Currently exploring new projects. I’m a generalist builder with startup, product and ops experience. I’ve done a bit of EA community building and am keen to improve talent pipelines for people working on the most important problems. (A little on my journey to EA)
Some posts I’ve written and particularly like:
Advice I frequently give:
If you’re running a retreat, nail the vibes and venue
I’m always keen to hear feedback: admonymous.co/vaidehiagarwalla
/’vɛðehi/ or VEH-the-hee
Thank you for sharing this Frances, and I’m so sad to hear how difficult the past few years have been. Writing with this much clarity and precision is difficult at the best of times, I can only imagine the amount of work that went into this.
I’ve unfortunately had to help a number of friends raise issues to community health over the years because of how emotionally taxing and difficult it is. Sometimes, it’s also a lack of faith that investing time will actually improve things for the better. And even as a third party, trying to communicate clearly, evaluate whether sufficient action has been taken, manage confidentiality etc are all incredibly high cognitive load and emotional tasks.
While I am very glad you were able to advocate for yourself, I’m so sad that you had to.
Changelog: added directorysf (https://www.directorysf.com/) to the list of places to look for housing. It’s pretty active, but you will need an invite from an existing user to join.
Animal welfare fund
Some norms I would like to see when folks use LLMs substantively (not copy editing or brainstorming):
explaining the extent of LLM use
explaining the extent of human revision or final oversight
ideally I’d love to know section by section. Personally I’d prefer it if authors only included sections they have reviewed and fully endorse, even if this means much shorter posts
not penalizing people who do 1) and 2) for keeping AI-speak or style
I think this unfairly discriminates against people who are busy, weak in writing and/or English. I personally dislike it, but don’t think it’s fair to impose this on others
If this tool could be used by orgs I think it would be super useful. E.g. analyzing the HIP talent directory or inbound applications against a job you’re recruiting for. Any chance you could make the prompts/tool available to orgs as well?
Thanks for this write up! It was really insightful. A few questions:
People who apply to found an NGO come with all sorts of motivations.
Could you say more about what motivations they come with?
As this is a regional program, we couldn’t have a cohort composed entirely of only 4 countries, even though several were outstanding candidates.
Base on my experience working in India, I’ve seen a lot of benefits of having multiple orgs working in the same geographies at the same time/stage to share resources, advice, talent, etc. Curious what you were limited by here / what factors went into this decision (e.g. I imagine you could have branded this as a regional wide program with a focused initial cohort, with a plan to do focused outreach into other geographies later).
Finally
A common refrain in EA is that the broader social sector doesn’t care about impact, and that good intentions are their only north star.
I have not heard this sentiment quite stated so strongly in EA, but if it is then I’d like to also strongly disagree! After years of working with dozens of nonprofit fundraisers all over the US, I am confident that people do care about impact—they care a lot about effectiveness and using their limited time and resources efficiently. In fact, many switch into fundraising from programmatic because they their organisation needed it and saw it as important. The main difference is that they aren’t prioritising EA causes, but I don’t think that can be chalked up to good intentions.
Recent example—an op ed piece on the AI safety pipeline having too many researchers is labelled community, a post advocating for more AI field building by an OP grant maker is not.
Thanks Aaron, this is really insightful!
+1 me too!
Thanks for flagging those! I think my original point probably still stands regarding more projects for different species etc., since the incubated projects are from the existing recommended ideas list.
I noticed that AIM has recommended 0 aquatic animal charities in 2026, 1 in 2025 and 0 in 2022-2024.
Curious if either of you (or AIM researchers) have thoughts on why that is, and to what degree that is an indicator of a lack of high-EV, foundable (e.g. talent exists) projects in the space.
Have not thought about compounding returns to orgs! I can think of some concrete examples with AIM ecosystem charities (e.g one org helping bring another into creation or creating a need for others to exist). Food for thought.
Curious how you see the communitarianism playing out in practice?
There’s definitely a cooperative side to things that makes it a lot easier to ask for help amongst EAs than the relevant professional groups someone might be a part of, but not sure I’m seeing obvious implications.
So keen to hear from the disagrees (currently about 21% (5/23) votes) on which parts folks disagree with!
Yeah, and I can probably cite like 3-4 other prominent-ish articles. I think these efforts feel more like a bandaid and not like actually changing the fundamental core principles on which you do your thinking.
Very curious if you can describe the types of people you know, their profiles, what cause areas and roles they are have applied for, what constraints they have if any.
But typically (not MECE, written quickly, not in order of importance, some combination could work etc.):
“Relentlessly resourceful” from Paul Graham covers a bunch of it better than I could
Strong intuitions for people management and org building (likely from experience)
Strong manager / leader
Gets shit done—can move quickly, decisive, keeps the momentum going, strong prioritization skills
Cares about structure and can implement systems, but only when they actually matter for helping the org achieve their goals
Able to switch between object level, in the weeds work and strategic thinking, and willing to do in the weeds work if needed (for earlier stage orgs)
The ‘enable the org to succeed’ implies ‘at it’s stated goals or mission’.
Like, the by the org or it’s leaders own lights.
For many years I’ve been trying to figure out a core disagreement I have with a bunch of underlying EA/rationalist school of thought. I think I’ve sort of figured it out: the emphasis on individual action, behavior & achievement over collective. And an understanding of how the collective changes individuals—through emergent properties (e.g. norms, power dynamics, etc.), and an unwillingness to engage.
This has improved a bunch since I first joined in 2017 (the biggest shock to the system was FTX and subsequent scandals). Why I think these issues have existed historically:
General skepticism towards management / bureaucracy
Unwillingness to engage with “fuzzier” social sciences (and unfamiliarity with the same)
Lot of focus on power law distribution of individual talent and performance (and very little on organisational talent & performance)
Too much first-principles wheel re-inventing and rejection of “common sense” best practices
I care a lot about this issue because I think very few problems can be solved with one-man-show(s). I believe an important way the world improves is by building organisations.
It’s not enough to have a superstar technical founder if they can’t find a way to reliably and sustainably product output at scale—which is almost always by finding other people to help them (building a team). I think the key skill to succeed here is organisational competence: “the collective capabilities, skills, and knowledge that an organisation possesses, enabling it to perform effectively and achieve its strategic objectives.”—random reasonable sounding business website. (emphasis mine)
The EA movement skews young and towards IC academics, researchers and engineers rather than operators with experience in leadership, management & operations. In fact, the skillsets needed to be a good IC can even be orthogonal to those of a good director or manager.
I notice the following:
Lack of strong non-technical founder-level operator talent that wants to work on EA priority areas
Current founders/leaders
Failing to recognize the invaluable strategic role that senior operators play (as outlined in this great post).
Hiring, but then not being able to share control of the org with senior operators and/or adapt / make compromises to enable the org to succeed
Being open to change, but not having the time or naturaly tendency towards big-picture thinking (I’ve noticed a common tendency towards perfectionism which can slow people down)
I think this would be very valuable as a top level post so more people can see this!
Not a recruiter from this ama but just wanted to add:
I’ve seen a number of marketing roles advertised in the past year across field building and effective giving orgs in particular, but also (IIRC) some more direct work AI safety orgs.
There’s also been calls for e.g. and AI Safety focused marketing agency and things like that.
Probably stemming from two things:
recent influx in new effective giving orgs, which are now making their first hires (naturally, marketing + reaching new counterfactual audience is a top priority)
in general other orgs in the EA space are seeing the value of marketing as they are going through growth phases
the most developed / large marketing team in the meta or field bulding space is 80K’s I believe. Most other meta orgs are very small
I think animal welfare orgs also have more developed ones, while global health orgs don’t as much since they do most of their fundraising from foundations
You might want to check out the work Good Impressions do—and this forum post they wrote: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/8M8jGsCLcTzTnYtsw/opportunities-to-improve-ea-communications
Importantly if you can demonstrate comfort with doing 0 to 1 marketing (as that’s where most orgs are at) - that would help.
This is really awesome! Gives me glucose goddess meets veritasium vibes. Loved the hook too.