RyanCarey

• RyanCarey 11 Jun 2019 0:23 UTC

  16 points

  in reply to: aarongertler's comment on: Long Term Fu­ture Fund and EA Meta Fund ap­pli­ca­tions open un­til June 28th

  I think there should be an Oxford group that has as its au­di­ence the peo­ple in EA orgs, with ac­tivi­ties to im­prove hap­piness, pro­duc­tivity, and the at­trac­tive­ness of these work­places, which is quite differ­ent from the goal of try­ing to grow a com­mu­nity of stu­dents. On this front, I’ve been spend­ing time find­ing group hous­ing near the new office. It would also be good to have short-term hous­ing for vis­i­tors. It would be good to have din­ners, and fun ac­tivi­ties on a Fri­day night. In-prin­ci­ple, the range of ac­tivi­ties that could be helped by prox­im­ity to the Oxford orgs is ex­tremely large, but things that in­ter­act more closely with the orgs, like grant recom­men­da­tions, or re­cruit­ment, just to pick a cou­ple of ar­bi­trary ex­am­ples, would have to be worked out be­fore­hand.

• RyanCarey 10 Jun 2019 23:16 UTC

  22 points

  on: Long Term Fu­ture Fund and EA Meta Fund ap­pli­ca­tions open un­til June 28th

  I’m not in­volved with ei­ther of these funds, but here are three pro­jects I re­ally want to see hap­pen:

  • More re­cruit­ing for EA orgs: FHI wants to grow a bunch and could benefit from hav­ing more great re­searchers referred. Prob­a­bly similar is true for other orgs.

  • Tar­geted out­reach us­ing so­cial me­dia ad­ver­tise­ments: EA is cur­rently do­ing lit­tle out­reach for fear of dilu­tion, and is thereby fore­go­ing many of the benefits of our sur­plus of funds and ideas. Maybe we could do more out­reach in a way that doesn’t bring about dilu­tion, such as by ad­ver­tis­ing in­tel­lec­tual con­tent in a way that’s filtered to just in­tel­lec­tual au­di­ences.

  • EA Oxford com­mu­nity. There’s ~45 em­ploy­ees at FHI/​GPI/​Forethought/​CEA-UK but al­most all of the com­mu­nity ac­tivi­ties are run by and di­rected at stu­dents.

• RyanCarey 30 May 2019 16:43 UTC

  15 points

  on: [Ques­tion] 20,000/​40,000 Hours- MidCa­reer Options

  I think the main an­swer is that ad­vice for mid/​late-ca­reer is harder to provide. But we can im­pro­vise by lev­er­ag­ing the ex­ist­ing re­search:

  Could one land jobs at any of the po­si­tions on 80,000 Hours’ jobs board?

  Could you switch to work­ing on a high-pri­or­ity area in gen­eral?

  What are the main skills gained from your ca­reer? Are these needed by any of the or­ga­ni­za­tions on the jobs board? Are they needed for start­ing any new or­ga­ni­za­tions?

  
  

• RyanCarey 10 Apr 2019 22:54 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: Habryka's comment on: Long-Term Fu­ture Fund: April 2019 grant decisions

  Isn’t Matt in HK?

• RyanCarey 8 Apr 2019 20:34 UTC

  32 points

  in reply to: baleparalysis's comment on: Long-Term Fu­ture Fund: April 2019 grant decisions

  It would be re­ally use­ful if this was split up into sep­a­rate com­ments that could be up­voted/​down­voted sep­a­rately.

• RyanCarey 8 Apr 2019 17:17 UTC

  18 points

  in reply to: Misha_Yagudin's comment on: Long-Term Fu­ture Fund: April 2019 grant decisions

  It’s a bit sur­pris­ing to me that you’d want to send all four vol­umes.

• RyanCarey 8 Apr 2019 13:45 UTC

  43 points

  on: Long-Term Fu­ture Fund: April 2019 grant decisions

  This is a strong set of grants, much stronger than the EA com­mu­nity would’ve been able to as­sem­ble a cou­ple of years ago, which is great to see.

  When will you be ac­cept­ing fur­ther ap­pli­ca­tions and mak­ing more grants?

• RyanCarey 8 Apr 2019 13:12 UTC

  23 points

  on: An­nounc­ing EA Hub 2.0

  In keep­ing with our ethos, we want to col­lab­o­rate with other EA pro­jects as much as pos­si­ble. The Hub presently con­nects with the EA Fo­rum, EA Work Club, Pri­or­i­tyWiki, EA Dona­tion Swap and Effec­tive Th­e­sis.

  I’m not sure much in­te­gra­tion would be re­quired, but did you con­sider link­ing the 80k jobs board? This seems like a re­ally use­ful re­cent EA tool that could fit in quite well.

• RyanCarey 27 Mar 2019 18:43 UTC

  18 points

  on: Should EA Groups Run Or­gan Donor Regis­tra­tion Drives?

  I agree that reg­is­ter­ing for or­gan dona­tion af­ter death helps but does no di­rect harm. But I think we need to have a high bar for in­clud­ing an ac­tivity in the typ­i­cal cache of ac­tivi­ties that EAs pro­mote to oth­ers. We want the act to be similar to other acts that have near-max­i­mal im­pact. Dona­tion fits that bill be­cause once you start donat­ing any­where, you can switch to other dona­tion tar­gets that have a big long term im­pact.

  For or­gan dona­tion, though, I don’t think it re­ally gives you ideas about any­thing that can be done that has any real long-term sig­nifi­cance. If you go down the or­gan-dona­tion ver­ti­cal, you might end up with kid­ney dona­tion, or with ex­treme ideas about self-sac­ri­fice. This kind of ide­ol­ogy is re­ally catchy—It brought Zell Krav­in­sky mild fame, and was the main ob­ject of the book Strangers Drown­ing. But I don’t think that’s the main way that long-run good is done. I think do­ing long-run good re­quires mostly a more an­a­lyt­i­cal or startup mind­set. If you do things like live kid­ney dona­tion, I ac­tu­ally think you might do less good than work­ing for the week of your op­er­a­tion, and donat­ing some of that to a top longter­mist char­ity.

  I get that my claim is that the sec­ond-or­der effects out­weigh the first-or­der ones here, but I don’t think that should be so sur­pris­ing in the con­text of EA out­reach—we need to carve an over­all pack­age—that gets peo­ple to do some good in the short-run, but most-im­por­tantly, that builds up a pro­duc­tivity mind­set, and gets peo­ple to do a lot of good over the longer term.

• RyanCarey 22 Mar 2019 11:08 UTC

  17 points

  in reply to: Jamie_Harris's comment on: SHOW: A frame­work for shap­ing your tal­ent for di­rect work

  I hear more peo­ple do cold out­reach about be­ing a re­searcher than RA, and my guess is that 3-10x more peo­ple ap­ply for re­searcher than RA jobs even when they are ad­ver­tised. I think it’s a com­bi­na­tion of those two fac­tors.

  My recom­men­da­tion would be that peo­ple ap­ply more to RA jobs that are ad­ver­tised, and also reach out to make op­por­tu­ni­ties for them­selves when they are not.

  I think about half of re­searchers can use re­search as­sis­tants, whether or not they are cur­rently hiring for one. A ma­jor rea­son re­searchers don’t make re­search as­sis­tant po­si­tions available is they don’t ex­pect to find one worth hiring, and so don’t want to in­cur the ad­minis­tra­tive bur­den. Or maybe they don’t feel com­fortable ask­ing their bosses for this. But if you are a strong can­di­date, coldly reach­ing out may re­sult in you be­ing hired or may trig­ger a hiring round for that po­si­tion. Although of­ten strong can­di­dates would be peo­ple I have met at an EA con­fer­ence, that got far in an in­tern­ship ap­pli­ca­tion, or that has been referred to me.

  I don’t think the salaries would be any lower than com­pet­i­tive rates.

• RyanCarey 21 Mar 2019 19:00 UTC

  12 points

  in reply to: Jan_Kulveit's comment on: EA Pro­jects eval­u­a­tion platform

  This is an un­char­i­ta­ble read­ing of my com­ment in many ways.

  First, you sug­gest that I am wor­ried that you want to re­cruit peo­ple not cur­rently do­ing di­rect work. All things be­ing equal, of course I would pre­fer to re­cruit peo­ple with fewer al­ter­na­tives. But all things are not equal. If you use peo­ple you know for the ini­tial as­sess­ments, you will much more quickly be able to iron out bugs in the pro­cess. In the test­ing stages, it’s best to have high-qual­ity work­ers that can per­ceive and rec­tify prob­lems, so this is a good use of time for smart, trusted friends, es­pe­cially since it can help you post­pone the re­cruit­ment step.

  Se­cond, you sug­gest that I am in the dark about the im­por­tance of con­sen­sus-build­ing. But this as­sumes that I be­lieve the only use for con­sul­ta­tion is to reach agree­ment. Rather, by talk­ing to the groups work­ing in re­lated spaces like BERI, Bren­don, EA grants, EA funds, and donors, you will of course learn some things, and your be­liefs will prob­a­bly get closer. On ag­gre­gate, your pro­cess will im­prove. But also you will build a re­la­tion­ship that will help you to share pro­pos­als (and in my opinion fun­ders).

  Third, you raise the is­sue of con­nect­ing fund­ing with eval­u­a­tion. Of course, the dis­tor­tionary effect is sig­nifi­cant. I hap­pen to think the effect from cre­at­ing an in­cen­tive for ap­pli­cants to ap­ply is larger and more im­por­tant, and fun­ders should be highly en­gaged. But there are also many ways that you could have fun­ders be mod­er­ately en­gaged. You could check what would be a use­ful re­port for them, that would help them to de­cide to fund some­thing. You could check what pro­jects they are more likely to fund.

  The more strate­gic is­sue is as fol­lows. Con­sen­sus is hard to reach. But a fund­ing plat­form is a good that scales with the size of the net­work of ap­pli­cants (and imo fun­ders). Some­what of a nat­u­ral monopoly (al­though we want there to be at least a few fun­ders.) You even­tu­ally want wide­spread com­mu­nity-sup­port of some form. I think that as you sug­gest, that means we need some com­pro­mise, but I think it also weighs in favour of more con­sul­ta­tion, and in favour of a more ex­per­i­men­tal ap­proach, which pro­jects are started in a sim­ple form.

• RyanCarey 21 Mar 2019 12:11 UTC

  25 points

  on: EA Pro­jects eval­u­a­tion platform

  I’m a big fan of the idea of hav­ing a new EA pro­jects eval­u­a­tion pipeline. Since I view this as an im­por­tant idea, I think it’s im­por­tant to get the plan to the strongest point that it can be. From my per­spec­tive, there are only a small­ish num­ber of es­sen­tial el­e­ments for this sort of plan. It needs a sub­mis­sions form, a de­tailed RFP, some fun­ders, and some eval­u­a­tors. In­stead, we don’t yet have these (e.g. de­tail re de­sired pro­jects, con­sul­ta­tion with fun­ders). But then I’m con­fused about some of the other things that are em­pha­sised: large ini­tial scale, a pro­cess for re­cruit­ing vol­un­teer-eval­u­a­tors, and fairly rigid eval­u­a­tion pro­ce­dures. I think the fun­da­men­tals of the idea are strong enough that this still has a chance of work­ing, but I’d much pre­fer to see the idea ad­vanced in its strongest pos­si­ble form. My pre­vi­ous com­ments on this draft are pretty similar to Oliver’s, and here are some of the main ones:

  This makes sense to me as an over­all idea. I think this is the sort of pro­ject where if you do it badly, it might dis­suade oth­ers from try­ing the same. So I think it is worth get­ting some feed­back on this from other eval­u­a­tors (BERI/​Bren­don Wong). It would also prob­a­bly be use­ful to get feed­back from 1-2 fun­ders (maybe Matt Wage? Maybe some­one from OpenPhil?), so that you can get some in­for­ma­tion about whether they think your eval­u­a­tion pro­cess would be of in­ter­est to them, or what might make it so. It could also be use­ful to have un­offi­cial ad­vi­sors.

  I pre­dict the pro­cess could be re­fined sig­nifi­cantly with ~3 pro­jects.

  You only need a cou­ple of vol­un­teers and you know per­haps half of the best can­di­dates, so for the pur­pose of a pi­lot, did you con­sider just ask­ing a cou­ple of peo­ple you know to do it?

  I think you should provide a ~800 word re­quest for pro­pos­als. Then you can give a much more de­tailed de­scrip­tion of who you want to ap­ply. e.g. just longter­mist pro­jects? How does this differ from the scope of EA grants, BERI, OpenPhil, etc etc? Is it suffi­cient to ap­ply with just an idea? Do you need a team? A proof of con­cept? etc etc etc.
  
  This would be strength­ened some­what by already hav­ing ob­tained the eval­u­a­tors, but this may not be im­por­tant.

• RyanCarey 19 Mar 2019 18:41 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: Girish_Sastry's comment on: SHOW: A frame­work for shap­ing your tal­ent for di­rect work

  I was in­fluenced at that time by peo­ple like Matt Fal­lshaw and Ben Toner, who thought that for suffi­ciently good in­tel­lec­tual work, fund­ing would be forth­com­ing. It seemed like in­sights were mostly what was needed to re­duce ex­is­ten­tial risks...

• RyanCarey 19 Mar 2019 15:51 UTC

  5 points

  in reply to: Girish_Sastry's comment on: SHOW: A frame­work for shap­ing your tal­ent for di­rect work

  I thought that more tech­ni­cal skills were rarer, were ne­glected in some parts of academia (e.g. in his­tory), and were the main thing hold­ing me back from be­ing able to un­der­stand pa­pers about emerg­ing tech­nolo­gies… Also, I asked Carl S, and he thought that if I was to go into re­search, these would be the best skills to get. Nowa­days, one could ask a lot more differ­ent peo­ple.

• RyanCarey 17 Mar 2019 20:30 UTC

  12 points

  on: The ca­reer co­or­di­na­tion problem

  I don’t think this idea was mine origi­nally, but it would go a long way just to have two pi charts: the cur­rent dis­tri­bu­tion of ca­reers in EA, and the op­ti­mal dis­tri­bu­tion.

• RyanCarey 13 Mar 2019 2:09 UTC

  5 points

  in reply to: aarongertler's comment on: SHOW: A frame­work for shap­ing your tal­ent for di­rect work

  Ryan/​Te­gan: Did you get your “some­thing like thirty times lower” es­ti­mate from any par­tic­u­lar re­search or­ga­ni­za­tion(s)?

  This is an or­der-of mag­ni­tude es­ti­mate based on ex­pe­rience at var­i­ous orgs. I’ve asked to be a re­search as­sis­tant for var­i­ous top re­searchers, and gen­er­ally I’m the only per­son ask­ing at that time. I’ve rarely heard from re­searchers that some­one has asked to re­search-as­sist with them. Some of this is be­cause RA job de­scrip­tions are less com­mon but I would guess that there is still an effect even when there are RA job de­scrip­tions.

SHOW: A frame­work for shap­ing your tal­ent for di­rect work

• RyanCarey 9 Mar 2019 11:46 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: ConcernedNetizen's comment on: Un­so­lic­ited Ca­reer Advice

  Cover let­ters to core EA orgs from EAs gen­er­ally in­di­cate in­ter­est in EA. It’s some­times also in­di­cated by in­volve­ment in EA groups, through a CV, by refer­ral sources, and by in­ter­views. You can pretty re­li­ably tell.

• RyanCarey 5 Mar 2019 14:27 UTC

  20 points

  in reply to: ConcernedNetizen's comment on: Un­so­lic­ited Ca­reer Advice

  Hun­dreds of EA ap­pli­cants? Most EA org roles don’t have that… I’ve been in/​around MIRI, Ought, FHI and many other EA orgs. It’s com­mon to have about a hun­dred ap­pli­cants for a role (re­search or ops) and the num­ber of EA ap­pli­cants is usu­ally in the tens.

• RyanCarey 20 Feb 2019 17:47 UTC

  12 points

  in reply to: Jorgen_Ljones's comment on: Pre-an­nounce­ment and call for feed­back: Oper­a­tions Camp 2019

  Hey Jor­gen,

  That would hon­estly be my guess. Some peo­ple would call this cyn­i­cal, but I think the amount of skills you’re go­ing to im­part in 4 days, or even with a very long ~5 week camp, are pretty limited com­pared to the vari­a­tion in peo­ple’s in­nate dis­po­si­tions, and the ex­pe­rience gained in their whole life­time be­fore­hand.