Letâs make nice things with biology. Working on nucleic acid synthesis screening at IBBIS. Also into dual-use risk assessment, synthetic biology, lab automation, event production, donating to global health. From Toronto, lived in Paris and Santiago, currently in the SF Bay. Website: tessa.fyi
Tessa A đ¸
Karma: 2,930
I would recommend this post over the GiveWell one as a case study /â postmortem on charity entrepreneurship.
While it covers similar ground, the GiveWell post (which is essentially a metacommentary on this one) seemed to be written partly with the intention of reassuring donors to GiveWell that they shouldnât update too negatively. This post felt like a more straightforward summary of Evidence Actionâs decision-making process about No Lean Season.
I think this post also more clearly emphasizes the various factors that contributed to the decision to shut down the program; not just uncertainty about its impact but also the need to relaunch with a new partner, such that:
Ultimately, we determined that the opportunity cost for Evidence Action of rebuilding the program is too high relative to other opportunities we have to meet our vision of measurably improving the lives of hundreds of millions of people. Importantly, we are not saying that seasonal migration subsidies do not work or that they lack impact; rather, No Lean Season is unlikely to be among the best strategic opportunities for Evidence Action to achieve our vision.
This conclusion is also expressed in the GiveWell post, but I found it more clear here.
While making several of review crossposts for the Decade Review I found myself unhappy about the possibility that someone might think I had authored one of the posts I was cross-linking. Here are the things I ended up doing:
Make each post a link post (this one seems⌠non-optional).
In the title of the post, add the author /â blog /â organizationâs name before the post title, separated by an en-dash.
Why before the title? This ensures that the credit appears even if the title is long and gets cut off.
Why an en-dash? Some of the posts I was linking already included colons in the title. âEvidence Action â Weâre Shutting Down No Lean Season, Our Seasonal Migration Program: Hereâs Whyâ seemed easier to parse than âEvidence Action: Weâre Shutting Down No Lean Season, Our Seasonal Migration Program: Hereâs Whyâ.
Other approaches Iâve seen: using colons, including the authorâs name at the end of the post in brackets, e.g. Purchase fuzzies and utilons separately (Eliezer Yudkowsky), using âonâ instead of an en-dash, e.g. Kelsey Piper on âThe Life You Can Saveâ, which seems correct when excerpting rather than cross-posting.
Add an italicized
header(ETA: I think a footer works better) to the crosspost indicating that itâs a crosspost and, where appropriate, adding a link to the authorâs EA Forum account.Example: Because of the ongoing Decade Review I am re-posting some classic posts under the review crosspost tag. With their permission, this post may eventually appear under the original authorâs account. This post is from December 19, 2014.
You can filter the 80,000 Hours job board by âinternshipâ roles that require an undergraduate degree or less.
In addition to their Summer Research Internship, SERI maintains a spreadsheet on Longtermism Early Career Opportunities.
Oh, huh, it looks like this has already been crossposted as part of The Motivation Series. (I only discovered this while clicking through various reading lists to upvote old posts.)
In the blog post, Evidence Action is pretty clear about why they didnât relaunch with a new partner:
Ultimately, we determined that the opportunity cost for Evidence Action of rebuilding the program is too high relative to other opportunities we have to meet our vision of measurably improving the lives of hundreds of millions of people. Importantly, we are not saying that seasonal migration subsidies do not work or that they lack impact; rather, No Lean Season is unlikely to be among the best strategic opportunities for Evidence Action to achieve our vision.
And they later say:
We also want to ensure that the takeaway is not that if a program faces challenges, an NGO should walk away from doing work that measurably improves the lives of tens or hundreds of thousands of people. International development programs are complex â operating in high-risk settings where the risk of corruption and a whole host of other challenges is high.
I think this Our World in Data post is great, and definitely a classic, thank you for cross-posting! No worried if you donât have the time, but would you be willing to copy over the full text to the forum? Iâve had pretty good luck with copying the page source and pasting it into this HTML to Markdown converter for quick cross-posting.
Thank you!
It seems to me that much of what richard_ngo highlighted in the EA Archives Reading List sequence should be available to vote on.
I could go through the list and crosspost what is neither already posted nor book-length/ânot-forum-friendly, but this sounds like a fair bit of work, so I am posting this comment to invite others to also makes some review crosspost posts based on that sequence.
I have two questions:
Is it reasonable to crosspost academic papers as a â review crosspostâ?(Presumably we should not crosspost paywalled papers for copyright reasons?)
I already sent an Intercom message about this, but could we adjust the post dates on everything already under the EA Forum Archives user and classic repost tag so they become eligible?
In response to your questions, speaking with some (limited, worked as an not-100%-software engineer in the SF bay area with lots of SW eng friends) experience:
How do people find good jobs there? Do you have recruiters? Are there reasons not to use them?
Large or VC-rich companies have recruiters, theyâre fine to use. Lots of good but smaller companies donât have recruiters. You can apply through their website but get a referral if possible.
A referral? Yes, most companies have an internal referral system, and if you can get any kind of referral whatsoever, this helps you.
If you hate networking, Triplebyte (https://ââtriplebyte.com/ââ) is pretty great. Take a programming test, get matched with top companies.
Something potentially non-obvious: there is an indirect and socially-acceptable way to ask for an internal referral. It goes something like this:
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If you know someone who currently works at a company: you donât have to ask indirectly. You can just say, âhey, will you refer me for [job] at [your company]?â You can offer to give more context on why youâre interested or what relevant background you have, but you may not need to.
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If you have a tenuous connection[1] to someone who works at a company: itâs acceptable to contact them (over email if you have it, otherwise over LinkedIn) saying something like, âhey, Iâve been looking at [job] at [your company] and would love to learn more about whatâs it like to work there. Any chance youâd have have time for a coffee chat /â video call to talk about it in the next week?â
If they agree, aim to have a pleasant conversation about your mutual (tech /â business) interest. Be a friendly, curious person who enthusiastically wants to hear about their job and company culture. This is not an interview in either direction!
Towards the end of your conversation, assuming youâre still interested in the job, say something like, âalright, thanks so much, this was so helpful. I think I will apply!â (pause here to see if they offer to refer you) âNo pressure, but I figured it doesnât hurt to ask: does [your company] have an internal referral system? Any chance youâd be willing to refer me for [job]?â
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If you have a no connections at a company: itâs acceptable to look through your social networks (e.g. LinkedIn, Facebook) to see if anyone at the company in one degree of separation from you, and ask for an intro through your connection. For example, you might be in touch with a former co-worker who was in the same grad school lab as someone now working at the company. Itâs okay to ask that former coworker something like, âhey, Iâm not sure how in touch you are with [person], but Iâm thinking of applying to [their company] and would like to learn more, any chance youâd be able to intro me to them?â. Make it clear that they can say no! If they say yes, you will probably get an intro email to the person, and then this turns into (2).
In Israel, the official requirements for a job are higher than the real requirements. Are there strange things like that in your country too? (They might not seem strange from the inside, I can try helping with more specific questions)
It is the case in the USA that a good candidate usually meets more than half of the listed job requirements, but a candidate who meets all of them is probably overqualified.
One thing Iâve found annoying /â weird is that you donât necessarily hear back from recruiters or others if you donât get a job, even after an interview. This varies among companies, but for many of them you just⌠eventually assume that you didnât get the job.
You may have seen this already, but Haseeb Qureshiâs writing on US tech careers for earn-to-give is top-notch stuff: https://ââhaseebq.com/ââtech-careers/ââ. Iâve forwarded his advice on negotiating job offers to SO many people.
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on the level of, like, âtook a class with them 5 years agoâ or âvolunteered with them at an event onceâ. These are not people youâre really in touch with.
I like this distinction! Trying to find examples from biotechnology:
Ordering: youâd prefer cheap benchtop DNA printers to be developed after decent screening mechanisms, Ă la SecureDNA or Common Mechanism
Gradualness: environmental deployment of gene drives, maybe? (mostly for the âmore time with more clarityâ reasons of wanting a fair bit of time to observe how these work in practice)
Distance from now: germline gene editing of humans (people like Doudna have often called for a âsociety-wide conversationâ + more time to develop norms for this before we deploy it)
Fair, yeahâ this piece is still getting referenced (a testament to its impact!) so I figured itâs open for criticism, but I wasnât imagining I was criticizing your current views.
One thing I dislike about this model is that it seems to compress varying negative judgments into âthis person is weirdâ. A few examples from this post:
Unprofessional /â unserious : If youâre a punk rocker vegan advocate, people may judge you to be unserious, as you have not compromised your self-expression in order to appear professional.
Untrustworthy: If someone hears you advocating for [cryonics /â open borders /â other radical ideas], they may conclude that you are not forming your beliefs in a normal way, and then choose to generally trust you less. If you only advocate for one of those ideas, among a portfolio of relatively normal beliefs, the average person is probably correctly judging you to be more trustworthy, at least by their epistemic standards.
Unrealistic: If you are advocating for universal basic income instead of relaxed zoning laws, people may conclude that you are not a good political ally because you are making unrealistic demands.
You can try to respond to all of those by âdonât be weirdâ, but it seems better to figure out whether you need to send signals of seriousness, trustworthiness, or pragmatism.
Whatâs more, as EmeryCooper mentioned, this doesnât apply nearly as well to domains like physical appearance as it does to policies and opinions. Iâve also seen this extended to types of weirdness that seem more difficult to change, like being visibly LGBT+ or having a non-standard accent.
+1 that âsustainable motivation pointsâ are important
Additionally, Iâve always found it odd to imagine âweirdness pointsâ as a totally fixed quantity. This was echoed in comments on the original post. While I agree that people have a limited tolerance for having their social expectations violated, and violating their expectations can have consequences between âthey take you a little less seriouslyâ and âthey judge you as untrustworthy, unpredictable, or otherwise badâ, itâs not like those social expectations are completely invariant. For example, in some social circumstances is possible to set peopleâs expectations, and increase their tolerance for you being weird.
ETA: it feels worth noting that much of the commentary on the post You have a set amount of âweirdness pointsâ. Spend them wisely., both on the EA forum and on LW (where is was cross-posted) was criticism of the concept of weirdness points. One major criticism was that âdonât be weirdâ probably matters for advocates (since much of their work is to make their ideas more mainstream) but probably matters a lot less in other career paths.
I think youâre right that some people will make prejudiced snap judgments of you if you have cornrows, but my instinct is to say, âscrew âem, they should get over thatâ. I guess Iâd check in on how common you expect prejudice to be and how relevant such judgments will be to your career or other goals. For example, are there successful people in your academic field who look the way you want to?
I am a person with weird hair (usually dyed blue-green) and I think there are some social circumstances where this benefits me by making me more memorable, e.g. I was âthe girl with green hair who likes mathâ at one student conference. It also has costs; I think looking like a person who cares about my appearance/âself-expression makes me seem less serious to many people.
As one example of navigating this trade-off, I dyed my hair back to a natural colour when I went to the UN Bioweapons Convention in 2017, because it seemed like a context where it was more important to be taken seriously and which might have more formal dress norms. I probably would not do that if I attend again in 2022, since Iâll be 5 years older and have more experience in biosecurity.
The benefits of pre-exposure prophylaxis vs. vaccines have been back on my mind since reading GiveWellâs Initial thoughts on malaria vaccine approval, which concluded that seasonal malaria chemoprevention (SMC) remains more cost-effective than vaccination at present (though itâs important to note that this vaccine is much lower-efficacy than the COVID ones, in part because taking down parasites is vaccination on hard mode).
Does the recent and rapid development of Pfizerâs SARS-CoV-2 protease inhibitor (discussed today by Derek Lowe) affect your conclusions here at all?
Reasons I think this might affect your conclusions:
The antiviral is very effective. In fact, the trial was stopped due to efficacy, after it showed 89% reduction in hospitalization when given to high-risk patients within 3 days of symptom onset, and 85% reduction when given within 5 days.
The antiviral was created quickly. While it took more than 100 days, it has been less than 2 years after the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 (so this is definitely a speed record for a bespoke antiviral). This speed record suggests to me that we may also get faster at producing new antivirals (e.g. through ).
The antiviral was created at a time when global vaccine access is still limited (e.g. most African countries are not on track to have 40% of their population vaccinated by the end of 2021). We still have limited mRNA vaccine production capacity, whereas it should be possible to rapidly scale global production of this, especially if this is put into the UN Medicines Patent Pool.
Yes, I found this super helpful, especially the ability to double-dip on matching. Links to the individual Founders Pledge funds:
Animal Welfare Index: https://ââwww.every.org/ââanimal.welfare.fund
Climate Change Fund: https://ââwww.every.org/ââclimate.change.fund
Global Health and Development Fund: https://ââwww.every.org/ââglobal.health.fund
Science and Technology Index (includes NTI, CHAI, Center for Health Security): https://ââwww.every.org/ââscience.technology.fund
Global Education Index: https://ââwww.every.org/ââglobal.education.fund
You can click through to individual charity pages from each of these pages.
Iâm willing to do a few more crosspostsâ are there pieces of object-level content that youâd really like to see crossposted?