From December 2018 – March 2019, I participated in a rather involved hiring process as a research analyst for the Open Philanthropy Project. Although I was compensated well for my time during this process, I was ultimately not offered a full-time position.
I had been approached to join them twice before: first in April 2018, and later in December 2018. The first time I was too focused on my data science work at Animal Charity Evaluators to seriously consider a career change to research analysis at a think tank, but given my recent switch to the board at ACE, I decided to move forward with applying at Open Philanthropy, despite it being a completely different line of work.
My time with Open Philanthropy was limited, but it was overall a fulfilling experience. Applying at a think tank of this caliber was far more serious than I originally thought it would be. I'm not entirely sure of what I was expecting beforehand, but I can now say that the process of applying to work at OPP was not only helpful to them in terms of understanding how I would potentially perform there, but also was extremely helpful to me in terms of better understanding how I currently think deeply about more practical effective altruism considerations (as opposed to the theoretical considerations I'm more used to thinking about).
I currently earn a living by doing communications consultation work — a far cry from the research analysis that OPP wanted me for. My work these days is maybe a bit too meta: I communicate to communications departments how to more effectively communicate. Mostly this consists of data analysis and hypothesis testing, but I've found that most people misunderstand what I do when I tell them this. The reality is that my job is just to implement best practices in places that don't already think too deeply about what their data is telling them.
There's a social norm that it's not good to publicly mention when you try and fail to be hired somewhere. I don't like this norm. I think it's important to be open both about one's successes and one's failures. This applies especially in this case, because I found the application process to be so enlightening about how I'd actually perform this type of think tank work. Nevertheless, it taught me a lesson: my career goals should align more closely with the skill expertise I have that is neglected among my peer group.
I've dedicated my life to the field of effective altruism. I donate 25% of my income to EA organizations; I serve on the board of an EA org; I've volunteered and/or worked for half a dozen EA orgs over the past seven years; and I spend a non-trivial amount of my free time thinking about and contributing to EA spaces.
When I applied to OPP (and, indeed, when OPP sent me multiple invitations to apply), the idea (I think) was that I might perform well as a data analyst. I think this was correct. But it failed to take into account that lots of people that are into effective altruism consider research analysis as a high-status position, and thus expend a lot of resources to strongly compete for the very few positions available in the field. While I may be competent at research analysis, that category isn't at all neglected among EAs. Compare this state of affairs to my communications expertise: among EAs, communications is a neglected field. I'm much better suited to working in the relatively neglected field where I've already built a good deal of career capital.
Tim Urban of Wait But Why published an excellent post last year about how to pick a career that fits you. His advice is sourced from (among others) the well-researched 80,000 Hours, which incubated ACE in its initial year. I have siblings in both middle school and high school, so I've been thinking deeply on these ideas recently, and I believe the same sorts of considerations apply to me.
The one thing I've learned from my experience with OPP is that I'd like to be a bit more novel in the data science communications projects that I undergo. Most of my current work involves just applying best practices to orgs that aren't already following them; but there is an undeniable excitement when you're working on novel procedures. To that end, I've been pursuing knowledge of more of the darks arts of communication — not because I plan to use them, but because I want to learn more about the methods that compete with the 'best practices' that I currently solely implement. Of particular interest has been Destin Sandlin's recent Smarter Every Day series on social media manipulation (on youtube, twitter, and facebook). I've also gained access to a number of paid tutorial videos obtained on the dark web that focus on facebook ad manipulation. Again: I want to stress that I have no intention of doing anything black hat — how I've handled wikipedia/EA controversies in the past should make that perfectly clear — but knowing these strategies is helping me to understand how to better innovate in the communications field.
I look forward to seeing how this affects what I do next in my career.
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