Along with my co-founder, Marcus A. Davis, I run Rethink Priorities. Previously, I was a professional data scientist.
Peter Wildeford
Karma: 7,303
This is cool, and I think it is underrated as a path. In either case, I wish more people tried out just writing, especially on the EA Forum.
What do you see as the difference, if any, between being an internet blogger and being an independent EA researcher (besides sounding less pretentious)? What would you see as the difference, if any, between being an internet blogger and a journalist?
I definitely agree that one of the best things applicants interested in roles at organizations like ours can do to improve their odds of being a successful researcher is to read and write independent research for this forum and get feedback from the community.
I think another underrated way to acquire a credible and relevant credential is to become a top forecaster on Metaculus, Good Judgement Open, or Facebook’s Forecastapp.
Peter Wildeford has done the largest non-manual retention analysis I know, which looked at the percentage of people who answered the EA survey using the same email in multiple years. He found retention rates of around 27%, but cautioned that this was inaccurate due to people using different email addresses each year.
Thanks for citing me, and I’m excited for the new data sources you are looking at.
One thing you might want to add is that I looked at two different approaches. You quote the first approach, but the second approach—which I think is more accurate, and is based on comparing the year people say they joined EA versus the survey take rate for that year—shows that roughly ~60% of EAs still stay around after 4-5 years.
Alas, if I were graduating sooner … In the mean time, will be following closely.
We’ll definitely have more roles open for after you graduate—don’t worry!
Oh, and to support the suggested model of a consultancy, one need only look at Data for Progress for an example of a polling arm that has become quite influential (within progressive/leftist circles) for issue messaging
Yes—I think we aspire to be somewhat like Data for Progress, but for effective altruism, though I think we are more wary of blurring between the lines of advocacy and truth-seeking.
Help Rethink Priorities Use Data for Animals, Longtermism, and EA
I’m happy to speak with anyone who wants to compete with Rethink Priorities! Feel free to send inquiries to peter@rethinkpriorities.org
Easy to not be afraid when you’re the player and the scorekeeper!
(BTW this sounds salty from me, but I promise I’m just joking around.)
It does seem like bad incentives that very well-researched pieces can get much less karma than relatively quick comments.
people who created posts in that era have seen their karma recalculated without the 10x multiplier.
Worth also noting that these earlier posts didn’t benefit from the invention of strong upvoting (or from the increased size of the voting community), so their karma seems a lot below what they would’ve gotten if they were posted recently.
The reason is that Aaron couldn’t beat me in karma fair and square, so he had to play dirty.
:D
This does seem like a good model to try.
I’ve thought about this before and I would also like to see this happen.
I notice that the listed grants seems substantially below $1000/hour; e.g. Rethink getting $250,000 for seven FTEs implies ~$35,000/FTE or roughly $18/hour. *
This is two misconceptions:
(1) we are hiring seven interns but they each will only be there for three months. I believe it is 1.8 FTE collectively.
(2) The grant is not being entirely allocated to intern compensationInterns at Rethink Priorities currently earn $23-25/hr. Researchers hired on a permanent basis earn more than that, currently $63K-85K/yr (prorated for part-time work).
It definitely does strike me as there needing to be a lot of continued longtermist research and field-building to allow us to be in a good position to deploy a large amount of capital at a critical time. It’s not easy to deploy capital overnight.
Sorry if this is a strawman of the “invest to give later” argument or something already addressed, but I think it’s important to put out there if it hasn’t been already.
I time track ~30hrs a week.
I get ~6hrs a week of “deep work”, mainly because I am in management and a lot of management activities are not classically considered deep work.
My efficiency is ~70%.
Yeah, I think it certainly would be fine to donate to an organization that can make use of your money but not for a year or two. I think this would actually be very helpful to the org as a signal of support and for removing some uncertainty for them, to allow them to actually grow (steadily).
How is NIMBYism helpful?
Can you say more about what kind of wild animal welfare work you would want to see?
FWIW I made $187K/yr in total comp (£136K/yr) in Chicago as a data scientist after four years of experience. My starting salary was $83K/yr in total comp (£60K/yr) with no experience. In both jobs, I worked about 30hrs/wk. My day-to-day experience was rather identical to this post.