I find it a bit disconcerting that you write about the costs to the org, but not the costs to the applicants. Ie. applicant puts a lot of work into applying for a role and then you decide that that one is the one you won’t fill. It may very well be that the trade is still worth it and that the negative effect on candidates can be mitigated. But lacking even a single sentence in this direction seems callous. (I’m writing this as someone who spends more time on the side of hiring people than on the side of applying for jobs.)
Richard Möhn
Karma: 294
To be specific: The above is a linear, high-level retelling of the history of smallpox, some of it misleading (eg. about the scab being ‘consumed’, which sounds as if people had to eat it). The creative part is dressing it in a language of metaphor and pathos, which many apparently like, but I was wondering if it was written by AI until I saw the publication date. A composition of first-person accounts and tight, plain-language description of the eradication efforts would have been more powerful. If you disagree, read some good historians.
Then EA creative writing must be in a dire state.
Search for ‘Ashgro’ in https://survivalandflourishing.fund/2025/recommendations to find examples of projects we’re sponsoring.
What does the research say about the fraction of people who decided on ethical grounds to have/not to have children and then were happy with their choice on emotional grounds vs. regretted their choice?
It might be better to have them for impact and find out that it’s great to have them independent of impact than to not have them because one didn’t feel like having them. (Similar to my experience. I think babies are gross rather than cute. Only my own baby is cute.)
I agree with David’s response.
I know there is more nuance in your post, but if I take your title at face value, I would say: When I’m evaluating candidates and I catch you not being honest (ie. lying or distorting the truth), I’m going to reject your application. If I catch you lying outright, I’m never going to consider you again as a candidate. If I find out after you were hired that you lied during the application process, I would probably do my best to get you fired. (I mean the ‘you’ in a general sense. I’m not expecting you, JDLC, would lie.)
If you give honest, but unspecific answers, and it’s about an important skill, I’m going to ask you follow-up questions to figure out what’s going on.
Thanks! I’ve written it down for next time.
Down-to-earth interventions sounds better to me, too. I like all of the examples.
Just a quick thought: Supporting (investigative) journalism is also a possible intervention. I think journalism is considered a pillar of democracy? Currently, Kelsey Piper’s work on OpenAI/Sam Altman is a good example.
I see. Thanks for explaining!
Good to know about the small donations! Although I wonder: There are lots of (small) AI safety orgs that have a donate thing on their website and it’s easy to donate a small amount. Is this also secretly very inefficient? To make bigger donations I would have to save up and then make a good decision. I prefer a drive-by spray-and-pray approach, personally.
NTI is a good suggestion, too! Even if it’s not just bio, at least it’s not AI safety. (Nothing against AI safety – as I stated above: I already donate in other ways.)
Thanks! Donated.
I think Yanni isn’t writing about personal favourites. Assuming there is such a thing as objective truth, it makes sense to discuss cause prioritization as an objective question.
The outline structure makes this easy to skim. Thank you!
I like this. The actionable points are a bit buried in the prose, but you describe two ways of going astray that I hadn’t thought about. Thank you!
One thing I would always mention is that false negatives are less costly in hiring than false positives. But I guess the article is written for an intermediate level of hiring skill, so that point is taken for granted.
It’s long, but it looks like Rethink Priorities have put a lot of thought into this job posting: https://careers.rethinkpriorities.org/en/postings/8588ecc5-3e26-4086-bdb2-fe9a2eb43252
Sounds good!
By the way, another thing one might try: Adding salt during the soaking and again during the cooking. Perhaps one teaspoon per kg of beans. In my experience, it also reduces cooking times. I haven’t evaluated it rigorously, though.
Perhaps it’s because of farts? I hope I don’t get downvoted for bringing this up – it’s serious and, I suspect, a major inconvenience for people who cook beans from scratch.
It could be that cooking beans for a long time (maybe combined with regular skimming or whatever other techniques we don’t know about) makes them cause way less flatulence than soaking them in little water and cooking for a short time. People recommend soaking for reducing beans’ gas-generation potential, but in my experience (yes, I’ve used a tally counter to count my farts under different soaking and cooking conditions and bean species, but obviously N=1) it takes a lot of soaking water to do that. I’ve found 7 l for 500 g of dry beans to work decently. After soaking I drain and then cook in a small amount of water.
And soaking with a lot of water has implications that might not work for Ugandans:
You need a much bigger soaking container than cooking container. (Or have to soak in multiple changes of water, which becomes tedious.)
You need more water.
If you want a lot of beans for dinner, draining the water becomes physically difficult for one person.
Speaking of dinner: If you eat three meals with beans per day, you’ll have two or three containers going for soaking. It’s likely easier to have one pot over the fire that just gets restarted soon after each meal. (Assuming that refrigeration is hard to come by in Uganda.)
Further practical issues:
If the beans are small, draining the soaking water requires a sieve or colander, which people might not have.
Beans start to ferment when soaked in hot weather (as mentioned in other comments, I think). The more they ferment, the stranger they taste and the longer they need to be cooked because of acid building up. (Try and cook some beans with vinegar added to the water.)
It’s easy to forget to start soaking them in time.
Personally, I do soak and use a pressure cooker. But perhaps that’s a luxury.
Thanks for explaining! My original concern was that these considerations were not included in the original post.