sky

• sky 12 Sep 2020 23:23 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Joey’s comment on: How have you be­come more (or less) en­gaged with EA in the last year?

  Joey, could you say more what you mean by “con­cepts...that con­nect to im­pact”? I’m in­ter­ested in ex­am­ples you’re think­ing of. And whether you’re look­ing for ad­vances on those ex­am­ples or new/​differ­ent con­cepts?

Turn­ing per­centages back into peo­ple: per­son­al­iz­ing quantification

• sky 5 Sep 2020 21:05 UTC

  10 points

  in reply to: abrahamrowe’s comment on: EricHer­boso’s Shortform

  Quick meta com­ment: Thanks for ex­plain­ing your down­vote; I think that’s helpful prac­tice in general

• sky 5 Sep 2020 20:48 UTC

  13 points

  on: sky’s Shortform

  Quick thoughts on turn­ing per­centages back into people

  Oc­ca­sion­ally, I ex­per­i­ment with differ­ent ways to grok prob­a­bil­ities and statis­tics for my­self, start­ing from the ba­sics. It also in­volves pay­ing at­ten­tion to my emo­tions, and imag­in­ing how differ­ent ex­pla­na­tions would work for differ­ent stu­dents. (I’m of­ten a men­tor/​work­shop pre­sen­ter for col­lege stu­dents). If your brain is like mine or you like see­ing how other peo­ple’s brains work, this may be of in­ter­est.

  One trick that has worked well for me is turn­ing %s back into people

  Ex­am­ple: I think my Pro­ject X can solve a prob­lem for more peo­ple than it’s cur­rently do­ing. I have a sur­vey (N=1200) which says I’m cur­rently solv­ing a prob­lem for 1% of the peo­ple im­pacted by Is­sue X. I think I can definitely make that num­ber go up. Also, I re­ally want that num­ber to go up; 1% seems so paltry.

  I might start with:Ok, how likely do I think it is that 1% could go up to 5%, 10%, 20%?

  But I think this is the wrong ques­tion to start with for me. I want to in­form my in­tu­itions about what is likely or prob­a­ble, but this all feels su­per hy­po­thet­i­cal. I know I’m go­ing to want to say 20%, be­cause I have a bunch of ideas and 20% is still low! The %s here feel too fuzzy to ground me in re­al­ity.

  Alter­na­tive: Turn 1% of 1200 back into 12 peo­ple

  This is 12 peo­ple who say they are pos­i­tively im­pacted by Pro­ject X.

  This helps me re­mem­ber that no one is a statis­tic. (A post which may have in­spired this idea to be­gin with). So, yay, 12 peo­ple!

  But go­ing from 1% to 5% still sounds un­am­bi­tious and un­satis­fy­ing. I like am­bi­tious, tena­cious, hope­ful goals when it comes to peo­ple get­ting the solu­tions they’re look­ing for. That’s the whole point of the pro­ject, af­ter all. Some­times, I can phys­i­cally feel the stress over this ten­sion. I want this num­ber to be 100%! I want the prob­lem solved-solved, not kinda-solved.

  At this point, maybe I could re­mind my­self or a stu­dent that “should­ing at the uni­verse” is a recipe for frus­tra­tion. I love that con­cept, and some­times it works. But of­ten, that’s just an­other way of should­ing at my­self. The fact re­mains that I don’t want to be less am­bi­tious about solv­ing prob­lems that I know are real prob­lems for real peo­ple.

  I try the per­cents-to-peo­ple tech­nique again:

  • Turn 5% of 1200 back into 60 peo­ple. Oh. That’s 48 ad­di­tional peo­ple. Also no­tice: it’s only 60 peo­ple if we’re talk­ing about 48 ad­di­tional peo­ple, while los­ing 0.

  • Turn 10% back into 120 peo­ple. 108 ad­di­tional peo­ple, while los­ing 0.

  • Turn 20% back into 240 peo­ple. 228 ad­di­tional peo­ple, while los­ing 0.

  • So, an in­crease of 5% or 20% is the differ­ence be­tween 48 or 228 ad­di­tional peo­ple reached. I know about this pro­gram be­cause I work on it, and I know how much goes into Pro­ject X right now to reach 12 peo­ple. I’m sure there are things we could do differ­ently, but are they differ­ent enough to reach 228+ ad­di­tional peo­ple?

  Now this feels differ­ent. It’s hum­bling. But it piques my cu­ri­os­ity again in­stead of my frus­tra­tion: how would we at­tempt that? Could we?

  • What else do I need to know, to figure out if 60 or 120 or 240 (...or 1000, or 10000) is any­where within the realm of pos­si­bil­ities for me?

  • Do I have a clear idea about what my bot­tle­necks or mis­takes are in the sta­tus quo, such that I think there are 48 more peo­ple to reach (while still reach­ing the 12)? What pro­cesses would need to change, and how much?

  • This im­me­di­ately brings up the re­sponse, “That de­pends on how long I have.” (Woot, now I’ve just grokked why it’s use­ful to time-bound ex­am­ples for com­par­i­son’s sake). We could call it 1 year, or 3, or 10, etc. I per­son­ally think 1-3 years is usu­ally eas­ier to con­cep­tu­al­ize and op­er­a­tional­ize.

  • Also, what­ever I do next, it’s ob­vi­ously go­ing to take no­table effort. I know I can only do so much work in a day. (I prob­a­bly hate this truth the most. This is definitely where I re­mind my­self not to should at the uni­verse). Now I won­der, is this definitely the pro­gram where I want to fo­cus my effort for a while? Why? What if there are prob­lems up­stream of this one that I could put my effort to­ward in­stead? …aha, now my un­der­stand­ing of why peo­ple care about cause pri­ori­ti­za­tion just got deeper and more per­son­ally in­tu­itive. This is a topic for an­other post.

  To re­turn to per­centages, here’s one more ex­am­ple. Per­centages can also feel daunt­ing in­stead of un­am­bi­tious:

  • Go­ing from 12 to 60 peo­ple is a 400% in­crease. (Right? I haven’t mis­calcu­lated some­thing ba­sic? Yes, that’s right; thank you, on­line calcu­la­tors). 400%! Is that mad­ness?

  • Turn ’400% in­crease’ back into 4 ad­di­tional peo­ple reached, for ev­ery 1 per­son reached now.

  That may still be daunt­ing. But it may be eas­ier to make es­ti­mates or com­pare my in­tu­itions about differ­ent ac­tion plans this way.

  If you (or your stu­dents) are like me, this is a use­ful ap­proach. It gets me into the headspace of imag­in­ing cre­ative pos­si­bil­ities to solve prob­lem X, while still ground­ing my­self within some con­crete pa­ram­e­ters rather than los­ing my­self to should­ing.

• sky 1 Sep 2020 22:33 UTC

  9 points

  on: sky’s Shortform

  We­bi­nar to­mor­row: ex­plor­ing solu­tions jour­nal­ism [for EA writ­ers]:

  If EA jour­nal­ists and writ­ers are plan­ning to cover EA top­ics, I think a solu­tions jour­nal­ism an­gle will usu­ally be the most nat­u­ral fit.

  The Solu­tions Jour­nal­ism Net­work “train[s] and con­nect[s] jour­nal­ists to cover what’s miss­ing in to­day’s news: how peo­ple are re­spond­ing to prob­lems.”

  The Solu­tions Jour­nal­ism Net­work is hav­ing a we­bi­nar to­mor­row: https://​​zoom.us/​​we­bi­nar/​​reg­ister/​​WN_Qcbxqd-uRvyvy1OnvVaIPg

  Solu­tions journalism

  “Can be char­ac­ter-driven, but fo­cuses in-depth on a re­sponse to a prob­lem and how the re­sponse works in mean­ingful detail

  • Fo­cuses on effec­tive­ness, not good in­ten­tions, pre­sent­ing available ev­i­dence of results

  • Dis­cusses the limi­ta­tions of the approach

  • Seeks to provide in­sight that oth­ers can use”

  This is still a less com­mon me­dia an­gle. The qual­ity of cov­er­age will clearly still vary a lot de­pend­ing on one’s re­search, ed­i­to­rial in­put, etc, but this is a bet­ter fit than many other me­dia an­gles one could take to cover top­ics of in­ter­est to you in EA.

  More info on this type of jour­nal­ism: https://​​www.solu­tion­sjour­nal­ism.org/​​

• sky 10 Jun 2020 22:24 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Danny Lipsitz’s comment on: EAGxVir­tual Un­con­fer­ence (Satur­day, June 20th 2020)

  Definitely, I think for many peo­ple, the dona­tions ex­am­ple works. And I like the fire­fighter ex­am­ple too, es­pe­cially if some­one has had first re­spon­der ex­pe­rience or has been in an emer­gency.

  I’m cu­ri­ous what hap­pens if one starts with a toy prob­lem that arises from or feels di­rectly ap­pli­ca­ble to a true co­nun­drum in the listener’s own daily life, to illus­trate that pri­ori­ti­za­tion be­tween press­ing prob­lems is some­thing we are always do­ing, be­cause we are finite be­ings who of­ten have press­ing prob­lems! I think when I started learn­ing about EA via dona­tion ex­am­ples, I made the er­ror of cat­e­go­riz­ing EA as only use­ful for spe­cial cases, such as when some­one has ‘ex­tra’ re­sources to donate. So, GiveWell sounded like a use­ful source of the ‘the right an­swer’ on a nar­row prob­lem like find­ing recom­mended char­i­ties, which gave me a limited view of what EA was for and didn’t grab me much. I came to EA via GiveWell rather than read­ing any of the philos­o­phy, which prob­a­bly would have helped me un­der­stand the ba­sis for what they were do­ing bet­ter :).

  When I was faced with real life trade-offs that I re­ally did not want to make but knew that I must, and some­one walked me through an EA anal­y­sis of it, EA sud­denly seemed much more leg­ible and use­ful to me.

  Have you seen your stu­dents pick up on the pri­ori­ti­za­tion ideas right away, or find it use­ful to use EA anal­y­sis on prob­lems in their own life?

• sky 10 Jun 2020 2:23 UTC

  8 points

  in reply to: Danny Lipsitz’s comment on: EAGxVir­tual Un­con­fer­ence (Satur­day, June 20th 2020)

  I’m ex­cited about this! I ac­tu­ally came here to see if some­one had already cov­ered this or if I should ☺️. I’d love to see a teacher walk through this.

  Here’s an idea I’d been cu­ri­ous to try out talk­ing or teach­ing about EA, but haven’t yet. I’d be cu­ri­ous if you’ve tried it or want to (very happy to see some­one else take the idea off my hands). I think we of­ten skim over a key idea too fast—that we each have finite re­sources and so does hu­man­ity. That’s what makes pri­ori­ti­za­tion and will­ing­ness to name the trade offs we’re go­ing to make such an im­por­tant tool. I know I per­son­ally nod­ded along at the idea of finite re­sources at first, but it’s easy to carry along with the S1 sense that there will be more X some­where that could solve hard trade-offs we don’t want to make. I won­der if start­ing the con­ver­sa­tion there would work bet­ter for many peo­ple than e.g. start­ing with cost-effec­tive­ness. Com­mon sense ex­am­ples like hav­ing limited hours in the day or a finite fam­ily bud­get and need­ing to choose be­tween things that are re­ally im­por­tant to you but don’t all fit is an idea that I think makes sense to many peo­ple, and start­ing with this fa­mil­iar build­ing block could be a bet­ter foun­da­tion for un­der­stand­ing or at­tempt­ing their own EA anal­y­sis.

A mes­sage to com­mu­nity mem­bers, in light of global protests for racial justice

• sky 21 May 2020 11:13 UTC

  1 point

  on: Call notes with Johns Hop­kins CHS

  I also found this helpful—ap­pre­ci­ate it

• sky 18 May 2020 14:26 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: AnonymousEAForumAccount’s comment on: Ra­cial De­mo­graph­ics at Longter­mist Organizations

  Thanks for adding that re­source, Anon.

• sky 4 May 2020 14:58 UTC

  33 points

  on: Ra­cial De­mo­graph­ics at Longter­mist Organizations

  Thanks for do­ing this anal­y­sis! My pro­ject plans for 2020 (at CEA) in­clude more efforts to an­a­lyze and ad­dress the im­pacts of di­ver­sity efforts in EA.

  I’d be in­ter­ested in be­ing in touch with the au­thor if they’re open to it, and with oth­ers who have ideas, ques­tions, rele­vant anal­y­sis, plans, con­cerns, etc.

  I’m hope­ful that EAs, like the au­thor and com­menters here, can thought­fully iden­tify or de­velop effec­tive di­ver­sity efforts. I think we can take wise ac­tions that avoid com­mon pit­falls, so that EA is strong and flex­ible enough as a field to be a good “home base” for highly al­tru­is­tic, highly an­a­lyt­i­cal peo­ple from many back­grounds. I’m look­ing for­ward to con­tinued col­lab­o­ra­tion with y’all, if you’d like to be in touch: sky@cen­treea.org.

• sky 29 Mar 2020 13:18 UTC

  3 points

  on: What posts do you want some­one to write?

  Posts on how peo­ple came to their val­ues, how much in­di­vi­d­u­als find them­selves op­ti­miz­ing for cer­tain val­ues, and how EA anal­y­sis is/​isn’t rele­vant. Bonus for points for re­sources for talk­ing about this with other peo­ple.

  I’d like to have more “In­tro to EA” con­vos that start with, “When I’m pri­ori­tiz­ing val­ues like [X, Y, Z], I’ve found EA re­ally helpful. It’d be less rele­vant if I val­ued [ABC ] in­stead, and it seems less rele­vant in those times when I pri­ori­tize other things. What do you value? How/​When do you want to pri­ori­tize that? How would you ex­plore that?”

  I think per­sonal sto­ries here would be illus­tra­tive.

• sky 28 Mar 2020 21:04 UTC

  2 points

  on: sky’s Shortform

  Should re­duc­ing par­ti­san­ship be a higher pri­or­ity cause area (for me)?

  I think poli­ti­cal po­lariza­tion in the US pro­duces a whole heap of re­ally bad so­cietal/​policy out­comes and makes oth­er­wise good policy out­comes ~im­pos­si­ble. It has always seemed rel­a­tively im­por­tant to me, be­cause when things go wrong in the US, they of­ten have global con­se­quences. I haven’t put that many of my ac­tual re­sources here though be­cause it’s a drain­ing cause to work on and didn’t feel that tractable. I also sus­pected my­self of mo­ti­vated rea­son­ing: I get deep joy from in­ter-group co­op­er­a­tion and am very dis­tressed by in­ter-group con­flict.

  Then I read things like the thread be­low and feel like not pay­ing more at­ten­tion to this is fool­ish, like I’ve gone too far in the other di­rec­tion and un­der­weighted the im­por­tance of this bar­rier to global co­or­di­na­tion. I imag­ine oth­ers have writ­ten about similar ques­tions and I would be in­ter­ested in more thoughts.

  https://​​twit­ter.com/​​CT_Bergstrom/​​sta­tus/​​1243265011788611584

sky’s Shortform

• sky 24 Mar 2020 13:01 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Aidan O'Gara’s comment on: After one year of ap­ply­ing for EA jobs: It is re­ally, re­ally hard to get hired by an EA organisation

  Hi Ai­dan, I’m re­ally late to this thread, but found it in­ter­est­ing. If you don’t mind com­ing back in time, could you clar­ify this:

  “I think part of what might be driv­ing the differ­ence of opinion here is that the type of EAs that need a 45 minute chat are not the type of EAs that 80k meets.”

  I imag­ine this is true for a lot of EA org staff. It sounded from Howie’s com­ment like it’s prob­a­bly less true for coaches at 80K, though, com­pared to other EA org staff.

  Howie’s com­ment:

  “We try to make sure that we talk to the peo­ple we think we’re best placed to help with coach­ing in other ways too, for ex­am­ple some of our ad­vice and many of the con­nec­tions we can make are par­tic­u­larly valuable for peo­ple who don’t already have lots of cur­rent links to other effec­tive al­tru­ists.”

  I find the net­work con­strained hy­poth­e­sis in­ter­est­ing and am in­ter­ested in ex­plor­ing it, so I think clar­ify­ing our mod­els here seems useful

• sky 3 Mar 2020 14:51 UTC

  3 points

  on: EA Sur­vey 2019 Series: Com­mu­nity De­mo­graph­ics & Characteristics

  I find my­self nav­i­gat­ing to this page a lot re­cently, thanks for pub­lish­ing!

  Quick UX re­quest: could you up­date this post with links to sub­se­quent posts in the se­ries? I’m of­ten hunt­ing around try­ing to find var­i­ous pieces of data, and would find that su­per helpful for user nav­i­ga­tion, rather than search­ing on the ti­tle.

• sky 29 Jan 2020 20:15 UTC

  17 points

  in reply to: rosiecampbell’s comment on: The EA Ho­tel is now the Cen­tre for En­abling EA Learn­ing & Re­search (CEEALAR)

  I think it’s worth not­ing that the acronym for the Athena Cen­ter for EA Study is ACES! :)

• sky 8 Dec 2019 22:40 UTC

  4 points

  on: What to know be­fore talk­ing with jour­nal­ists about EA

  FYI: I’ve up­dated this post to show that we now have an email ad­dress for re­quests for me­dia help: me­dia@cen­treea.org

• sky 4 Dec 2019 20:40 UTC

  15 points

  in reply to: Jonas Vollmer’s comment on: What to know be­fore talk­ing with jour­nal­ists about EA

  Thanks for adding this, Jonas. I just added a brief blurb that I think is re­lated to this. (See the sec­tion about re­quired skills, where I’ve added a note about be­ing per­son­able but will­ing to be “awk­ward”). Th­ese are the kinds of tips I’d usu­ally dis­cuss and re­hearse with some­one in an in­ter­view prac­tice ses­sion. I no­tice this post is more about how to eval­u­ate a me­dia op­por­tu­nity and self-as­sess readi­ness, rather than what to do dur­ing an ac­tual in­ter­view. The lat­ter is some­thing I talk more about with peo­ple when we’re re­hears­ing for a spe­cific in­ter­view.

  When re­hears­ing mock in­ter­views with peo­ple, I’ve no­ticed that the point you raise is one of the things that most trips peo­ple up though, which I think is un­der­stand­able.

  If some­one asks you, “Some peo­ple have said but­ter is blue. Do you think that’s true?”, it’s al­most a knee-jerk re­sponse to an­swer “Really? No, I don’t think but­ter is blue. I be­lieve but­ter is white or yel­low, be­cause....”. The prob­lem is that our nat­u­ral in­stinct here works against us. “EAs ‘don’t think but­ter is blue’” is a much weirder and more in­trigu­ing quote than, “EAs ‘think but­ter is white or yel­low.’”

  It’s takes prac­tice to get out of this habit and en­sure that the words you say con­sist only of words you want to ap­pear in the ar­ti­cle, with­out giv­ing fod­der to com­pet­ing/​dis­tract­ing/​in­ac­cu­rate mes­sages. (You might still be mis­rep­re­sented or mi­s­un­der­stood even then, but this is one strat­egy to lower that risk). The ad­vice of in­ter­view coaches is just what you said, Jonas: that you should start right in de­scribing your ac­tual be­liefs, and not re­peat the ques­tion.

  It can look some­thing like this:

  Q: Some peo­ple have said but­ter is blue. Do you think that’s true?

  [Take a breath, smile, omit the first part of the re­sponse that comes into your head. Say,..]

  A: Ac­tu­ally, I think but­ter is white or yel­low. [or]

  A: Ac­tu­ally, I don’t think that’s within my area of ex­per­tise.

  [Pause. Let it be awk­ward if needed, wait for a new ques­tion]. [or]

  A: Hm, no; what I do think is true is...[(pos­si­bly un­re­lated) point that you want to give a good quote about in or­der to com­mu­ni­cate with your read­ers/​view­ers].

  The last ap­proach can feel es­pe­cially awk­ward, but can be very effec­tive in avoid­ing click­bait quotes and pro­vid­ing con­tent you ac­tu­ally want to be quoted.

• sky 12 Nov 2019 4:05 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Jess Kinchen Smith’s comment on: What posts you are plan­ning on writ­ing?

  I would per­son­ally find this very use­ful!