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
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).
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).
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.
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.
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).
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.