tobyj

Karma: 320

tobyj Aug 31, 2022, 4:00 PM
1 point
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in reply to: Nathan Young’s comment on: ARIA is looking for topics for roundtables
Interested in hear what you would write on this

tobyj Jun 23, 2022, 7:32 AM
4 points
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on: Seven ways to become unstoppably agentic
This is great—really inspiring, makes me want to do more of all of those things! Thank you for writing this! I’m going to create a rejection list right now.
One thing I thought in reaction to this is that a reason we might hesitate to be more agentic is being uncomfortable setting boundaries.
When you put-yourself-out-there a lot, you will also start being asked for things more. Or you might put yourself in a situation that feels bad for some other reason. Being comfortable rejecting requests or removing yourself from a situation seems like a really important related thing to work on.

tobyj Jun 9, 2022, 9:02 AM
44 points
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on: Power dynamics between people in EA
Thank you for writing this Julia. I think it’s great that we have more shared views and discussion about power dynamics. I’ve recently started working on an EA project full time, and it was jarring to realise that at some of the social events I attend, >50% of the attendees are professional stakeholders (and some of the others will probably be future colleagues/stakeholders).
A couple of the points you made seem particularly important to me, so I thought it might be good to emphasize them and elaborate with some ideas:
Inside view vs outside view
Part of the reason power dynamics aren’t always obvious, is that it’s very easy to come up with self-serving narratives to explain our own feelings and behavior. And our society has egalitarian norms that push us to want to see things as more equal that they are. Here is an specific example of this from my partner, Hannah.
I suspect we should be very humble about our ability to clearly comprehend what is going on here. When so much of our social, romantic and professional lives are at stake all at once, there are huge returns to self-deception. This isn’t a problem that is unique to EA, but EA is ridiculously tightly coupled in places, so it might be particularly hard.
Taking an outside view is likely to be key to understanding and responding to the power dynamics of your relationships. This will include considering things like age, wealth, experience, self esteem, and seniority.
One of the most important area to take an objective/analytical/outside view of power in a relationship is to consider what your alternatives to a given relationship are, and how they compare to the other person’s alternatives (i.e. your respective BATNAs). Growing your BATNA might be a key way to ensure you are not disempowered—e.g.
- Make more friends and professional relationships outside EA so you can more easily decouple from the community
- Build financial runway so you can quit if needed
- Develop skills that are less specifically targeted at an EA career track
- Develop a more internally-sourced sense of self worth (see Charlie’s post on self-love)
Setting boundaries
The boundary setting things you lay out are great—here are some ideas for relevant boundaries that I have been trying to employ:
- Set clearer and harder boundaries than feels necessary—e.g. avoid dating any current or likely future colleagues, set much higher bars to date people who are more closely enmeshed in your social and professional circles.
- Try to be in touch with, and trust, your feelings more—if a situation or relationship feels bad, don’t think you need to come up with a narrative to explain it—you can act to set boundaries based on the badness of the feeling alone, and can aim for the minimum viable explanation when telling people why.
- Avoid putting too much trust in individuals who don’t seem self-aware about their own perverse incentives. Nobody will be able to see this perfectly, and self-deceptions will be happening. But if someone isn’t able to demonstrate the self awareness or trust to be able to reveal their own incentives, think about backing slowly away.
- For any relationship where there is a clear dependency (managers and reports, romantic partners, housemates) - insist on regular conversations about how the relationship is going and how it can be improved. In these conversations you should probably have the expectation that you are both minimizing conflict, and a shared goal of uncovering and resolving those conflicts. (resistance to these conversations is the reddest of red flags in my experience...)
The tone of this post is wary, but largely positive. I think it’s important to highlight that the areas where power dynamics go most unaddressed are where you will find real mistreatment, abuse, and bullying.
I would love EA (and people in general) to be having more open conversations about this. Although we should also be humble. Illegible, unaddressed and painful power dynamics are the norm of human groups, not the exception.

tobyj May 5, 2022, 10:48 AM
5 points
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on: Why scale is overrated: The case for increasing EA policy efforts in smaller countries
This is such a great article! Thank you for writing it. Really interesting ideas.
Here’s a thing that came to mind when reading it.
You talk about policy diffusion seeming to be greater from high reputation countries. This seems quantifiable.
It seems both possible and powerful to build a map of the probability of policy diffusion from country A to country B for policy area X. (for all As, Bs and Xs). Simple example here (arrow size representing probability)
For example—this paper seems to have done something approximating this—see figure 1 in particular (although looks like it took a bunch of manual coding of parliamentary debate data).
The policy diffusion landscape has big implications for my own work (advising UK civil servants on where they can have impact in government), so really keen to talk to anyone working on this.

tobyj Apr 8, 2022, 11:55 AM
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on: You are probably underestimating how good self-love can be
Thank you for this post Charlie. I’ve been consuming some of the resources since I first read it and have found them really valuable. I’m pretty convinced of the central idea that self -love and compassion can form the basis of large improvements in well-being.

tobyj Apr 6, 2022, 9:47 AM
6 points
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on: 5-Minute Advice for EA Global
Thanks for this! I like the 1:1 ops advice in particular. I’m going to set so many alarms!
Possibly a counterpoint, but I’d recommend considering under-scheduling your 1:1s ahead of time. In my experience, I get a lot of good ideas of people to speak to during the event. Having time (especially on Sunday) to book those has been important. Under-scheduling also allows you to assess your energy levels on the weekend (Personally I’ve tended to over estimate my ability to have several intense back-to-back conversations).

tobyj Apr 4, 2022, 11:20 AM
22 points
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on: Issues with centralised grantmaking
Hundreds of people spent considerable time writing applications to FTX Future fund’s first round of funding. It seems inefficient to me that there aren’t more sources of funding looking over these applications and funding the projects they think look the most promising.
This wouldn’t directly address your main concern, but I’d be really interested to see more full grant applications posted publicly (both successful and non-successful).

tobyj Apr 3, 2021, 12:00 PM
5 points
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on: FAQ: UK Civil Service Job Applications
This article is really useful- thanks for writing it Kirsten.
Couple of opinions I’d add:
If you don’t get on the fast stream, do apply for other jobs. The fast stream seems good, but I’m not convinced it’s much better than just getting a job in the Civil Service and just moving around independently.
Applying for jobs in the Civil Service is a specific skill that you can get better at. Apply for a bunch of jobs, get feedback, and try and improve your scores.

tobyj Apr 3, 2021, 11:45 AM
6 points
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in reply to: Tom Barnes🔸’s comment on: FAQ: UK Civil Service Job Applications
These 2 apps should help give a sense of where you can work on different causes in the Civil Service:
https://highimpact.shinyapps.io/impact_areas/
https://highimpact.shinyapps.io/civil_service_jobs_explorer/
That said, for non-civil servants—I would strongly suggest focussing the first role you get on skill development and understanding how government works, rather than trying to go straight into the most impactful area.
Civil servants are expected to move around a lot, so you can find the most impactul areas once you are in, and demonstrating good generalist skills is one the key things that will make moving around easy.

tobyj Sep 17, 2018, 12:36 PM
3 points
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on: Giving What We Can is still growing at a surprisingly good pace
Are there any estimates of GWWC attrition other than this one?

Linear growth in new members with a fixed attrition rate would result in active members curving towards a plateau (~12,000 assuming ~600 new members and ~5% attrition annually).