I’m Ruthie. I’m a software engineer. I’m a GWWC member, most interested in global poverty alleviation. I keep a blog, mostly not related to EA at ruthiebyers.com. I also do a lot of social dancing and I play fiddle.
ruthie
The Impact you can (and can’t) Make in an Hour
I think this is what Ryan is saying, but I want to say it again and say more, because I feel strongly and because Ryan left a lot of inferential distance in his post.
I dislike the idea that EA is mostly attractive or mostly applicable to it’s current dominant demographic of math/econ/tech interested people in their 20s. I think the core ideas of EA are compelling to a wide variety of people, and that EA can benefit from skills outside of it’s current mainstream. It seems likely to me that the current situation is more the result of network effects than that EA is not interesting to people outside of this cluster.
Catering our “general” advice to only one sort of person makes it more likely that other types of people will feel lost or unwelcome and not pursue their interest in EA; I take it Erica has felt this way. While the statement Alex made in his last paragraph is reasonable as stated, we are not in the position of only being able to give one piece of advice.
Thanks for writing this! Your journey seems unusual and interesting in comparison to other narratives I’ve heard.
I’m especially interested in your experience with volunteering and activism. I read a lot on this forum about giving money to other organizations which help and not very much about how we can help people directly. I’d love to hear more about what you think the impact of your volunteer activities and professional work are and where you think good ones are available to others.
I can totally sympathize. Job seeking sucks, especially if you’re not feeling like an awesome person who everyone would obviously want to employ. I also know from experience that telling you you’re awesome (I don’t know you, but you’re probably awesome) doesn’t necessarily make you feel that way.
I am not a career counselor, but this is the advice I would give you:
Don’t go to grad school unless you’re really sure you want to. Grad school is a really crummy job, and the payoff in terms of career capital is dubious. Most other jobs you can get are better than grad school, even if they’re not in your field.
It’s not too late for a career change. You sound not excited to enter CS, but if you decided that was your best option, coding bootcamps are a thing, and they seem pretty good at turning STEM oriented people into employable coders. There are a lot of other places you could go, and a lot of jobs that don’t have much more qualification than some college degree.
Earning to give is not the only EA career option. If it won’t make you happy, you’ll probably just get burnt out on it and maybe resent EA for making you feel like you had to do that. http://www.benkuhn.net/career-ideas has a list of career ideas that aren’t earning to give, and it’s extremely incomplete.
Also don’t feel like you have to be passionate about the first job you take (or the second or the third). If you don’t know what you want to do, you try things until something works. I also think that a lot of people start jobs that they don’t feel passionate about, and then grow passionate about them over time, so not feeling like there’s anything exciting for you right now doesn’t mean that you’ll never have a job you’re excited about.
Lots of people graduate without a job or a plan. As long as you have some savings or someone you can stay with for a while, waiting until you’re out of school and have time and space to think about your life is a totally reasonable plan.
I’m happy to talk more or help you brainstorm ideas besides grad school or industry in something your not excited over PM if you think that will help.
hugs and good luck!
There are also intelligent, thoughtful people outside of LW.
Also, while I agree that keeping the tone among EAs thoughtful, I would be extremely sad if we didn’t encourage particular people or groups from being interested in EA because they aren’t “intelligent enough.”
I don’t know what the bare minimum to get hired anywhere is, but I know that most medium-sized and up places that you might want to work will hire an entry level employee who looks smart but has a very small amount of actual experience.
A good applicant can write a simple program on a white board and has a project on github, or a past internship, or a dynamic website that they run, to point at. If you think you’re on the edge now, these accomplishments shouldn’t be too far away.
I really like the suggestion of encouraging people from minority groups to host events and do outreach. In general, making these people more visible might help combat the perception that they are absent from EA, so it might make sense to encourage them to, for instance, blog, post on the forum, or speak at EA events they aren’t hosting.
I think Ben’s criticism is fair, in that a perfectly rational altruist wouldn’t make it. That is, if you are willing to give up three weeks of income to donate a kidney, you should be willing to work for three weeks and donate all of your income, not just whatever percentage you donate normally. This is not to say that it’s an unreasonable decision in all cases—taking three weeks off of work to donate a kidney has all sorts of other consequences (you probably get to do a lot of reading while you’re stuck in bed), but from a first order altruistic standpoint, at the income level I mentioned it still wouldn’t make sense.
I agree that diversification would be good for the movement, and I’m excited to see a compelling suggestion of something EAs can do besides donate money. Thanks!
I think that there are potential EAs out there for whom the earning to give model is very costly or unrealistic (people who would have to develop unrelated new skillsets and/or move to new cities). For example, a schoolteacher is probably in a poor position to earn to give (although they can certainly donate money), but they could donate a kidney over their long summer break with no lost earnings.
That’s a really good question, and as another 20-something in tech, I also definitely don’t have all the answers. I have an in-progress draft of a post more generally on outreach, to be posted somewhere (not sure where), but I’ll briefly list some of my thoughts directly related to making a wider variety of people feel welcome.
Expand our models of EA dedication beyond earning to give. This model doesn’t fit most people well, but it’s by far the most prominent idea of what living an EA life looks like.
People want to see people like them in communities they’re part of (I don’t endorse this state of affairs, but I think it’s often true). This may seem discouraging, because it most obviously says “to get more of x type of people, you need to already have x type of people.” I think it’s not totally unactionable though—if cultural minorities make themselves more visible by posting an commenting on the forum, coming to meetups, etc., new people in the same cultural minorities will see them and know they are welcome.
Do your best not to assume that people are in your cluster. The career advice example is good. Another example is to explain math or econ jargon when you use them in a post. I think this has an outsize effect. The experience of being in a community but having the content aimed at different sorts of people is a little like going to a social dance and having no one ask you to be their partner—it’s hard to believe that you’re wanted, even when people keep telling you so. And it feels really crummy.
Note that I don’t know anyone who has said that they were interested in EA but felt unwelcome there. I think at least part of it is that EA is something that very few people outside of this cluster have even heard of, much less have taken steps towards getting involved in.
For better or for worse, I think it may be difficult to “police the door” on who should and shouldn’t call themselves an effective altruist. For example, a whole lot of people call themselves environmentalists, even if they’re doing little or nothing for the environment besides holding opinions positive to environmentalism. On the flip side, there are people doing more for the environment than the typical environmentalist.
In practice, I think that what words people use to describe themselves has more to do with what words their friends use to describe themselves. This applies to me too—like Peter, I’m a GWWC member, but I don’t self-identify as effective altruist, and I think this is because I don’t feel very connected to the community.
I think this works in reverse too. “Queer” is a word that naively seems well defined to exclude some people, but I know people who self-identify as queer even though they are both straight and cisgender. I’m not criticizing—these people are also usually careful to communicate clearly about what this means. I say this to point out how difficult it can be to clearly define group membership.
GWWC has a well defined criterion for membership, and there could be other similar organizations with well defined criteria, but I’m not sure that we could give the movement itself a well defined criterion even if we wanted to.
I personally spend a lot of time thinking about whether what I’m doing right now really is the best thing, or whether I could be doing something better.
I think there’s an inherent problem that if you want to do the best possible thing, you’ll never know that you’ve succeeded (you’ll often no that you didn’t), and therefore never get that satisfaction.
People earning to give seem to deal with this by setting goal amounts or income percentages. If they reach or exceed their goal, they’ve succeeded, even if they had some dollars that they could have donated but didn’t.
This kind of trick is harder to use for something like choosing a thesis topic, but you could try something like it. You could have a goal that your thesis should “substantially further the goals of effective altruism” or maybe more usefully that it should relate to some aspect of EA like “international development” or “human truthseeking” that seems useful to investigate further. You can consider candidate topics that fit your goal and choose freely using any criteria you want, whether they include “looks higher value” or “looks like more fun,” and as long as your topic meets your original goal you can count yourself as having succeeded.
But yeah, a supportive community also seems really important (-:
It changed for medical reasons, so unrelated to how I felt the policy was working for me in terms of balancing temptation with my reasons for doing it. I’d like to go back to it, or something like it, but I don’t know how to do it without spending a lot more energy thinking about food than I want to right now.
Do you remember any of the questions/reactions you got from the non-EA students at those dinners?
That’s reasonable—I think some teachers probably can do this as a part-time thing on top of teaching. Keep in mind though, that tutoring work is highly variable by time of year, not very available in some places (I knew zero students with private tutors of any kind in my hometown in Kansas), and can have high transportation overheads. Another way to look at is that if an option that good were available to all teachers, you’d never see teachers getting food service jobs.
In either case, my main point is that the way someone earns marginal income can be completely different than the way they earn their average dollar.
My contribution is here: http://www.ruthiebyers.com/2014/12/24/an-hours-impact.html
I have a different reason for thinking this is true, which involves fewer numbers and more personal experience and intuition.
Having a high standard—either you make major changes in your life or your not an effective altruist—will probably fail because people aren’t used to or willing to make big, sudden changes in their lives. It’s hard to imagine donating half your income from the point of view of someone currently donating nothing; it’s much easier to imagine doing that if you’re already donating 20% or 30%. When I was first exposed to EA, I found it very weird and vaguely threatening, and I could definitely not have jumped from that state to earning to give. Not that I have since gone that far, but I do donate 10% and the idea of donating more is at least contemplatable. Even if you mostly care about the number of people who end up very highly committed, having low or medium standards gives people plausible first steps on a ladder towards that state.
As an analogy, take Catholics and nuns. There are many Catholics and very few nuns, and even fewer of those nuns were people who converted to Catholicism and then immediately became nuns. If there was no way to be Catholic except being a nun, the only people who could possibly be nuns would be the people who converted and then immediately became nuns.
$2K in a couple of weeks is only the case for very high-earning people. With a more typical income, donating a kidney is probably worth the lost income.
It seems like by donating, you expect to lose a few weeks of life and a few weeks of work (which may or may not be paid, depending on your situation). I’m not sure I correctly remember the QALY/”life saved” ratio, but what I remember is 35 QALYs/saved life, which seems reasonable. If you’re making $55,000 and donating 10% of your income, it would take a little less than two months of lost income to make that much. It seems like you’re still ahead with the kidney donation at that rate.
- 28 Dec 2014 4:36 UTC; 0 points) 's comment on The Impact you can (and can’t) Make in an Hour by (
I was 95% vegetarian for about 5 years and found it worked pretty well, even without specific rules.
In general, I ate meat at major family holiday gatherings, when I was traveling and there were no filling vegetarian options, occasionally when there was particularly ethical meat available, and when the meat in question was clearly headed to the trash can if I didn’t eat it. I think overall I ate meat about once a month, but I didn’t keep close track, and the times I ate meat were pretty clustered, so it’s hard to estimate. I certainly felt that I was achieving my goals in being vegetarian.
One thing that helped me not decide that every friend’s birthday was a special occasion was that I just told everyone around me that I was vegetarian. Since upsetting people’s expectations makes me uncomfortable, I would only very rarely eat meat in social settings.