I share lessons from thousands of hours of suicide counselling calls so you can better connect to the people in your life. Listening skills can save lives. I believe CPR for the soul will be normal one day, let’s bring that day closer.
Said Bouziane
Karma: 13
Thoughts on the applicant feedback problem.
Could job application / grant application / whatever application feedback be outsourced?
Lack of feedback maybe causes a lack of improvement in applications (for jobs, grants, whatever) and keeps the entire pool of applicants (and therefore effective altruists) less competitive.
I wonder under what conditions people could benefit from one another’s feedback being visible. For example if I applied for a job and was knocked back (e.g. an EA job) and not given any feedback, how could my information gap be filled in novel ways?
Maybe outsource feedback to different people such as a curated community of HR people incentivised to contribute to a feedback pool so that future job applicants are more prepared
Maybe outsource feedback to an AI using specific training and specific templates so that questions are designed to surface blind spots
Maybe outsource feedback to structured industry specific mentorship / networking organisations
Maybe the person who didn’t hire me could visibly publish one detailed constructive criticism publicly, clearly deidentified or depersonalised
Considerations:
Maybe organisations have strong incentives to not show constructive criticism
Perhaps those incentives are more important places to intervene or problem solve?
Maybe the cost of publishing high quality constructive criticism, done effectively with the right parameters, would offer enough return to be worth it
E.g. a grants organisation publishing ‘top 10 reasons we didn’t go with x proposal’
Is this too controversial? Could the balance be struck between informative and helpful without being condescending or offensive?
If more people had more access to more quality feedback, would that likely improve ‘things’?
Good points, to play devil’s advocate it did take many decades for auto manufacturers to include seat belts by default.
It seems safety policy sometimes meets resistance by production / profit motive, despite clear evidence of cause of death.
It takes courage to put yourself out there and plant a flag in a hill (sharing an idea that you profess strong conviction in).
I’m new too and lowkey I find it quite intimidating lol because there’s literally people who post around here that have enormous influence out in the world and have done big things, so knowing all that I wanna say good on you for putting yourself out there!
I think what Camille is hinting at is something called ‘the scout versus the soldier’ mindset, if you’re not familiar with it you may like to watch this Ted talk.There’s also a really good forum guide which goes into it too, into the norms of writing around here and what kind of attitude is typically regarded highly (in other words how to write for this audience so they can receive your intended ideas with higher understanding and less misunderstanding).
Check it out if you haven’t already:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/yND9aGJgobm5dEXqF/guide-to-norms-on-the-forumEven though English isn’t your first language (or second lol) you put the arguments forward really clearly.
I believe I am picking up where you’re going, and if you haven’t already you may get a lot out of the book Ishmael by Daniel Quinn. This human chevanism you’re referring to creates lots of problems and offers a lot of utility when viewed rationally, it opens a lot of great discussions about language and how our expectations influence reality.
When you’re talking with ChatGPT it could even help to ask the robot to highlight the differences in the writing between soldier versus scout mindset, I haven’t tried this myself but I certainly want to now lol!
Thanks for sharing your thoughts Soe Lin!
Thanks for sharing this I haven’t thought about having to fight with my family over hot water in so long.
Or using the phone rather than the internet, for that matter.
Or when my mum just yanked the card out of the cable tv box and that was that, no more access to quality shows.
Or how inconvenient and annoying those big refedexes were, huge books full of maps that you had to pull over to flip back and forth through in order to drive somewhere you didn’t know.
Or the ability to just word vomit a problem and get recommended an excellent book to tackle it in precise ways that also takes context and meta info into account like when talking to an llm.
Or the fact that I can talk to relatives overseas without having to write a damn letter and wait weeks for a reply.
The list actually goes on and on now that I think about it, I’m keen to come back in here in ten or twenty years to see what I find.
You know what, I think I’ll schedule an email reminder to do just that.
[edit]Cya then, hopefully.
I like this discussion a lot thank you.
Is it about safety? I imagine it’s important to future generations as a significant artefact of history. A thousand years from now if we figure out how to make it there, probably people will treat the ISS as a kind of gateway / shrine / pilgrimage if they’re hella nerdy and feel like getting off planet matters. Totally making this up.
I do feel like politics and PR have played a big part in the space race since the start, nature of the beast.
Possibly it’s important for another longterm reason. If SpaceX is going to play the role of ferryman to future space exploring civilizations like it claims to want to do, they are essentially setting the standard.
Other private space companies are all watching, even ones that don’t exist yet (will look back through history). The choices that get made aren’t just important here for their real and current impact, but potentially also for setting the precident for future decision makers. If we act with (at least visible) integrity in these choices then what impact might that have on the court of public opinion for how we expect companies to operate?
Thank you this is 100% what I was looking for.
Thank you, I found the thoughts on incentives really interesting, you write with enough clarity to reveal the truth of what you’re talking about with psychological safety. That level of directness about strengths and capacity… it reads lightly on the page but in my experience such discussions can be so silent their absence weighs so heavily.
This looks like a really cool project, how’s it going? Is there an update or log somewhere?
I have some suggestions I hope this is welcome here and received in the spirit it’s given. I like the idea of For Futures and it seems to me like there should be way better discussion around it.
Receiving the news that the hub was shutting down is the reason I finally came here and looked around properly.
Glad I did.
Hi everyone, I’m 32 and pretty lucky in that I have a career which fits my exact personal childhood wounds getting to work in suicide prevention. As you can imagine I use the word ‘lucky’ with more than a little tongue in my cheek.
That said I’m very much wanting to have a greater impact than the one my job allows, as I’ve heard it put: your job won’t pay you what you’re worth it’ll pay you what the role is worth. I love the impact that I get to make but… if I could do it without the paperwork and admin oh boy would I ever lmao.
To that end I have a blog where I can write and spread my good cheer without needing permission. I share insights from my career, lived experience and industry experts so you can make the world more inviting for those on the fringes, basically.
People like me, people like my mum who lives with voices.
I’m keen to network with others who are writing, blogging / making content trying to make a difference. Especially people interested in creating businesses, services, digital products and the like in order to maximise good. Double especially people in Australia.
I feel like this place is exactly what I desperately needed about 20 years ago, thank you to all of you who’ve made it what it is! I hope to contribute. I’d love to get more involved in my local EA Chapter but have very little big bursts of time available, so this forum feels like the perfect way to meet in the middle.
I’m keen to meet you!
I like this post. I think I’ll try and do this much more often here as an experiment.
I mean, I’m active in many places online… as a lurker. But if I’m going to practice spreading positive good this is probably a great place to practice.
Did the thing, thank you Aaron.
I like this suggestion, I feel like the big solution we need to find in order to implement something like this really successfully is to increase tolerance for discomfort and disagreement.
I see dialogue shut down far too quickly in intellectual space.
I heard once that the old philosophers in Greece needed to state one another’s position well enough that the the person they debated with actually agreed ‘yes you understand my position, I have nothing to add’.
Only after that did debate take place.
Not sure if this is true or not but the spirit of the anecdote feels like it’s really missing from most media and discussion out there in the mainstream.
What ways could interdisciplinary cross-pollination be more cultivated?
Ah yeah thanks for informing me.