Exactly! Somewhat of a sidenote but I find it relevant: I’ve seen this thing with many political parties in Sweden that usually have a youth organisation that for various reasons often represents a more radical version of the so-called party line on various issues. Political opponents will try to hold the party responsible for what the youth branch says and does, but it’s generally understood by most (I think) that the latter is the avant-garde and should not be conflated with the general views of e.g. those voting for the party in elections. Denying there are important connections between the two would be dishonest, but so would saying they are the same be.
Markus Amalthea Magnuson
Karma: 1,074
It should probably not even be called a work sample under the circumstances I describe, but rather just work.
For example, if I’m hiring a communicator, I could ask them to spend two hours on improving the text of a web page. That could be a typical actual work task at some point, but this “work sample” also creates immediate value. If the improvements are good, they could be published regardless of whether that person is hired or not. This is also why you would pay an applicant for those two hours.
A very simplified example, but I hope the point comes across. And like you mention, for some types of work such isolated tasks are much more prevalent.
Thank you for an excellent reply. I’ve for a long time found the “mastery, autonomy, purpose” concept useful and think of it as true – for lack of a better word. That these three aspects determine drive/motivation/happiness to a large extent, in a work context.
It seems to me some criticisms, including this one, paint a picture that does not very accurately describe what most effective altruists are up to in a practical sense. You could get the idea that EA is 10,000 people waking up every day thinking about esoteric aspects of AI safety, actively avoiding any other current issues regardless of scale.
In reality, a fair chunk (probably a vast majority?) do what most would perceive as “traditional” charity work, e.g. working at an organisation that tries to alleviate poverty or promote animal welfare, organising their community (university etc.) to promote doing good, doing research on effective methods for solving large problems in society today, or getting more people and organisations to donate money to charitable causes.
I have a hard time believing the general public actually thinks existential risk research on things like pandemic preparation/prevention is a bad idea or not money well spent. But if you equal existential risk with AI threat, it’s a whole other framing.
Every movement will have far-out elements that might be hard to make sense of without a lot of context, but that are also just one facet of the movement as a whole. A lot of the recent criticisms of EA I’ve seen target longtermism in its most “extreme” form, and drag all of effective altruism with it. The criticism of longtermism is very healthy and useful, in my opinion, but this conflation is concerning.
Very good post. Would love to see more summaries of research on hiring but also what makes employees happy, and similar topics. A question about work samples: What are your thoughts, and what is the research, on using real (paid) work instead of work samples? Meaning, identifying some existing task that actually needs to be done, rather than coming up with an “artificial” one.
You could probably make this happen faster and at a much higher quality by instead spending your time on finding funding (e.g. from the EA Infrastructure Fund) to pay an experienced full-stack developer to build the first prototype, under your guidance. Unless it’s also your main career plan to work in web development, then you’ll learn a lot from doing the project on your own. (This is from someone who has worked in web development for 15+ years.)
I plan to start offering this – among other things – for free through the Altruistic Agency later this year.
Why do you need a legal entity? Maybe you could describe the project/website in more concrete terms – that would make it easier to give concrete recommendations.
Just a list of projects and organisations FTX has funded would be beneficial and probably much less time-consuming to produce. Some of the things you mention could be deducted from that, and it would also help in evaluating current project ideas and how likely they are to get funding from FTX at some point.
Or test titles on an appropriate audience. For example, come up with 20 different titles, then pay 100 professional recruiters 20 dollars each to vote on which one sounds most impressive. Actually, maybe something like that could be done on an even larger scale to find out how this “career capital issue” can be improved for many EA job roles.
The Carbon Almanac – an opportunity for EA climate organisations
Work to give community builders more job security. How to do this would obviously depend on the situation at hand, but in cases where community builders are on grants one could consider longer grant periods, longer exit grants and/or support and incentives for people to start legal entities which then employ them as community builders.
I wonder if this could be, more or less, a single organisation with the main purpose of providing stability for every single community builder at once. A rather small operations team could probably streamline things like contracts, payroll etc. As you mention, for things like mortgages, having what banks consider “normal employment” can be quite important. But the mental relief of not having to think about a bunch of things is a nice perk too, that employees at “normal” organisations take for granted.
Twitter, as a fairly open platform, could be immensely valuable (because social networks are valuable) for humanity if it was more geared towards its users.
My sense is that people have felt for years that Twitter experiment with features that no one asked for rather than making it a nicer place for existing users. (Not sure how true this is, although I’d personally agree.) This is often noticeable in e.g. this way: https://twitter.com/scifiagenda/status/1328804296436006912 (See thread for interesting comments on how Twitter product design is an echo chamber of toxic positivity.)
If a social network of Twitter’s size and popularity could be slowly shifted towards an open feature development process informed by its users, it could start to grow into something else than what its most frequent users endearingly call a “hellscape”. At some point, it would be so usable and useful that its users might even consider paying (a small fee) to keep their account or create a new one. With such a change, the bot problem would probably be significantly reduced automatically. By then, a Stack Overflow-style reputation system is in place that allows self-moderation of the entire platform. Maybe it ends up truly enjoyable again.
Nothing about the above is too hard for capitalists to stomach, making it much more realistic than asking for hyper-niche features that only EAs and rationalists would like/use. Whatever you want to do to Twitter, there has to be a business case for it, sadly.
Yes, I rant about this regularly for some strange reason that still eludes me. On Twitter.
I would like the ability to sort search results by date. Often, I want to know who mentioned something in the past few weeks or months, this is currently not possible. (I’m guessing the current sort order is by magic, but there is nothing indicating this.)
Are some countries far more suitable for setting up a new nonprofit?
I can’t think of any specific links or such but I can tell you more: I may not go so far as to say it’s the norm in Sweden, but it’s definitely common to have an annual “utvecklingssamtal” (personal development discussion) and it’s often combined with salary negotiations. Personally, I think these two discussions should be separate.
Good organisations use this opportunity to gather a lot more knowledge than what is related to performance. In particular, it can be a way to have an open-ended discussion about the work environment and what improvements can be made. For example, improvements in the physical environment (it’s too cold, too dark, chairs and desks are annoying etc.) or improvements in mental environment (Monday meetings are too long, people ping on Slack too often, my colleague is always late for meetings etc.)
Usually, you would fill out some form with prepared questions beforehand and try to standardise this to use over several years to get a sense of improvements made, i.e. asking the exact same questions every year and to everyone. In other words, combine an open-ended part with a very structured part.
If it would help you a lot more than the above, I could probably dig up some old such documents from previous employers, although I would have to paraphrase them rather than share them directly due to privacy and/or intellectual property reasons.
Having seen overworked operations staff in several organisations throughout my career, reducing stress and having a healthy culture seem to be key improvement factors regardless of organisation size. (This goes for many roles.) If you consistently can’t accomplish everything you need to accomplish in 8 hrs/day – given a full-time situation – you are clearly understaffed and this should be resolved ASAP. There are many other stress reducers, such as many weeks of paid vacation per year, great salaries, clear areas of responsibility, structured interviews on the work environment (not the same as performance reviews!) etc.
It seems like many “normal” organisations are under the delusion that they need to operate under the, literally, military conditions you describe. This “get it done yesterday” mentality can kill the morale in any organisation and especially operations people will take the hit, because they are expected to tie all the bits together. What you describe as “never really quite off-the-clock” is super-dangerous and leads to burnout.
If you have worked in different organisations with vastly different cultures on these issues, it seems wild that any organisation wouldn’t prioritise the well-being of their employees, when it so obviously also improves the quality of the work.
A common excuse is that some roles or types of work “are just like that” but when people doing that work start talking to others doing it elsewhere it often turns out not to be the case. It’s a matter of culture. I know this from experience in software engineering – one company I worked at had a “no death marches” rule to explicitly counteract a common unhealthy bit of culture at many software companies.
How do you plan to encourage participants outside the EA community?
How come you do not mention open source projects? I don’t know how valuable it is nowadays, but working on e.g. Firefox early in my career definitely helped me learn fast from very good programmers in a real project used by millions. It has been a good CV item as well.
Non-profit work is systematically underpaid (and often unpaid) in relation to its value (e.g. for humanity) since market mechanisms are laughably unfit to price it properly. I think the EA community is in a great position to counteract this through a culture of high salaries, good benefits etc. and should use that opportunity. I’m happy you bring it up though, as I think there should be far more research on things like salary, incentives etc. instead of just relying on “business/market common sense” which is only fully appropriate in businesses proper, which most EA organisations are not.