Letās 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 šø
Thank you for your kind words! I do find it really useful to have time that is intentionally free from obligation. I do still track my time, but I have an āendorsed chillā category (which I absolutely did not circa 2018).
You might enjoy the book Essentialism by Greg McKeown. Itās written in a standard business-psych tone, so expect lots of inspiring anecdotes of corporate success and bolded subheadings, but/āand it has a number of useful strategies for prioritizing. It also frames a bunch of things I was deficient inā e.g. dropping unnecessary commitments, sleeping adequately, accepting trade-offsā as difficult skills that high-achieving people should master, which made cultivating those skills feel more appealing on an ego level.
Fair enough! I have revised the title to include āself-careā, which hopefully makes it clearer (the previous title, for later arrivals to this comment thread, was just āAiming for the minimum is dangerousā).
+1, distinguishing between āNo degree requirementā, āBachelorsā, āMastersā all would be helpful. You could borrow from the 80k board and separate out the āAcademic Degreeā requirements from the āRelevant Experienceā requirements (e.g. ā< 1 Yearā, ā1-2 yearsā, ā2 or more yearsā)
If youāre looking for resources on mental health, you might enjoy some of the upvoted posts under the self-care tag, including Mental Health Resources Tailored for EAs and Resources on Mental Health and Finding a Therapist.
FYI for anyone else who might crosspost Brian Tomasik posts: I learned thanks to a crosspost of The Importance of Wild-Animal Suffering that he doesnāt like crossposting since it makes updating the content of posts more difficult. I have updated my crossposts from him to only include the summary paragraphs and a table of contents (with a caveat that the contents are as of the time of cross-posting).
When NTI launched the Biosecurity Innovation and Risk Reduction Initiative in 2018, five proposals were highlighted, which all seem to have translated into current initiatives:
Financial Incentives for Biotechnology Investors to Improve Biosecurity
Standards for Funders, Grantees, and Publishers to Identify and Mitigate Biological Risks
Establishing a Seal of Approval to Incentivize the Adoption of Biosecurity Norms
Iād be curious to hear you answers to any of the recently-shared Hamming Questions for Project Planning for those initiatives. Copying the first three questions here:
What are the most important problems for this project, and what is stopping you (/āNTI) from working on them right now?
What is the limiting factor on the projectās growth and progress?
What problems in this project are the largest order of magnitude? What changes could you make that would result in a 100x or 1000x increase in this projectās positive impact?
What do you think are the most important security (Iām especially interested in biosecurity) projects being done outside of the USA/āUK? More generally, what are the organizations or projects you would suggest EAs based outside the USA or UK try to get involved with?
Well, thanks for leaving feedback despite being unsure! I appreciate it since this is my first time doing a bunch of crossposts, and Iām trying to figure out a good format.
The EA forum team is going to back-date these posts to their original dates so they can be voted on in the review. Would you still have benefited from the note being at the beginning if this postās date indicated that itās from 2014?
(On my first few cross-posts, I placed the āhey, this is a crosspostā note as a header, but I noticed it was removed when the forum team backdated the posts; decided to try entering it as a footer instead for my latest batch of crossposts.)
I messed around making an Airtable of biosecurity-related early-career opportunities earlier this year, more or less for my own reference.
Hereās a link, which might be of interest both from a data design perspective and because you might not have all of the internships listed there (though note that it lists a bunch of non-internship things as well): https://āāairtable.com/āāshr1WyRk3o9PdbbIl
One thing thatās a bit unclear to me from the form: is this more of a job board, or more of a list of regularly-occurring internships?
(If job board, some Boreal-summer internships Iād think to link will not be posted yet; if list of orgs /ā programs that regularly host internships, then the āApplication Deadlineā would be a time of year rather than a specific date.)
Linking the recent post about this: EA Internship & Research Opportunities for Undergraduates
Thanks for taking the time to put together this list, this is great! I found that a few of these were on the forum already:
Why Charities Usually Donāt Differ Astronomically in Expected Cost-Effectiveness
A post you can upvote about Sendwave: Why and how to start a for-profit company serving emerging markets
New UK aid strategy ā prioritising research and crisis response
For the cage-free campaigns summarized in the vox article you linked, there are ~20 posts under the corporate cage-free campaigns tag, not sure which which you think is the best.
Using the tax system and stock market to donate more: a few basic strategies is a more recent posts that references https://āāreducing-suffering.org/āāshould-altruists-leverage-investments/āā, might be a good upvote (many of the other links are referenced in various forum posts, too, this is just one highlight)
Crossposted yesterday: [Crosspost] Reducing Risks of Astronomical Suffering: A Neglected Priority
I have crossposted the following, and may crosspost more if I feel like it (and will add them to this list if I do:
Brian Tomasik ā Differential Intellectual Progress as a Positive-Sum Project
Paul Christiano ā Machine intelligence and capital accumulation
Carl Shulman ā What portion of a boost to global GDP goes to the poor?
Carl Shulman ā How migration liberalization might eliminate most absolute poverty
Also, to my pleasant shock, if you copy-paste from one website into the EA Forum WYSIWYG editor, it formats tables and images correctly? This makes cross-posting way easier than Iād realized!
I donāt think I quite understand this reply. Are you saying that (check all that apply):
In your experience, the people involved in discussions do embrace redistribution and fairness as core values, they are just placing more value on future people.
Actual longtermists also advocate for near-term redistributive causes, so criticism about resource allocation within the movement away from the global poor and towards longtermism doesnāt make sense (i.e. itās not zero-sum).
Redistributive commitments are only one part of the āfoundational valuesā, and Toby and others in the longtermist camp are still motivated by the same underlying impartial utilitarianism, so pointing at less emphasis on redistribution is an unfair nitpick.
Iām willing to do a few more crosspostsā are there pieces of object-level content that youād really like to see crossposted?
I would recommend this post over the GiveWell one as a case study /ā 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 shouldnāt update too negatively. This post felt like a more straightforward summary of Evidence Actionās 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 /ā blog /ā organizationās 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. āEvidence Action ā Weāre Shutting Down No Lean Season, Our Seasonal Migration Program: Hereās Whyā seemed easier to parse than āEvidence Action: Weāre Shutting Down No Lean Season, Our Seasonal Migration Program: Hereās Whyā.
Other approaches Iāve seen: using colons, including the authorās name at the end of the post in brackets, e.g. Purchase fuzzies and utilons separately (Eliezer Yudkowsky), using āonā instead of an en-dash, e.g. Kelsey Piper on āThe Life You Can Saveā, 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 itās a crosspost and, where appropriate, adding a link to the authorās 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 authorās account. This post is from December 19, 2014.
You can filter the 80,000 Hours job board by āinternshipā roles that require an undergraduate degree or less.
In addition to their Summer Research Internship, SERI maintains a spreadsheet on Longtermism Early Career Opportunities.
Iām also familiar with this school of thought, but Iām not sure itās empirically validated?
In the case of Dominic Cummings, I believe you are referring to this post which describes running successful political campaigns. Those seem like they might be an outlier, in that they are an extremely time-bound competition where ādo things faster than your opponentā is an obvious win? As Samuel noted, running a startup is also a case where a marginal month of delivery matters, since you likely have <1 year of runway to demonstrate to investors that you should continue being funded. The other examples you cite donāt seem to be of people optimizing for impact.
Lynette Bye put some empirical research into the post How Long Can People Reasonably Work?, but found the literature pretty disappointing. Her top-level conclusions included:
The hyperproductive people I know seem to score well on (1) working on important things and (2) being very focused while working, but vary in how many hours of work they do per week (Iād estimate 30-50).
I am not a hyperproductive person, so Iām not sure you should take productivity advice from me, but ātry to do at least one thing I think is actually important per weekā seems to give me better results than ātry to work really hardā, since the latter can lead to hyperfocused work on things that donāt really matter.
Curious if you know of any sources that were missed in Lynetteās post, or this response, though!