Rob Gledhill

Karma: 497

Rob Gledhill 14 Dec 2023 18:31 UTC
31 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Jason’s comment on: EV updates: FTX settlement and the future of EV
The Charity commission didn’t encourage us to offboard projects, and we aren’t off-boarding projects because of anything that we anticipate the Charity Commission might do.

Rob Gledhill 31 Aug 2023 15:29 UTC
18 points
11 ∶ 1
on: Rob Gledhill’s Quick takes
I’ve heard people express the idea that top of funnel community building is not worth the effort, as EA roles often get 100+ applicants.
I think this is misguided. Great applicants may get a job after only a few applications. Poor applicants may apply to many many jobs without getting a job. As a result you should expect poor applicants to be disproportionately well represented in the applicant pool—hence the pure number of applicants isn’t that informative. This point is weakened by recruitment systems being imperfect, but as long as you believe recruitment systems have some ability to select people, then I think this take holds.
I’m really only making a claim about a specific argument, not whether or not top of funnel community building is a good idea on the margin.

H/T Amarins for nudging me to post this
What links here?
- AnonymousTurtle's comment on AMA: Six Open Philanthropy staffers discuss OP’s new GCR hiring round by Open Philanthropy (21 Oct 2023 17:06 UTC; 2 points)

Rob Gledhill 5 Jul 2023 20:53 UTC
3 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: Milena Canzler’s comment on: Why EA Community building
I think that’s the first time I’ve seen this written as clearly as here, and I don’t really like it or agree
Apologies, I think I should be clear that when I say “the messaging changed” I’m just describing what I believed happened, not that I think it was a good thing. I agree that some people aren’t interested in AIS, or aren’t the right fit, but can still make the world substantially better. I do however think that we should openly say “we think AIS is an important cause area” and should spend less time arguing why that isn’t a weird thing to think.
I also get the impression that you forget to mention the value of community for keeping strong values, and sticking to your plan
I agree that this is a value of community building, but it seems similarly relevant for explicitly longtermist community building and broad EA community building?

Rob Gledhill 20 Jun 2023 20:56 UTC
5 points
1 ∶ 1
in reply to: Miri’s comment on: Effective altruism organizations should avoid using “polarizing techniques”
If these judgment calls are being made and underpin the work of CEA’s groups team, that seems very relevant for the EA movement.
I agree. We’re working on increasing transparency—expect to see more posts on this in the future
Do I interpret your comment correctly, that the CEA groups team does have an internal qualitative ranking, but you are not able to share it publicly?
I’m not 100% clear what you mean here, so I’ve taken a few guesses, and answered all of them
- Do we have a qualitative ranking of the grants we’ve made: No. We are interested in making the “fund/don’t fund” decision—and as such a qualitative ranking within everyone we’ve funded doesn’t help us. We do have a list of the funding decisions we’ve made, and notes on the reasons why these decisions were made. These often involve qualitative judgements. We will sometimes look back at past decisions, to help us calibrate.
- Do we have a qualitative ranking of common actions community members might take: No. We don’t have an X such that we could say “<job category> is worth X% of <job category>, holding ‘ability’ constant” for common EA jobs. Plausibly we should have something like this, but even this would need to be applied carefully—as different organisations are bottlenecked by different things.
- Do you have heuristics that help you compare different community building outcomes: Yes. These are different between our programs, as it depends on how a program is attempting to help. E.g., in virtual programs admissions, we aren’t able to applicants on outcomes, as for many participants, it is one of their first interactions with EA. As I mentioned above, I want us to increase transparency on this.
I also want to emphasise that an important component in our grantmaking is creating healthy intellectual scenes.

Rob Gledhill 20 Jun 2023 12:47 UTC
7 points
2 ∶ 2
in reply to: Miri’s comment on: Effective altruism organizations should avoid using “polarizing techniques”
Hey Miri,
Typically, unless someone is donating large amounts of money—we would interpret direct work as more valuable. But all of these things have a scale, and there is a qualitative part to the interpretation. With donations, this is especially obvious—where it is very measurably true that some people are able to donate much more than others. However there is also an element of this with careers, where some people are able to have a huge impact with their careers, and others have smaller impact (yet still large in absolute terms). Because there are a lot of sensitive, qualitative judgement calls—we can’t provide full reasoning transparency.

Rob Gledhill 19 Jun 2023 16:37 UTC
10 points
1 ∶ 3
in reply to: Linda Linsefors’s comment on: Effective altruism organizations should avoid using “polarizing techniques”
Hey Linda,
I’m head of CEA’s groups team. It is true that we care about career changes—and it is true that our funders care about career changes. However it is not true that this is the only thing that we care about. There are lots of other things we value, for example grant-recipients have started effective institutions, set up valuable partnerships, engaged with public sector and philanthropic bodies. This list is not exhaustive! We also care about the welcomingness of groups, and we care about groups not using “polarizing techniques”.
In terms of longtermist pressure—I have recently written a post about why we believe in a principles first approach, rather than an explicitly longtermist route.

Rob Gledhill 12 May 2023 20:55 UTC
5 points
2 ∶ 0
in reply to: Dušan D. Nešić (Dushan)’s comment on: What is effective altruism? How could it be improved?
Hi Dušan
I work with Ben, as head of groups at CEA. If I could answer
How important is to you pushing to open EA groups in countries where a lot of aid is going?
In general we’ve found it very difficult to “push” for opening an EA group. Running an impactful EA group requires a pretty high level of EA knowledge (alongside other skills) and trying to find an EA organizer, with that level of skill, in a country without an EA Group has historically proved difficult.
Instead we have prioritized having global platforms (e.g., Virtual Programs, EA Anywhere, and professional/affiliation based groups). Additionally when someone does wish to start a group we have support (e.g., resource centre, welcomer calls)

Rob Gledhill 16 Feb 2023 20:32 UTC
29 points
6 ∶ 0
on: Transitioning to an advisory role
I’ve only been at CEA for a part of Max’s tenure—but it’s been a real privilege seeing you work. Absolutely incredible what you’ve achieved.

Rob Gledhill 2 Sep 2022 22:52 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: AnonymousEAForumAccount’s comment on: Red Teaming CEA’s Community Building Work
I agree with this statement entirely.
Go team!

Rob Gledhill 2 Sep 2022 21:08 UTC
4 points
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in reply to: AnonymousEAForumAccount’s comment on: Red Teaming CEA’s Community Building Work
I was surprised by your “unpleasant to a lot of communities” comment. By that, are you referring to the dynamic where if you have to place value on outcomes, some people/orgs will be disappointed with the value you place on their work?
Not really. I was more referring that any attempt to quantify the likely impact someone will have is (a) inaccurate (b) likely to create some sort of hierarchy and unhealthy community dynamics.
This seems like another area where control groups would be helpful in making the exercise an actual experiment. Seems like a fairly easy place to introduce at least some randomization into
I agree with this, I like the idea of successful groups joining existing mentorship programs such that there is a natural control group of “average of all the other mentors.” (There are many ways this experiment would be imperfect, as I’m sure you can imagine) - I think the main implementation challenge here so far has been “getting groups to actually want to do this.” We are very careful to preserve the groups’ autonomy, I think this acts as a check on our behaviour. If groups engage on programs with us voluntarily, and we don’t make that engagement a condition of funding, it demonstrates that our programs are at least delivering value in the eyes of the organizers. If we started trying to claim more autonomy and started designating groups into experiments, we’d lose one of our few feedback measures. On balance I think I would prefer to have the feedback mechanism rather than the experiment. (The previous paragraph does contain some simplifications, it would certainly be possible to find examples of where we haven’t optimised purely for group autonomy)

Rob Gledhill 2 Sep 2022 16:29 UTC
3 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: AnonymousEAForumAccount’s comment on: Red Teaming CEA’s Community Building Work
Hey, thanks for this. I work on CEA’s groups team. When you say “we don’t know much about which work … has the most impact on the outcomes we care about”—I think I would rather say
a) We have a reasonable, yet incomplete, view on how many people different groups cause to engage in EA, and some measure on what is the depth of that engagement
b) We are unsure how many of those people would have become engaged in EA anyway
c) We do not have a good mapping from “people engaging with EA” to the things that we actually want in the world
I think we should be sharing more of the data we have on what types of community building have, so far, seemed to generate more engagement. To this end we have a contractor who will be providing a centralized service for some community building tasks, to help spread what is working. I also think groups that seem to be performing well should be running experiments where other groups adopt their model. I have proposed this to several groups, and will continue to do so.
However trying to predict the mapping from engagement to good things happening in the world is (a) sufficiently difficult that I don’t think anyone can do it reliably (b) deeply unpleasant to a lot of communities. In trying to measure this we could decrease the amount of good that is happening in the world—and also probably wouldn’t succeed in taking the measurement accurately.

Rob Gledhill 8 Jul 2022 20:17 UTC
1 point
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Jona’s comment on: Things I’m curious about city or national groups trying
Thanks Jona, I agree that there is potential applicability beyond city and national groups—including for individuals.
I’m excited by the results of the A/B/C/D testing!

Rob Gledhill 16 Jun 2022 13:52 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Community builders should focus more on supporting friendships within their group
This is great. It is friendships that kept me anchored in EA when I was in my earning to give phase

Rob Gledhill 4 Mar 2022 14:08 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: Rob Gledhill’s comment on: Best Countries during Nuclear War
After looking into how average temperatures are calculated, I get “Average yearly temperature is calculated by averaging the minimum and maximum daily temperatures in the country, averaged for the years 1961–1990, based on gridded climatologies from the Climatic Research Unit elaborated in 2011.”
This means a country like France, that is mostly quite warm, but also has Mont Blanc, where it will be cold at the top, would look significantly cooler than it is.
I think using the average temperature of the capital city is more useful, as this gives you the temperature in the place that the people are (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_average_temperature)

Rob Gledhill 4 Mar 2022 13:51 UTC
6 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Best Countries during Nuclear War
Maybe I can give a few thoughts on Chile to help your search.
- Average temperature may be confusing, given that Arica is currently too hot for agriculture, and Tierra del Fuego is too cold for agriculture, I think a temperature change would just change where the agriculture was happening (this seems really critical, changing Chile’s temperature rating can make it overtake Uruguay in your spreadsheet)
- Chile already has desalination plants for the mining industry, which is promising for building more desalination plants to support agriculture (as I can’t predict what effect a nuclear winter would have on rain patterns)
- [If this is about where to move to] The speed and transparency of the visa process is important, as a recent immigrant to Chile, I’d say transparency is good and speed is average (~3 months)
- [If this is about where to move to] Population density and sentiment towards immigrants seem important—outside of the Region Metropolitano, there is very obviously space in Chile—and it is a great place to be an immigrant if (and only if) you have a white collar job
Not specific to Chile
- Years of education is a component of HDI, if you have already completed your education, I don’t think this effects you so much (also caring about years in education rather than quantity learnt seems to be missing the point). As such I’d recommend using GDP per capita (PPP) and life expectancy
- Crime is likely to spike in a crisis, I’d prefer to be somewhere with low current crime rates
- I think you should penalise landlocked countries, as this does add a dependency on other countries and you need things to go right in more places
- When I look at the top places in the Food Security Index, I have places like the UK in #3 spot, despite the fact that it imports a large share of it’s food. Even if I rank by the “natural resources and resilience” sub-index—I see net food importers surprisingly high in the list (and Norway and Finland are #1 and 2 in the natural resources and resilience sub-index. I would not like to be farming in Norway and Finland after global temperatures drop)
- I am somewhat sceptical of the global peace index—just based on a quick investigation, it has the UK as more peaceful than Chile—scoring Chile worse in “ongoing conflict” and “safety and security”—this is despite the UK frequently deploys troops abroad, the UK has multiple regions that want to break away, and Chile has not been involved in a war since WW2 - I haven’t fully unpacked this, but to me it doesn’t pass a sniff test

Rob Gledhill 29 Nov 2021 12:08 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
on: The Explanatory Obstacle of EA
Thanks Gidon—I really like this post. A few reactions:
- I think “helping others” sounds like it’s exclusively about humans. I agree “doing good” is hard to picture, but part of this is out of genuine uncertainty on the human/animal trade-offs
- What made prioritization really click for me was an example, I agree with you that this is the most central idea, and as a result, I think in an intro it is worth giving an example of two interventions intended to help the same target population, where one is way more effective (for me it was comparing two health interventions that both naively sounded like “good” things to do)