Hi Kyle! You might be mixing this up with CE’s Incubation Program, which does focus on creating new charities. The Foundation Program does not, as is explained in the write-up linked above.
CE is very prolific on the Forum lately so maybe you’ve seen of their other posts?
[Disclaimer: I’ve worked with CE before and am a current Incubatee, but have never done any work on the Foundations Program. Send me a DM if you want me to put you in touch with some of the people who have]
Hi Lizka! I’m a current Incubatee, but applied back in Spring 2022, so I do fall into this group Ula is describing. Feel free to DM me with any questions you have!
You can find CE’s Research Report here: https://3394c0c6-1f1a-4f86-a2db-df07ca1e24b2.filesusr.com/ugd/26c75f_2081c09f8f20405e89105ac88c01ec6d.pdf
Exciting, thanks for sharing!
(Minor nitpick: the CEA travel grant policy Doc you link to is the old one, which has since been updated, so you might wanna change that!)
Adding some data to this:
When I sent an email to the email address mentioned above, I received a well-meaning automated reply.
However, it contained the following part, which I don’t think we should lead with:
In the meantime, why not check out some fun facts about Effective Altruism? Did you know that by donating to charity, you can save a life for as little as $3.33? Or that some of the most effective ways to make a positive impact are also some of the most unexpected?
https://www.effectivealtruism.org/articles/introduction-to-effective-altruism
This is inaccurate at best and deceiving and harmful at worst—and it’s even debunked by the very link you follow this up with![1]
The CEA website mentions the more commonly used number of 5,500$.
Both OpenAI and DeepMind are hiring for software engineers right now, as per their website!
My understanding is that it’s not that she never wants to do damage control and crisis management—but that she is tired of constantly having to do it and the fact that it crowds out the other aspects of EA and Community-Building
Hi Tim! Former teacher here. I have taught some—but very little - EA stuff at high school, and would be happy to share my limited experience.
More importantly, if you ever feel like you’d benefit from talking to a fellow European ex-teacher about a career pivot, definitely reach out! I’m currently doing some EA research, a bunch of independent projects and will go through the CE Incubation Program in a few weeks (as a surprising amount of ex-educators have).
(You might think this is not important right now since you’ve committed to another year of teaching, but if you knew that your long-term career plan was to become an entrepreneur, an academic, a project manager, community-builder, I would probably prioritize getting some experience doing these things inside or outside the classroom, rather than “teaching EA”.)
Is using this type of technology already commonplace in EA Org’s offices and Co-working spaces? If not, this might be a great (and even more cost-effective) place to pilot this idea!
Agreed on the feedback part, but pretty unsure how to solve this without bringing on one person for a few hundred hours to give individual feedback.
Regarding the hours of productivity lost: I’m not sure about the counterfactual, since CERI applicants are mostly students.
I think my main point however is this: being forced to actually write a proposal for that vague research idea that has been floating around in your head seems pretty valuable to me whether you get feedback or not. I, for example, spent quite a few hours just digging through research agendas in different x-risk fields to make sure I’m not just riding my hobby horse, but that my research actually fills some gap. So, even if I hadn’t been accepted, I would probably have considered this “time well spent” rather than “lost productivity”.
(Disclaimer that I might be biased here though—motivated reasoning/avoiding cognitive dissonance etc.)
In this case, if I had to choose between
A) attending an event with nicer background music + cocktails and
B) one that doesn’t seem “rehearsed”
I’d probably end up choosing the latter...
I think this is highly dependent on the tasks that are required of applicants! I know e.g. Charity Entrepreneurship has thought a lot about how to make the application process, work tests etc. more valuable for applicants. And iirc, I found the CERI Process quite helpful in sharpening my research focus and organizing my thoughts around x-risk.
(An entirely different question is whether long decision timelines negatively affect applicants’ options or result in applicants withdrawing/going with their second best option, but I’m not sure this happened a lot. There was also a post recently about the benefits of opening applications sooner to be able to compete with non-EA summer internships/Fellowships.)
SBF is watching this thread closely
I want to push back against the question itself—I think it might be a false dichotomy. I understand we like to put people into boxes, but it is likely things are more complex than that. For example, being a naive utilitarian and being a sociopath is not mutually exclusive, or he could be neither. I would like an honest discussion about what happened to consider these possibilities, too.
After receiving more applications than expected, we have decided to open our application form for 6 more days—the new deadline is November 7th. (Applications that have been submitted by the original deadline will be notified of the outcome of their application within the next few days.)
They now do! :)
Hi! Thanks for this. The links to the jobs @ Forethought don’t seem to work (for me on my phone, at least.)
My impression is that if people work on weekends or after hours, it’s often because they want to—I personally find it very exciting and gratifying to be able to contribute to other EA projects in my free time and interact with so many altruistic, like-minded people! I have rarely heard of this being a hard expectation though.
If anything, the EA community is more encouraging of people taking time off and taking care of their mental health because we want people to have more impact in the long-run rather than have burnout and basically 0 impact after that.
Lastly, my sense is this depends heavily on the role. As a charity entrepreneur, you might need to work longer hours especially in the beginning, but there are plenty of “normal jobs” out there where time is tracked and overtime is the exception, not the rule. :)
P. S. : Reach out to me if you want to chat about this or would like some support. ❤️