All power to you then—what’s the business?
SiobhanBall
Karma: 1,021
I’m not sure. The claim that cold outreach signals a lack of respect for boundaries is unnecessary moralising that I don’t put stock in. If your point is simply that it doesn’t work, people can find that out for themselves; I don’t think the externalities are so negative that donors need you to act as their mouthpiece on this. You’ve apologised for sounding patronising towards fundraisers; I’d be more concerned about coming across as patronising to donors, who themselves are not a homogeneous group. Some will be more receptive to thoughtful, targeted outreach than others, especially if the underlying project or work is persuasive.
I’m also uneasy with the alternative being proposed, of becoming ‘legibly excellent’ to the small set of advisers a donor already trusts. That may be good advice for organisations already close to those networks. But as a community norm—one frequently criticised as elitist—I read it as ‘don’t approach new donors directly; instead, prove yourselves to the existing gatekeepers and hope we choose to let you through.’
This post criticises people for opportunistically inserting their own projects into conversations about Anthropic wealth—while repeatedly emphasising the author’s own proximity to these donors, highlighting his own fund, and ending by recommending his own advisory. Ironically, I’m left wondering whether part of the concern about cold outreach is that, when it does work, it allows organisations to bypass the existing intermediaries. Middlemen tend not to be enthusiastic about that.
I thought the section on scaling was useful, though.
I strongly agree with this. Veganism should remain the gold standard. Not everyone has to reach that bar to help animals, but credit where it’s due.
Just want to specify that by ‘alternative proteins’, my vote entirely stands for cultivated meat; not the other alternatives which I believe will have a relatively tiny role to play in the big scheme of things.
Thanks, this is helpful and clarifies the crux.
Your BOTEC seems to depend on the assumption that the people hired through the open process will be roughly twice as impactful as the best people available through a closed process. That seems like a big uncertainty, but I appreciate it was a rough sketch.
If the open process produced people who are 2x as impactful, then yes, 120 additional hours looks very worthwhile. But if the difference is much smaller, or if a semi-closed process would have brought in the same people (which is why I wanted to know whether the two you mentioned were found via personal outreach/sourcing), then the case becomes less clear.
To run such a round for communication or marketing/SEO value is a novel approach, but isn’t without cost in terms of the sheer numbers of people spending time applying.I wouldn’t say that open hiring should never be used, but that orgs should stop defaulting to elaborate processes when targeted hiring may be more efficient. I agree with your final point that an open round may not be worth it in some cases.
Anyway, thanks again for writing this up.
Hi Romain, thanks for engaging!
1. Sorry, I wasn’t clear. I meant the cost of the 160 hours of staff time. Was that 160 hours total across the team, or 160 hours per person involved? Either way, do you have a rough estimate of the monetary value of that time?
2. If the outreach/referrals bucket produced the two strongest candidates but cannot be decomposed further, then it seems hard to know which part of the process generated the most value. It also makes it hard to tell whether a closed or semi-closed round would have been cheaper and more efficient in this case.
3. From your description, I’d imagine that skills had already been assessed before the final interview. I’m curious what, specifically, was missing among the final interviewees who did not meet the bar. Was the final interview surfacing new disqualifying information, or were they strong and hireable candidates facing a limited number of positions?
4. On retention, I’m surprised that two of the three hires staying one year would already count as a great success. Given the time invested by the team, and by many candidates, I would have thought the process would need to produce longer-term retention of exceptional talent. One year seems like a low bar for such a high bar, especially if you then have to run a similar round again.
To be upfront, I am sceptical that typical EA hiring processes are a judicious use of donor money (or candidate time). I may be wrong, but that is why I’m interested in the numbers here. If there is a more efficient way to hire, one should try to find it rather than defaulting to process templates from other organisations.
Transparent write-ups like this are valuable because they let us examine the trade-offs directly. My underlying question is whether an organisation could get most of the value by starting with a much smaller pool: top referrals, strong previous finalists, or otherwise directly sourced candidates, before running a large open process.
Thanks for writing this up! I appreciate the level of transparency, and would like to see more orgs write up their hiring processes in the same way here.
Some questions (to help me test my pre-existing view that closed or semi-closed rounds should be used more often when hiring for EA orgs):
1. You mentioned 160 hours spent on this round. What was the total cost?
2. You note that outreach/referrals produced the two strongest candidates. This category is split into newsletter, direct LinkedIn outreach, and personal sourcing/warm referrals. How many candidates, late-stage candidates, finalists, or hires came from each of those—especially LinkedIn outreach and personal sourcing or referrals?
3. Would you consider only using the niche job board next time, at least in the first instance, in order to reduce number of candidates and therefore staff time spent assessing?
4. Since this round produced 9 final interviewees (so made it to the top 2.1% of the entire pool, or the top ~4.8% of those who passed initial screening), will you defer to those people before opening a round next time?5. Roughly how long would the selected people need to stay in post for you to feel the process had paid off?
6. Do you know how many of the strongest candidates were already in similar roles when they applied? I’m wondering whether the strongest people for roles like these are already doing similar work and are therefore less likely to want to engage in an open round than active jobseekers.
This could be of interest: support reporting projects that document and explain the opportunities, harms, and regulatory and labor issues surrounding AI systems https://pulitzercenter.org/blog/open-call-proposals-pulitzer-centers-ai-accountability-fellowships-2026-2027
Given how many people apply for these roles, I don’t understand the struggle. I just attended EAG, which was packed to the rafters with people who have done the bootcamps/courses/programs looking for a way in to a high-impact org; many of them with serious experience in things like journalism, business operations, and academic publishing. EA appears well-manned enough to treat such valuable talent as volunteers/metrics for their career programs; I don’t believe that there is an under-supply issue. I think there aren’t enough jobs.
Understood. I was responding to what I assumed OP was getting at, regardless of how poorly framed, and your specific naming of chemicals threw me off. Thanks for clarifying.
What would need to happen for you to stand down on AI safety?
I’m not saying you should. I’m not saying you will. But what evidence would make you substantially less concerned than you are today?I’ve been asking people at EAG London some variation of two questions:
How worried are you about the economic and existential risks from AI?
What is the ‘expiry date’ of those worries?
This may seem leading, as if I’m implying that I’m not fully convinced by the broader arguments. Well, I’m not… not. My position is that I’m under-informed. But I still want to know how those better informed than I think about the limits of their concern.
So… is it a matter of time? If nothing substantially bad has happened in 10 years, will we stop fearing? Or is it a matter of meeting certain benchmarks of cooperation? Could it be when governments figure out a method of wealth redistribution that doesn’t result in societal decline?
Let me know your thoughts!
Change ‘alternative proteins’ to ‘cultivated meat’ and then I agree almost entirely.
I don’t think humanity will ever give up meat of our own volition. I’m not even sure that all the collective efforts and actions of vegans/vegetarians/advocates have caused a counterfactual decrease in meat production. I’m thinking about posing that question on here in its own post.
But once there’s an alternative to slaughter meat that tastes the same, is priced the same, and enjoys enough public acceptance to be bought in small-at-first, then swiftly increasing volumes… only then will factory farming stop existing. If there’s another path to ending factory farming in our lifetimes, then I don’t see it. And the downvotes I get when I talk about this dun’t help me see it, neither (grumpy cat face).
All else is re-arranging furniture on the Titanic, I fear.
Of course, the path is far from guaranteed. I’m personally on a quest to get to the fundamentals of what the path truly entails, what are the things holding it back, how do we win the fight for public acceptance (perhaps this is the most challenging potential ‘failure mode’), what are the tech barriers, how can they be overcome, how much investment is still needed (a lot), and on and on.
Good post, perhaps we can move towards being less apologetic in stating our conviction for alternative proteins and/or cultivated meat. I’m fine with APs, I just think they’re a stop-gap on the train to cultivated-town.
Can you explain how they’re the same?
Great post, not sure what to suggest. Thanks for publishing.
Thanks for this post! It’s clear, clever, and thought-provoking.
I’d push back on the moralising of salespeople. The reason they don’t necessarily worry about whether it will be ‘good’ for you to buy what they’re selling, and why that’s okay, is because you are the authority on that. Salespeople are not responsible for everyone’s experience of the world or the varying degree of appetite-to-be-sold-to among different people. What you find jarring, others might find refreshing.
In any case, thanks for showing that working with freelancers is often far more cost-effective than hiring an employee, due to reduced discovery costs. I’m all for orgs making quicker decisions to reduce the true cost of engagement from their side; why, you could book a call with me right now if you happened to need a good writer.
If you don’t book a call, and later discover you needed a good writer after all, you’ll have to pay the discovery costs you just described. So, is the marginal benefit of continuing the search (assuming, for argument’s sake, that more time spent tracks linearly to a better result) worth the additional transaction costs of looking beyond this comment?EA orgs should work with freelancers more often and, moreover, start applying a true cost effectiveness analysis to the way hiring is done. They seem to under-account for the transaction costs they themselves impose. For example, I know of an EA org with a specific policy against screening candidates during EAG, prioritising their remote process instead. A whole room full of potential hires who have already been somewhat screened for alignment, and basically no evidence that their in-house process produces better results for the extra cost. What could the counter-factual impact of those savings be? Small in the big scheme of things, perhaps, but worth considering.
Is anybody here doing something about the most recent ebola outbreak?
I am, yeah. I don’t think reasonable enquiry or more discussion is likely to shift the dominant narrative on a topic this inflammatory. The reactions to the CEA post made that clear.
I reckon there is more internal conflict; it’s just not being disclosed.
‘To me, this isn’t some carvout for sexual harassment, it’s trying to treat discussion of sexual harassment like I treat everything else.’This is a thankless endeavour. The topic is too emotionally heated, and the social incentives are too skewed towards what you’ve seen.
My own view is that the topic of whether there is or isn’t a particular problem with sexual harassment in EA has become a distraction. If there are concrete failures, name them and fix them. If there are clear policies that might improve things, propose them. But the ambient claim that EA is unusually bad is under-evidenced to me too, and I don’t think the community benefits from treating that as the default frame.
I largely agree, the plight of animals is being looked past … as is the only somewhat realistic solution to factory farming (and, therefore, the implications of AI on factory farming).
All or most funding currently allocated towards animal welfare in EA ought to be focused on but one intervention, in my view: policy advocacy to help get cultivated meat on supermarket shelves ASAP. No other intervention offers comparable upside (in terms of reduced suffering) of even a modest market penetration of cultivated meat.
I don’t see another way to end factory farming in our lifetimes.
Just one person’s strongly held view, though I’m also pleased to see Bruce Friedrich’s talk at EAG next week titled ‘the only tractable solution to industrial animal farming’. See some of you there!
Hi Jack, thanks for sharing your experience. Mine is that I’ve had success from reaching out to donors cold before. No donor is going to say, ‘I love cold outreach, please inundate my inbox’; they may nevertheless respond to an attempt if it’s done well. The comment you linked to suggests ways to improve outreach; it doesn’t seem to dismiss cold outreach wholesale.
Whether or not that’s a generous description is semantics; you’re writing off cold outreach as a category. Thoughtful, targeted outreach falls within that category. Or have I misunderstood—would you be okay with cold outreach provided that it’s done in the way I describe?
I appreciate your recognition that this post’s concern for the wider harms is somewhat cheapened by the self-promotion. And I see no problem with this kind of self-congratulatory rhetoric from a marketing perspective. I’d just hate for someone representing impactful work to read this post and think, ‘I’d better not shoot my shot.’ That would be a shame.