The Nonlinear Library EA - I'm glad I joined an experienced, 20+ person organization by michel
Mar 15, 2024
05:39
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: I'm glad I joined an experienced, 20+ person organization, published by michel on March 15, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum.
This is a
Draft Amnesty Week draft. It may not be polished up to my usual standards.
I originally started this post for the EA forum's career week last year, but I missed the deadline. I've used Draft Amnesty Week as a nudge to fix up a few bullets and am just sharing what I got.
In which: I tentatively conclude I made the right choice by joining CEA instead of doing independent alignment research or starting my own EA community building project.
In December and January last year, I spent a lot of time thinking about what my next career move should be. I was debating roughly four choices:
Joining the CEA Events Team
Beginning independent research in AI strategy and governance
Supporting early stage (relatively scrappy) AI safety field-building efforts
Starting an EA community or infrastructure building project[1]
I decided to join the CEA events team, and I'm glad I did. I'm moderately sure this was the right choice in hindsight (maybe 60%), but counterfactuals are hard and who knows, maybe one of the other paths would have proved even better
Here are some benefits from CEA that I think would have been harder for me to get on the other paths.
I get extended contact with - and feedback from - very competent people
Example: I helped organize the Meta Coordination Forum and worked closely with Max Dalton and Sophie Thomson as a result. I respect both of them a lot and they both regularly gave me substantive feedback on my idea generation, emails, docs, etc.
I learn a lot of small but, in aggregate, important things that would be more effortful to learn on my own
Examples: How to organize a slack workspace, how to communicate efficiently, when and how to engage with lawyers, how to utilize virtual assistants, how to build a good team culture, how to write a GDoc that people can easily skim, when to leave comments and how to do so quickly, how to use decision making tools like BIRD, how to be realistic about impact evaluations, etc.
I have a support system
Example: I've been dealing with post-concussion symptoms for the past year, and having private healthcare has helped me address those symptoms.
Example: Last year I was catastrophizing about a project I was leading on. After telling my manager about how anxious I had been about the project, we met early that week and checked in on the status of all the different work streams and clarified next steps. By the end of the week I felt much better.
I think I have a more realistic model of how organizations, in general, work. I bet this helps me predict other orgs behavior and engage with them productively. It would probably also help me start my own org.
Example: If I want Open Phil to do X, it's become clear to me that I should probably think about who at OP is most directly responsible for X, write up the case for X in an easy to skim way with a lot of reasoning transparency, and then send that doc to the person and express a willingness to meet to talk more about it.
And all the while I should be nice and humble, because there's probably a lot of behind the scenes stuff I don't know about. And the people I want to change the behavior of are probably very busy and have a ton of daily execution work to do that makes it hard for them to zoom out to the level I'm likely asking them to
Example: I better understand the time/overhead-costs to making certain info transparent and doing public comms well, so I have more realistic expectations of other orgs.
Example: If I were to start my own org, I would have a better sense of how to set a vision, how to ship MVPs and test hypotheses, as well as more intuitive sense of when things are going well vs. poorly.
If I want to later work at a non-EA org, my expe...
This is a
Draft Amnesty Week draft. It may not be polished up to my usual standards.
I originally started this post for the EA forum's career week last year, but I missed the deadline. I've used Draft Amnesty Week as a nudge to fix up a few bullets and am just sharing what I got.
In which: I tentatively conclude I made the right choice by joining CEA instead of doing independent alignment research or starting my own EA community building project.
In December and January last year, I spent a lot of time thinking about what my next career move should be. I was debating roughly four choices:
Joining the CEA Events Team
Beginning independent research in AI strategy and governance
Supporting early stage (relatively scrappy) AI safety field-building efforts
Starting an EA community or infrastructure building project[1]
I decided to join the CEA events team, and I'm glad I did. I'm moderately sure this was the right choice in hindsight (maybe 60%), but counterfactuals are hard and who knows, maybe one of the other paths would have proved even better
Here are some benefits from CEA that I think would have been harder for me to get on the other paths.
I get extended contact with - and feedback from - very competent people
Example: I helped organize the Meta Coordination Forum and worked closely with Max Dalton and Sophie Thomson as a result. I respect both of them a lot and they both regularly gave me substantive feedback on my idea generation, emails, docs, etc.
I learn a lot of small but, in aggregate, important things that would be more effortful to learn on my own
Examples: How to organize a slack workspace, how to communicate efficiently, when and how to engage with lawyers, how to utilize virtual assistants, how to build a good team culture, how to write a GDoc that people can easily skim, when to leave comments and how to do so quickly, how to use decision making tools like BIRD, how to be realistic about impact evaluations, etc.
I have a support system
Example: I've been dealing with post-concussion symptoms for the past year, and having private healthcare has helped me address those symptoms.
Example: Last year I was catastrophizing about a project I was leading on. After telling my manager about how anxious I had been about the project, we met early that week and checked in on the status of all the different work streams and clarified next steps. By the end of the week I felt much better.
I think I have a more realistic model of how organizations, in general, work. I bet this helps me predict other orgs behavior and engage with them productively. It would probably also help me start my own org.
Example: If I want Open Phil to do X, it's become clear to me that I should probably think about who at OP is most directly responsible for X, write up the case for X in an easy to skim way with a lot of reasoning transparency, and then send that doc to the person and express a willingness to meet to talk more about it.
And all the while I should be nice and humble, because there's probably a lot of behind the scenes stuff I don't know about. And the people I want to change the behavior of are probably very busy and have a ton of daily execution work to do that makes it hard for them to zoom out to the level I'm likely asking them to
Example: I better understand the time/overhead-costs to making certain info transparent and doing public comms well, so I have more realistic expectations of other orgs.
Example: If I were to start my own org, I would have a better sense of how to set a vision, how to ship MVPs and test hypotheses, as well as more intuitive sense of when things are going well vs. poorly.
If I want to later work at a non-EA org, my expe...