if they see a project going wrong in a way they think could end up net negative, the people running it will be keen to hear that and to pivot.
For docs I sent people asking for input, spending time to make sure they were as concise and clear as possible. I find this pretty challenging, and definitely more time consuming than writing longer docs. But it really increases people’s willingness to give comments . I also think it can improve their understanding of the project (because they get a better snapshot for a given time reading) and therefore the usefulness of comments.
Linked to the above, asking for help from people in a really targeted way: trying to find the people who would be most helpful for answering specific questions and improving specific aspects of the project, and then making concrete asks which made clear why they in particular would be helpful for answering this. Using that approach, I was surprised how helpful total strangers were (though this may be partly because academics are used to collaborating with strangers, so are particularly helpful). I think that also had useful knock on effects, because others were happy we were getting (and acting on!) advice from experts.
Something I still find hard, but am trying to do more in my current role, is get input and advice from people who are sceptical as well as those who are broadly supportive. It seems useful to try to really flesh out the strongest versions of concerns with your project, and how to mitigate those. It also seems likely to increase buy in for your project because it shows you’re keen to consider different worldviews and to act on rather than minimise concerns.
Thanks for this post! I think I would really have benefited from hearing something like this while I was at school / university. There were pretty long holidays during university which I didn’t really use productively. In particular, I think I would have benefited from:
Trying out some pretty different types of things. I was really all in on studying, and didn’t get a sense of what it was like to work at different jobs, and what types of day to day I liked and didn’t like.
Some more sense of urgency. I ended up doing a masters and phd − 10 years in academia—without planning to go into academia long term. I enjoyed it, and maybe I’d have decided to do that anyway. But I was really doing it because in each case it felt like a natural and pleasant step, rather than because it was likely to take me where I ultimately wanted to go.
Practice at putting myself out there. I’m naturally pretty shy and underconfident, so things like reaching out to strangers feels daunting. It’s taken me a while to get to the point where I’m now pretty happy to apply for things or to reach out to strangers to ask for advice. I think I’d have benefited from doing a bunch of this earlier on and realising that actually other people are really happy to help, and that applying for things and being rejected isn’t the end of the world.
I agree that the cause prioritisation work we need to do now is far harder than the work we were doing ten years ago. I think AI Impacts provides an interesting illustration of that: It was initially set up essentially as a cause prioritisation org. But in doing that work it became clear that whereas in comparing between different global development interventions there was a large published literature to build on, when trying to compare work on AI to other areas, and compare interventions within AI safety, there was far less to go on. That led to the conclusion that the work they should do first was get a better grasp on questions like ‘how fast will AI likely develop, and how discontinuously?’.
I think another thing going on is that the stakes have become higher. When Giving What We Can first started publishing recommendations eg comparing between donating to education or deworming, we only had ~30 members. That’s a lot of money over people’s lifetimes, but it’s nowhere near the resources the EA movement now commands. The huge increase in resources to allocate makes it more worth doing the foundational work that groups like AI Impacts do, and also the theoretic work GPI does. I think that makes it look like there’s less work being done, because there are way fewer actionable results per hour spent.
So well written!
Thanks, this kind of description of your reaction is really useful for helping calibrate what work people find most helpful and therefore what to prioritise in future.
I’m just speculating, but I read the claim in the post to be: There’s not much discussion / active work in EA on how to improve / spin up the physical manufacture and distribution of physical goods beyond donating money to existing organisations. GiveWell’s recommendations and the talks given by AMF/SCI are good examples of EAs noticing others doing important work with physical objects who need money, and trying to direct money to them. But there’s much on how to become excellent at doing the logistical work involved, or go further and improve the way the logistics is done.
That doesn’t seem right—since this comment was made, Holly’s gone from being EA London strategy director to not really identifying with EA, which is more like the 5% per year.
I’m not so convinced on this. I think the framing of ‘this was the founding team’ was a little misleading: in 2011 all of us were volunteers and students. The lower bar for doing ~5 hours a week of volunteering for EA for ~1 year. Obviously students are typically in a uniquely good position for having time to volunteer. But it’s not clear all the people on this list had uniquely large amounts of power. Also, I think situational effects were still strong: I felt it made a huge difference to what I did that I made a few friends who were very altruistic and had good ideas of how to put that into practice. I don’t think we can assume that all of us on this list would have displayed similarly strong effective altruist inclinations without having met others in the group.
Some may also have started off longtermist without that being obvious—I knew I was a total utilitarian and cared about the long run future from ~2009, but didn’t feel like I knew how to act on that until much later. So I guess from the outside my views may look like they changed over the last couple of years in a way they didn’t.
Here is the podcast episode I mentioned.
This looks great, thank you!