Tee

• Tee 8 Apr 2024 15:56 UTC

  0 points

  1 ∶ 0

  on: Choose your own odyssey: re­sults & in­sights from Tee Bar­nett Coach­ing Train­ing (TBCT)

  EA Forum note: I’ve cleared with the Forum team that I can offer free 20-minute calls as a ‘thank you’ for the first 10 people that leave thoughtful and engaging private or public comments. These short calls can be mini-sessions, coaching AMA, a catchup, or used any other way you’d like!

Choose your own odyssey: re­sults & in­sights from Tee Bar­nett Coach­ing Train­ing (TBCT)

• Tee 13 Oct 2023 9:54 UTC

  5 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Should we in­vest more in sup­port­ing al­tru­ists to be at their best? (Men­tal health + pro­duc­tivity)

  Thanks to Seb and others for putting in the effort to get clarity in this area for the community.
  
  Very briefly before I circle back for a more substantive round of commenting – noting that I haven’t dug into all of the studies that these quantitative estimates are predicated upon, I wasn’t able to find mention of staff “turnover /​ churn ” or anything of the sort in this report.
  
  If it’s the case that estimates within this report, and/​or quantitative estimates within studies that this report draws from, do not include an approximation of costs from staff turnover /​ churn, I’d be very surprised if they didn’t have at least a noticeable effect on estimates like those found in this report.
  
  I’d imagine HR professionals would care a lot about costs associated with turnover /​ churn. Anyone who has needed to replace someone understands firsthand how much of a heavy lift that can be, including the shared bandwidth burden of needing to cover duties that trickle onto everyone else. (This often strains multiple people)
  
  My eye test from coaching EAs struggling with various aspects of their job is that a nontrivial proportion of them are often considering leaving entirely. And in fact, some number of former clients of mine have left organizations after protracted periods of comparatively low productivity and comparatively low overall wellness.
  
  To spell out the implications of what I’m saying a bit more, should staff turnover have any kind of meaningful effect on organizational costs, the value of implementing various staff wellness interventions should go up if it improves retention
  
  Seb had a preference for me to include as a comment here. Curious for thoughts!

• Tee 27 Jul 2023 9:16 UTC

  1 point

  1 ∶ 2

  on: Launch­ing the meta char­ity fund­ing cir­cle (MCF): Ap­ply for fund­ing or join as a donor!

  Just applied for TBCT! Incredibly happy to see this get set up. What a gift for this community it could be

• Tee 27 Jul 2023 8:54 UTC

  1 point

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Devon Fritz’s comment on: Launch­ing the meta char­ity fund­ing cir­cle (MCF): Ap­ply for fund­ing or join as a donor!

  I was just thinking this

Coach­ing match­mak­ing is now open: in­vest in com­mu­nity well­ness by in­vest­ing in yourself

• Tee 28 Mar 2023 12:35 UTC

  1 point

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: DLMRBN’s comment on: Coach­ing Train­ing Pro­gram Launch: build and up­skill your prac­tice with Tee Bar­nett Coach­ing Train­ing (TBCT)

  My pleasure and thanks for saying that. Happy to add more popular questions to that section as they come

Coach­ing Train­ing Pro­gram Launch: build and up­skill your prac­tice with Tee Bar­nett Coach­ing Train­ing (TBCT)

• Tee 22 Nov 2022 13:36 UTC

  7 points

  1 ∶ 0

  in reply to: LukeDing’s comment on: The FTX crisis high­lights a deeper cul­tural prob­lem within EA—we don’t suffi­ciently value good governance

  Can confirm that Luke was a huge proponent of this from our interactions from ~2016 – ~2019. It’s one of the primary reasons Rethink Charity created and maintained our governance structure, which I thought was only moderately good but likely above average relative to what I’ve seen and heard about in the community

Re­place­abil­ity v. ‘Con­tex­tu­al­ized Wor­thi­ness’

• Tee 13 May 2022 14:16 UTC

  21 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Kirsten’s comment on: Some clar­ifi­ca­tions on the Fu­ture Fund’s ap­proach to grantmaking

  I’ve got a similar feeling to Khorton. Happy to have been pre-empted there.
  
  It could be helpful to consider what it is that legibility in the grant application process (for which post-application feedback is only one sort) is meant to achieve. Depending on the grant maker’s aims, this can non-exhaustively include developing and nurturing talent, helping future applicants self-select, orienting projects on whether they are doing a good job, being a beacon and marketing instrument, clarifying and staking out an epistemic position, serving an orientation function for the community etc.
  
  And depending on the basket of things the grant maker is trying to achieve, different pieces of legibility affect ‘efficiency’ in the process. For example, case studies and transparent reasoning about accepted and rejected projects, published evaluations, criteria for projects to consider before applying, hazard disclaimers, risk profile declarations, published work on the grant makers theory of change, etc. can give grant makers ‘published’ content to invoke during the post-application process that allows for the scaling of feedback. (e.g. our website states that we don’t invest in projects that rapidly accelerate ‘x’). There are other forms of pro-active communication and stratifying applicant journeys that would make things even more efficient.
  
  FTX did what they did, and there is definitely a strong case for why they did it that way. In moving forward , I’d be curious to see if they acknowledge and make adjustments in light of the fact that different forms and degrees of legibility can affect the community.
  
  
  

• Tee 12 May 2022 11:46 UTC

  7 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Nick_Beckstead’s comment on: Some clar­ifi­ca­tions on the Fu­ture Fund’s ap­proach to grantmaking

  why it’s at least a non-obvious decision
  
  Will we provide feedback to rejected applicants in the future? Possibly, but I think this involves complex tradeoffs and isn’t a no-brainer
  
  So I don’t think we should be doing this now, but I’m not saying that we won’t try to find ways to give more feedback in the future (see below).

  
  Very much appreciate the considerate engagement with this. Wanted to flag that my primary response to your initial comment can be found here.
  
  All this makes a lot of sense to me. I suspect some people got value out of the presentation of this reasoning. My goal here was to bring this set of consideration to yours and Sam’s attention and upvote its importance, hopefully it’s factored into what is definitely non-obvious and complex to decide moving forward. Great to see how thoughtful you all have been and thanks again!

• Tee 11 May 2022 19:39 UTC

  9 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Tee’s comment on: Some clar­ifi­ca­tions on the Fu­ture Fund’s ap­proach to grantmaking

  Okay, upon review, that was a little bit too much of a rhetorical flourish at the end. Basically, I think there’s something seriously important to consider here about how process can negatively affect community health and alignment, which I believe to be important for this community in achieving the plurality of ambitious goals we’re shooting for. I believe FTX could definitely affect in a very positive way if they wanted to

• Tee 11 May 2022 18:00 UTC

  20 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Robert_Wiblin’s comment on: Some clar­ifi­ca­tions on the Fu­ture Fund’s ap­proach to grantmaking

  an opportunity cost to providing feedback
  
  huge mistake for Future Fund to provide substantial feedback except in rare cases.

  Yep, I’d imagine what makes sense is between ‘highly involved and coordinated attempt to provide feedback at scale’ and ‘zero’. I think it’s tempting to look away from how harmful ‘zero’ can be at scale
  
  > That could change in future if their other streams of successful applicants dry up and improving the projects of people who were previously rejected becomes the best way to find new things they want to fund.

  
  Agreed – this seems like a way to pick up easy wins and should be a good go-to for grant makers to circle back. However, banking on this as handling the concerns that were raised doesn’t account for all the things that come with unqualified rejection and people deciding to do other things, leave EA, incur critical stakeholder instability etc. as a result.
  
  In other words, for the consequentialist-driven among us, I don’t think that community health is a nice-to-have if we’re serious about having a community of highly effective people working urgently on hard/​complex things

• Tee 11 May 2022 10:20 UTC

  12 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Luke Freeman’s comment on: EA and the cur­rent fund­ing situation

  Related thread that Sam and Nick are speaking on: https://​​forum.effectivealtruism.org/​​posts/​​hDK9CZJwH2Cqc9n9J/​​some-clarifications-on-the-future-fund-s-approach-to?commentId=JLDaxyk8uxdwcYNye#comments

• Tee 11 May 2022 10:10 UTC

  43 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Sam Bankman-Fried’s comment on: Some clar­ifi­ca­tions on the Fu­ture Fund’s ap­proach to grantmaking

  Thanks to Sam and Nick for getting to this. I think it’s very cool that you two are taking the time to engage. In light of the high esteem that I regard both of you and the value of your time, I’ll try to close the loop of this interaction by leaving you with one main idea.
  
  I was pointing at something different than what I think was addressed. To distill what I was saying: >> Were FTX to encounter a strong case for non-negligible harms/​externalities to community health that could result from the grant making process, what would your response to that evidence be? <<
  
  The response would likely depend on a hard-to-answer question about how FTX conceives of its responsibilities within the community given that it is now the largest funder by far.
  
  Personally, I was hoping for a response more along the lines of “Oh, we hadn’t thought about it that way. Can you tell us more? How do you think we get more information about how this could be important?”
  
  I was grateful for Nick’s thoughtful answer about what’s happening over there. I think we all hear what you’re saying about chosen priorities, complexity of project, and bandwidth issues. Also the future is hard to predict. I get all that and can feel how authentically you feel proud about how hard the team has been working and the great work that’s been done already. I’m sure that’s an amazing place to be.
  
  My question marks are around how you conceive of responsibility and choose to take responsibility moving forward in light of new information about the reality on the ground. Given the resources at your disposal, I’d be inclined to view your answer within the lens of prioritization of options, rather than simply making the best of constraints.
  
  As the largest funder in the space by far, it’s a choice to be open to discovering and uncovering risk and harms that they didn’t account for previously. It’s a choice to devote time and resources to investigate them. It’s a choice to think through how context shifts and your relationship to responsibility evolves. It’s a choice to not do all those things.
  
  A few things that seem hard waive away:
  
  1) 1600 −1650 (?) rejected applications from the largest and most exciting new funder with no feedback could be disruptive to community health
  
  Live example: Established organization(s) got rejected and/​or far less than asked for with no feedback. Stakeholders asked the project leaders “What does it mean that you got rejected/​less than you asked for from FTX? What does that say about the impact potential of your project, quality of your project, fitness to lead it, etc.” This can cause great instability. Did FTX foresee this? Probably not, for understandable reasons. Is this the effect that FTX wants to have? Probably not. Is it FTX’s responsibility to address this? Uncertain.
  
  2) Opaque reasoning for where large amounts of money goes and why could be disruptive to community health
  
  3) (less certain regarding your M&E plans) Little visibility on M&E given to applicants puts them in a place of not only not knowing what is good, but also how they know they’re doing well. Also potentially disruptive
  
  In regards to the approach moving forward for FTX, I wouldn’t be surprised if more reflection among the staff yielded more than ‘we’re trying hard + it’s complex + bandwidth issues so what do you want us to do?’ My hope with this comment is to nudge internal discussions to be more expansive and reflective. Maybe you can let me know if that happened or not. Insofar as I delivered this in a way that hopefully didn’t feel like an attack, if you feel including me in a discussion would be helpful, I’d love to be a part of it.
  
  And finally, I’m not sure where the ‘we couldn’t possibly give feedback on 1700 applications’ response came from. I mentioned feedback, but there’s innumerable ways to construct a feedback apparatus that isn’t (what seemed to be assumed) the same level of care and complexity for each application. A quick example – ‘stratified feedback’ – FTX considers who the applicant is and gives varying levels of feedback depth depending on who they are. This could be important for established EA entities (as I mentioned above), where for various reasons, you think leaving them completely in the dark would be actively harmful for a subnetwork of stakeholders. My ideal version of this would also include promising individuals who you don’t want to discourage, but for whatever reason their application wasn’t successful.
  
  Thanks for taking the time. I hope this is received well.
  
  
  
  

  What links here?

  • Tee's comment on Some clar­ifi­ca­tions on the Fu­ture Fund’s ap­proach to grantmaking by Nick_Beckstead (12 May 2022 11:46 UTC; 7 points)

• Tee 10 May 2022 12:38 UTC

  16 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Tee’s comment on: Some clar­ifi­ca­tions on the Fu­ture Fund’s ap­proach to grantmaking

  Also not trying to lay this all at FTX’s doorstep. Hoping that raising this will fold into some of the discussions about community effects behind closed doors over there

• Tee 10 May 2022 11:50 UTC

  40 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Some clar­ifi­ca­tions on the Fu­ture Fund’s ap­proach to grantmaking

  Thanks for writing this up, Nick. It seems like a pretty good first step in communicating about what I imagine is a hugely complex project to deploy that much funding in a responsible manner. Something for FTX to consider within the context of community health and the responsibilities that you can choose to acknowledge as a major funding player:
  
  – How could a grant making process have significant effects on community health? What responsibilities would be virtuous for a major funding player to acknowledge and address? –
  
  I’ve picked up on lots of (concerning) widespread psychological fallout from people, especially project leaders, struggling to make sense of decision-making surrounding all this money pouring into EA (primarily from FTX). I wouldn’t want to dichotomize this discussion by weighing it against the good that can be done with the increased funding, but there’s value in offering constructive thoughts on how things could be done better.

  What seems to have happened at FTX is some mixture of deputizing several individuals as funders + an application process (from what I’ve been hearing) that offers zero feedback. For those involved over there, is this roughly correct?

  If indeed there are no other plans to handle the fundamentals of grantmaking beyond deployment of funds, fundamentals that I believe dramatically affect community health, unless I someone can persuade me otherwise, I’d predict a lot more disoriented and short-circuited (key) EAs, especially because many people on this community orient themselves in the world of legible and explicit.

  In particular, people are having trouble getting a sense of how merit is supposed to work in this space. One of the core things I try to get them to consider, which is more pronounced perhaps now more than ever, is that merit is only one of many currencies upon which your social standing and evaluation of your project rests. This is hard for people to look at.

  I hope FTX plans to take more responsibility for community health by following up with investment in legible M&E and application feedback. Echoing what I said a month ago about funders in general: https://​​bit.ly/​​3N1q3To

  “Funders could do more to prioritize fostering relationships – greater familiarity with project leaders reduces inefficiencies of all sorts, including performative and preparation overhead, miscommunication, missed opportunities, etc.

  In my opinion, this should also apply to unsuccessful projects. A common theme that I’ve seen from funders, partly due to bandwidth issues though not entirely, is aversion to giving constructive feedback to unsuccessful projects that nonetheless endure within the community. Given my firsthand experience with many clients who are fairly averse to interpersonal conflict, it wouldn’t surprise me if aversion to conflict + public relations considerations + legal issues (and other things) precluded funders from giving constructive feedback to failed applications. Funders would likely need to hold the belief that this feedback would meaningfully improve these projects prospects, and therefore the community overall, in order to put in the requisite effort to get through these blocks to this type of action. They’d also likely need to feel reassured that the feedback wouldn’t be excessively damaging reputationally (for both themselves and others), destabilize the community, or the integrity of community norms.

  ...

  EA leaders are often at least partially in the dark regarding expectations from funders. This could be the case for many reasons, but a common reasons among leaders included the following:

  • Reputational fears – Reticence to reach out due to some (un)justifiable fear of reputational harm

  • Value system clash/​lack of familiarity – not wanting to waste the time of funders, usually due to lack of familiarity and fears of how they would be received, but also sometimes a principled decision about not wanting to bother important decision-makers

  • Not having considered reaching out to funders regarding expectations at a meaningful enough grain of detail

  • (Likely not always misplaced) concerns about arbitrariness of the evaluation process

  • Preparation overhead – not being ‘ready’ in various ways. In some cases, My outside view of the situation led me to believe that quite a bit of preparational overhead and perfunctory correspondence could be avoided if funders made it clearer that they care less about certain aspects of performative presentation ”

  What links here?

  • Tee's comment on EA and the cur­rent fund­ing situation by William_MacAskill (11 May 2022 10:20 UTC; 12 points)

• Tee 11 Apr 2022 17:10 UTC

  6 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: SebastianSchmidt’s comment on: Un­der­in­vest­ment at the top: what I dis­cov­ered coach­ing a dozen EA leaders

  Yeah. On the face of it, I could see how this feels like an easy ask, but I intentionally constructed this post in such a way as to have my work stand up and be evaluated on its own, without being associated with (or positioned against) other programs, coaches, or theoretical paradigms for now. I’ll have to spend a bit more time thinking through the differences between displaying in terms of ‘highlighting’, ‘promoting’, ‘recommending’ and ‘publicly outing’. What to look out for in both positive and negative senses sounds like something that actually could be a great post on its own. Maybe we could co-author that.

  With that said, I’m curious to hear what high quality you’d like to promote. I’m guessing Paradigm?

  This answer might make the above make more sense. My understanding is that Paradigm isn’t currently active, but were it still an option, I would restrict the scope of my recommendation to attending their workshops and working closely with specific coaches. For someone looking for a well-structured coaching program and hoping for a widely-recognized credential to earn, it wouldn’t be a very good choice. For me personally, my style of learning is boosted tremendously by fruitful individual relationships (great mentors, coaches, etc.) I like to think it worked out quite well in that sense

• Tee 11 Apr 2022 11:31 UTC

  8 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Re­place­abil­ity v. ‘Con­tex­tu­al­ized Wor­thi­ness’

  Replaceability v. ‘Contextualized Worthiness’

  I’ll take help recoining the term ‘Contextualized Worthiness’. Curious for thoughts, feelings, criticisms!
  More on my coaching trials with a dozen EA leaders here

  My guess is that 80K is likely unaware of this, but the concept of ‘replaceability’, ^[1] or at least as my clients almost exclusively seem to interpret it,^[2] seems to wreak havoc as a mental model on people’s self-approximations around whether they should be taking on/​staying in a given role. I see lots of evidence that it can even be ongoingly corrosive for those holding a role over a long period of time.

  This feels like a big problem. In fact, I’d go as far as to say that I believe it’s a primary culprit for imposter syndrome and decision paralysis in EA.

  Anxieties around replaceability are often delivered to me as a completely decontextualized hypothetical exercise, which is “is it possible that there’s someone in the world who would be better at this role than me? If so, me taking this role could be critically bad for the world.” The weight of this is likely exacerbated in leadership positions.

  Putting high credence into decontextualized replaceability arguments seem obviously flawed to me, but more importantly, seems to me to have the psychological effect of egregiously warping risk calculations around career exploration, patient accumulation and consolidation of career capital, and particularly willingness to assume responsibility and take action.

  You can basically condemn yourself (internally & socially) as a bad person for taking a role.^[3]

  A thing that I believe calibrates people better would be called something like “contextualized worthiness” considerations.

  Here’s a handful:

  • Distinguishing between ‘being quite well-placed contextually’ with ‘being best-placed decontextually’

  • Comparable talent landscape – where do comparable people seem to concentrate? Does it seem like none/​some/​most/​all would be interested in taking on this role?

  • Whether you were selected out of a search process

  • Whether the costs of running an expansive (or infinite) search process are too prohibitive to make a move

  • The importance of in-network trust in having you assume the role (versus a hypothetical ideal stranger), especially if respected individuals in a domain are actively encouraging you

  • Nearly everyone is pretty poor at approximating skill at a distance, or even knowing what it takes to be great at something, unless it can be identified by highly specialized credentials (and _even then_…) Seems even more true with complex leadership & generalist positions.

  • Whether the position/​org would have existed counterfactually

  • Institutional knowledge – being in the role/​org for a reasonable amount of time + rapport and sync with surrounding individuals is not trivial for the ideal stranger to attain

  • Reversibility (sort of) – can you run a set of experiments in a fixed amount of time that will allow you to relinquish the position/​fold the project if in fact you weren’t a good fit

  • Grace – having grace and forgiveness for yourself if you truly thought something through, took action and happened to be wrong

  • [the list can continue]

  The above ‘contextualized worthiness’ considerations often have the effect of getting people to track more inputs from reality, rather relying too heavily upon an abstract thought exercise that yields an absurdly high bar for action, and often bottoms out in a nasty set of implications for any misstep.
  
  If 80K doesn’t already plan to do this, a suggestion for remedial action would be an additional series of posts nuancing this concept for people. Many people I speak to could use this.^[4]

  1. ^

     To their credit, they do seem to have addressed some misconceptions and attempted to nuance it a long time ago: https://​​80000hours.org/​​.../​​replaceability-isnt-as.../​​....

     I’d wager that corrections would probably stick better in the community if misconception examples and even anonymized case studies were included.

     Nonetheless, I still think the point about how trying to correct how things spread mimetically still holds. If we keep seeing evidence that very unhelpful versions of this are still floating around, and that it severely affects (potentially) important people, more should be done to address this

  2. ^

     It could be claimed that this bastardizes the concept, but how concepts are originally designed and how they spread mimetically are very different.

  3. ^

     Worse still, interacting mental models often reinforced by EA can make people feel morally very bad for inaction

  4. ^

     Someone made the point that knowing how messages will spread is quite hard. Were I speaking to someone from 80K, I hope for the tenor of my message to be “hey, I get that mass media is hard, and you’ve largely been doing great, but we’ve potentially (re)discovered something pretty big as a result of your messaging. Would you seriously consider following up here?”