PipFoweraker

Karma: 8

I have been consistently donating a significant portion of my income since I started full time employment at 17 out of self-derived principles of charity that, in hindsight, were reflexively utilitarian—although I didn’t have the language for it then.

I’ve spent 90% of my career working in the public service, primarily out of a desire to help other people and the community at large. My recent time working in private finance has highlighted that although the pay is better, I am far less motivated to work for the profit of entities that don’t operate in alignment with my ethical principles.

I’ve spent the last few years educating myself on effective approaches to getting things done—the mechanics of project delivery, policy construction, and high level negotiations in Government as well as in some business arenas. I’m now trying to figure out how to put the skillset I have—project and program management, creating organisational workflows, managing medium-sized remote teams, and clear inter-group and intra-skateholder communication, to use in the EA field.

Alternate, potentially high-impact paths I am considering taking include entrepreneurship, something I have some experiences in, and operational or policy work in AI governance spaces. I do not presently have undergraduate-level education as I left home and started full time work quite young.

My current uncertainties are that I am not highly confident I have the raw intelligence to usefully contribute in a technical field, but I’m also not sure whether my more managerial and operational skills are of high enough quality for critical role hires. I’d like to have some guidance in clarifying those uncertainties!

PipFoweraker 15 Feb 2024 22:18 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
on: CLR Summer Research Fellowship 2024
The default start date is in the past :-)

PipFoweraker 16 Oct 2023 1:57 UTC
8 points
1 ∶ 0
on: Cash and FX management for EA organizations
An additional point supporting Advice 1:

Having multiple banks reduces your vulnerability to administrative FUBAR. It is a fact of life that operating in an unusual fashion in a regulated environment can occasionally cause headaches. When thinking about your org’s cash, losing access to all of it is often qualitatively different to losing access to most of it. Having funds spread across multiple banks, while some overhead applies to set up, leaves you with some redundancy in case of institutional delay.
If you are operating as a non-profit, or a new org that goes through rapid user or revenue growth, the likelihood that you will experience a bureaucracy or ops failure that might restrict access to your cash increases. It’s not high enough to be an overriding concern, but certainly well within the likelihood window of something as catastrophic as a bank failure when considering your options.

PipFoweraker 11 Nov 2022 7:19 UTC
1 point
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: RagtagJack’s comment on: The FTX Future Fund team has resigned
Seeking clarity: are you suggesting that the most appropriate course of action would be to return the present net balance of funds but not specifically plan to use future funds to offset losses because that would raise the difficulty bar on acquiring the new funds—“Why should I donate money to pay for someone else’s unethical actions”—or because repaying already spent funds rather than spending any future-donated money on more direct causes would be of lower utility overall?