TLDR: This post is part of a sequence we’ve prepared for the Career Conversations Week on the EA Forum. This article provides a concise overview of the traits that Charity Entrepreneurship deems most valuable for a career in nonprofit entrepreneurship. We intend to provide you with a deeper understanding of our criteria when evaluating applications for our Incubation Program. Additionally, we hope this post assists you in self-assessing whether this career path aligns with your aspirations and abilities.

It’s been five years since we started our Incubation Program. We’ve since incubated 27 charities, some of which are now GiveWell incubated or ACE recommended, with many others on a path to becoming leaders in their fields. This would be impossible without dedicated, smart, resilient, and ambitiously altruistic individuals like you. Of course, not everyone is suited to be a successful nonprofit entrepreneur, and so we’ve spent the last few years refining our [...]

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Outline:

(02:39) Competence:

(03:54) Personality Traits:

(05:58) Upskilling as You Go:

(07:48) Potential Obstacles in this Career Path

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I work as a Resident Assistant at my college. Last year, only a few weeks into me starting, I was called at night to come help with a drunk student. I didn’t actually help very much, and probably didn’t have to be there. I didn’t even have to write up the report at the end. At one point I went outside to let medical services into the building, but mostly I just stood in a hallway.

The person in question was so drunk they couldn’t move. They had puked in the bathroom and were lying in the hallway crying. They could barely talk. When Campus Safety arrived they kneeled down next to this person and helped them drink water, while asking the normal slew of questions about the person’s evening.

They asked this person, whose name I can’t even remember, why they had been drinking so much. They said, in between hiccups [...]

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Congrats on having invented something exciting!

Usually, the best way to get innovative new technology into the hands of beneficiaries quickly is to get a for-profit company to invest with a promise of making money. This can happen via licensing a patent to an existing manufacturer, or creating a whole startup company and raising venture capital, etc.

One of the things such investors want to see is a 'moat': something that this company can do that no other company can easily copy. A patent/exclusive license is a good way to create a moat.

There are some domains like software where simply publishing 'open source' ideas causes those ideas to get used, but for most domains including manufacturing, my default expectation is that new tech is not used unless someone can make money off it. Pharma is a great example - there are tons of vaccines and niche treatments that we [...]

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Hi folks, in this post we’d like to describe our views as the Chair (Peter) and Director (Michael) of HLI in light of the recent conversations around HLI’s work. The purpose of this post is to reflect on HLI’s work and its role within the EA community in response to community member feedback, highlight what we’re doing about it, and engage in further constructive dialogue on how HLI can improve moving forward.

HLI hasn’t always got things right. Indeed, we think there have been some noteworthy errors (quick note: our goal here isn’t to delve into details but to highlight broad lessons learnt, so this isn’t an exhaustive list):

• Most importantly, we were overconfident and defensive in communication, particularly around our 2022 giving season post. 
  • We described our recommendation for StrongMinds using language that was too strong: “We’re now in a position to confidently recommend StrongMinds as the most effective way we [...]

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I sometimes get a vibe that many people trying to ambitiously do good in the world (including EAs) are misguided about what doing successful policy/governance work looks like. An exaggerated caricature would be activities like: dreaming up novel UN structures, spending time in abstract game theory and ‘strategy spirals[1]’, and sweeping analysis of historical case studies.

Instead, people that want to make the world safer with policy/governance should become experts on very specific and boring topics. One of the most successful people I’ve met in biosecurity got their start by getting really good at analyzing obscure government budgets.

Here are some crowdsourced example areas I would love to see more people become experts in:

• Legal liability - obviously relevant to biosecurity and AI safety, and I’m especially interested in how liability law would handle spreading infohazards (e.g. if a bio lab publishes a virus sequence that is then used for bioterrorism, or if [...]

The original text contained 4 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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This piece defends a strong form of epistemic modesty: that, in most cases, one should pay scarcely any attention to what you find the most persuasive view on an issue, hewing instead to an idealized consensus of experts. I start by better pinning down exactly what is meant by ‘epistemic modesty’, go on to offer a variety of reasons that motivate it, and reply to some common objections. Along the way, I show common traps people being inappropriately modest fall into. I conclude that modesty is a superior epistemic strategy, and ought to be more widely used - particularly in the EA/rationalist communities.

[gdoc]

Provocation

I argue for this:

In virtually all cases, the credence you hold for any given belief should be dominated by the balance of credences held by your epistemic peers and superiors. One's own convictions should weigh no more [...]

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Outline:

(00:45) Provocation

(01:05) Introductions and clarifications

(01:10) A favourable motivating case

(03:08) Weaker and stronger forms of modesty

(04:25) Motivations for more modesty

(04:42) The symmetry case

(06:53) Compressed sensing of (and not double-counting) the object level

(09:00) Repeated measures, brains as credence censors, and the wisdom of crowds

(11:09) Deferring to better brains

(12:38) Inference to the ideal epistemic observer

(15:26) Excursus: Against common justifications for immodesty

(16:21) Being ‘well informed’ (or even true expertise) is not enough

(18:02) Common knowledge ‘silver bullet arguments’

(19:47) Debunking the expert class (but not you)

(22:51) Private evidence and pet arguments

(24:52) Objections

(25:04) In theory

(25:08) There's no pure ‘outside view’\[12\]

(25:56) Immodestly modest?

(28:55) In practice

(29:25) Trivial (and less trivial) non-use cases

(31:40) In theory, the world should be mad

(34:45) Empirically, the world is mad

(37:22) Expert groups are seldom in reflective equilibrium

(42:05) Somewhat satisfying Shulman

(42:55) Practical challenges to modesty

(44:21) Community benefits to immodesty

(47:25) Conclusion: a pean, and a plea

(47:53) Rationalist/EA exceptionalism

(50:46) To discover, not summarise

(53:00) Paradoxically pathological modesty

(54:28) Coda

(55:02) Acknowledgements

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Progress report on CEA’s search for a new CEO

I[1] wanted to give an update on the Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA)’s search for a new CEO.

We (Claire Zabel, Max Dalton, and Michelle Hutchinson) were appointed by the Effective Ventures boards to lead this search and make a recommendation to the boards. The committee is advised by James Snowden, Caitlin Elizondo, and one experienced executive working outside EA.

We previously announced the search and asked for community input in this post.

Note, we set out searching for an Executive Director, and during the process have changed the role title to CEO because it was more legible to candidates not familiar with CEA or EV. The role scope remains unchanged.

In summary, we received over 400 nominations, reached out to over 150 people, spoke to about 60, and received over 25 applications. We’re still considering around 15 candidates, and are currently more deeply assessing [...]

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Outline:

(00:05) Progress report on CEA’s search for a new CEO

(01:11) Process

(09:07) Commentary/reflections

The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration.

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Pure Earth is a GiveWell Grantee dedicated to reducing lead exposure in low- and middle-income countries. In collaboration with Stanford University and the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh (icddr,b), a preliminary cost-effectiveness analysis (CEA) was performed to assess the effectiveness of an intervention in Bangladesh. The CEA presents an encouraging outlook, with a cost per disability-adjusted life year (DALY)-equivalent averted estimated at just under US$1. As this assessment is preliminary, it may contain methodological inconsistencies with GiveWell’s. As such, we welcome any comments and corrections.

In 2019, after investigations concluded that turmeric was the primary source of lead exposure among residents of rural Bangladesh, Stanford University and Bangladeshi non-profit icddr,b embarked on a mission to eliminate lead poisoning from turmeric. Stanford and icddr,b’s investigations had revealed that lead chromate (an industrial pigment sometimes called “School Bus Yellow”) was being added to turmeric roots to make them more attractive for [...]

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