I’d like to devote my career to serving the world and its inhabitants. Currently working to reduce the suffering of farmed animals. I’m interested in many EA topics in general and always happy to connect to like-minded and non-like minded individuals ;)
SofiaBalderson
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Hey Vaidehi, thanks a lot for reading and your questions:)
1. Of the 100 strategic pairings you did, how would you break down the impact / what was the outcome of the pairings?We have only started doing strategic connections actively in August and have a follow-up time after three months of connections, so we don’t know the outcome for the majority yet. We have a system set up that notes down the input (resource provided, short or long consultation, funding, warm introduction or others) and output (tool adopted, meaningful or impactful connection, project consolidation or extension, knowledge gained, funding/volunteering/job opportunity gained, time saved, project started, co-founder paired, other). Some of the connections we have checked on had resulted in some outcomes from the above, some had no outcome, but the data we got won’t be informative yet. It is possible that long-term the impact of these connections can change too. We are going to check in on the connections in February after the survey and report back on the data in a post.
2. how do you think the AI for animals group will benefit animals? E.g. what kind of concrete outcomes do you expect to see?
It’s hard to know at this point what concrete outcomes will arise. The most ideal would be if we were able to establish a dialogue with companies that are involved with precision livestock farming and influence them to prioritize animal welfare higher than they otherwise would have. There is usually a point in intensive farming where welfare and economic gain are opposed and we would like to be in a position to influence these tradeoff decisions. With our initiatives to have animals included in the ethics frameworks in LLM companies, we are hoping that animals will have more consideration in future applications of the LLM. One hypothetical could be if someone asked for the steps to build a highway responsibly and the LLM would be more likely to advise to find and avoid cutting through any animal migration routes. Of course, we don’t expect to be able to do this on our own. Our focus on writing about AI and animals would ideally result in others feeling motivated to work on it too so this field grows faster and we can better take advantage of this window of time where changes in AI policy are easier to make. Finally, the work we do with helping animal advocates to use AI to improve their work efficiency aims to save valuable time and money in the movement.3. do you have a user survey or feedback on the relative value of the different services you provide? How do you prioritize between different initiatives?
We haven’t done extensive user surveys yet but we have done some user interviews (35 1:1 conversations) based around the needs of the community members and have incorporated some of their feedback into our strategy and programs. We also have continuous feedback being requested through all our channels.
Initially, because we started from such a small project, we were guided mainly by the feedback on the MVP experiments we conducted (which were in turn chosen because we identified a gap we thought was worth filling). Once the MVP launched and was converted into a program, the content was largely community-driven (e.g. members requesting channels). To help us decide whether a program is worth continuing, we look at the engagement indicators such as newsletter and Slack channel views, as well as talking to community members to find out whether a service is valuable. During these conversations we sometimes find more tangible impact.
We created a weighted factor model to help us choose between different programs (with Potential Impact, cost, feasibility, neglectedness and scalability as criteria). So far the highest ranking are the AI and Animals, the Slack space, resource wiki and the newsletter, with the Forum following close (largely because of the uncertainty around us being able to overcome the “cold start”). However, this model is initial, and we will be updating it based on the results of the community survey we’ll do in February.
We always have new ideas, either from ourselves or suggested. We will also ask this question in our upcoming survey to see how impactful and/or valuable these programs are to the community members and if there is something else people would like to see.
Hey Julia and Ozzie, thanks a lot for writing this! I enjoyed reading it and agree with your points, nice to see the gaps highlighted, hopefully it will lead to more people considering and starting these projects! I actually used the gap approach to start Impactful Animal Advocacy, and we now have a very active Slack space which the readers of this forum (interested in animal advocacy) are welcome to join. The main purpose is coordination and knowledge sharing in animal advocacy, and we also have a regular newsletter among other programmes like resource databases and wikis (building these up at the moment).
Thanks for reading Jessica and glad it resonated with you! I used to feel quite isolated at the beginning but I’ve been sharing my experience with other entrepreneurs and it has helped a lot to feel like my experience has been “normal” and others are going through similar stuff:)
Anything in particular do you think resonated with you, or any experience sounds different?
Thanks for reading Luke and thank you for the kind words 😊
Thanks a lot Corentin for reading and wow new org—exciting!!!
thanks for reading Simon and thanks for keeping us entrepreneurs mentally and physically healthy:)
Thanks a lot for writing this Lizka! I especially appreciate the “what you find hard” section. We really need more transparency about what successful people struggle with so that others, especially people who are just starting out, don’t feel bad for having a bad day (or a week, month, etc.). I also believe it’s valuable for other Forum users to see what happens behind the scenes, as many online products look like they “just happen” while many hours and people’s energy go into them!
As an additional benefit, if any org decides to hire for a Content Specialist this post can be very useful!
So excited for this!
I will post two things:
1. Writing about my job: Co-founder of a new charity
2. What I wish I knew when I started out in animal advocacyThank you!
Many thanks Jamie. This is very useful! How I wish though AI didn’t make things up 😂😂 it’s so keen to please us!
Hey Tristan, thanks for this! Glad you’ve found the posts useful:)
To your point about references: ideally references should be just a tick box exercise of fact checking and should testify to your character and ability to do great work. Which means that all your good references should do for all future jobs (keep in mind that most employers want two most recent places of work). Some organisations still ask questions about your ability to do that particular job which I don’t agree with as all jobs are different. To help with that I’d advise to cultivate references who believe in you and will testify to your ability to do completely new tasks. This is easier if you demonstrate in the job that you can handle new things and be good at them quickly. I personally really struggled with going from management to leadership, and if not for people who believed in me, encouraged me and saw my potential, I’d probably still be in my old role.
I think that while EA jobs and adjacent roles are preferable, remember that they are not the only options. My first three roles weren’t EA—very entry level work, but without it I’d never have gotten my subsequent animal roles. Id certainly continue job hunting in EA if I were you but I’d also be open to non EA roles simply to get experience. In the end EA roles are mostly usual roles like HR, Ops, Strategy etc, all these skills you can get outside and then come back when a role comes up. The movement is very competitive, not going to lie, but it’s definitely possible to get a role, especially if you spend time building your network from now on, and maybe have a volunteer side project. Let me know if you have any more questions, I feel like I should try and write a more suitable post for entry level folks:)
Thanks a lot for reading and for your comment Tristan! I’ve described a couple of techniques here and I think the majority can certainly be done even if you haven’t got the experience. The wishlist works well for people who already know a bit about what they like doing and have some experience of doing something, that’s true. One thing you could do is start building your wishlist. Maybe you could put what work you enjoyed at university/school, any particular projects that you found fun, and what you definitely didn’t enjoy. The purpose of the wishlist is not just to get attention but also get input into what roles might be suitable, and that’s relevant to you especially because you’re starting out.
Hey Nathan, here is some more info on the first workshop:
How bias can prevent you from hiring the best candidate:
A poorly written job description can put off diverse candidates.
A lack of universal criteria can lead to the best candidates being overlooked due to bias.
Lack of provision for inclusion during test task can miss out on some of the best performers
A process that’s not inclusive can lead to candidates dropping off
And many more!
We can’t afford to be biased when hiring, especially considering our movement’s limited resources.
Together we will look at the following:
The FAIR model of hiring
How to create a job ad that attracts the most diverse audiences
Hidden ways we can introduce bias in hiring unknowingly
How not to introduce bias via reference checks
How to remove bias from test tasks
Design the most and the least biased hiring process and spot the differences
We are confident that everyone, experienced and new hiring managers alike will come out with actionable takeaways from this important workshop.
Thanks Nathan that’s a great idea, we may publish something like this:)
Thanks a lot HIP for this great initiative, if any of the grantees affected would like to do work in animal advocacy in particular please email us to see if we can advise on next steps at [sofia at animaladvocacycareers.org] or via PM on the forum.
Thanks a lot Michel, a great addition to the post!
This is so exciting! I’m really happy that OP is investing in this. Very much looking forward to seeing all the translated content and the new community members that it will bring ☺️ Thanks so much for your work on this.
That makes sense, thanks. I wonder if the results they got were also influenced by some other practices, for example already looking in a place where there was less diversity, or advertising the job in a way that put a lot of more diverse candidates off, such as not including salary in the JD.
Hey Richard, thanks a lot for reading and for your valuable comment.
Interesting note about the DEI vs equality of opportunity point, I haven’t thought about it.I still think that we should continue in-person conferences, all I’m saying is that we need to improve the quality of online conferences and also help people to travel to offline conferences and events more easily (this is not just an EA issue, all industries who host offline events have this problem due to COVID visa application delays—we don’t know how long they will last).
I’m grateful that you pointed out the lack of evidence that removing IQ and maths tests won’t affect the quality of hire. There is certainly a lot of debate about this issue and I think that significantly more research needs to be done into this. I quite like this article that looks like past and most recent studies and summarises the conclusion whether or not we should use IQ to predict job performance:
Perhaps I should have been clearer when I argued this, as my main point is that due to the lack of high quality research and solid conclusions, we don’t know if IQ is really a good predictor of high job performance or not. Some still use IQ-like tests anyway and it will have a flow-through effect of poorer decision making due to everyone in the team with the same background and way of thinking.
Hey Matti, thanks so much for reading and for your kind comment. Glad you enjoyed it!
Really great to see you are doing this! Thank you!