Announcing my departure from CEA (& sharing assorted notes)

By Lizka @ 2024-10-03T18:30 (+191)

TLDR: I’ve recently started as a “Research Fellow” at Forethought (focusing on how we should prepare for a potential period of explosive growth and related questions).

I left my role on the CEA Online Team, but I still love the Forum (and the Forum/CEA/mod teams) and plan on continuing to be quite active here. I’m also staying on the moderation team as an advisor.

➡️ If you were planning on reaching out to me about something Forum- or Online-related, you should probably reach out to Toby Tremlett or email forum@effectivealtruism.org.

What’s in this post?

I had some trouble writing this announcement; I felt like I should post something, but didn’t know what to include or how to organize the post. In the end, I decided to write down and share assorted reflections on my time at CEA, and not really worry about putting everything into a cohesive frame or narrative. So the result includes:

1. More on my job change
   1. Very briefly, more on why & what ⬇️
   2. A note on EA & CEA ⬇️
2. Assorted notes from my time at CEA
   1. Some things I probably wouldn’t have predicted about working at CEA ⬇️
      1. In particular: how much I’d learn from working with managers and on a team, how much I appreciate CEA’s team values, and how warm people would be
   2. Some of the things about my work at CEA that were difficult for me ⬇️
      1. In particular: being public, other people’s confusions about CEA, lack of focus, and moderation
   3. And an overview of some of my major projects, with quick notes on them ⬇️

Briefly: more context on the change

• I worked at CEA for almost three years — first on the Events Team for some months, then as the “Content Specialist” on the Online Team for around two years.

• I’ve been focusing mostly on non-Forum-related projects^[1] for some months now.

  • Earlier this year, I started exploring whether I should work on something else, and handing off most of my Forum-related responsibilities. 

    • The Forum team now consists of @Sarah Cheng, @Agnes Stenlund, @Will Howard🔹, @JP Addison🔸, @Ollie Etherington, and @Toby Tremlett🔹, and moderation is being run by @JP Addison🔸 .

  • I ended up thinking that the best thing for me to work on was probably either a “Courses” program at CEA or research (or distillation) on (non-alignment) topics related to how society can prepare for transformative AI.

• I’ve now joined Forethought as a Research Fellow to study questions related to explosive growth. (There’s a bit of discussion on this in a sequence of posts from Lukas.)

  • By default, this position is temporary, and I’m not really sure what I’ll be doing in the longer term. I hope to learn, explore new areas, and try new things, and then re-evaluate.^[2]

A note on EA and CEA

I’ve left CEA, but I want to be clear that I’m still involved in EA, and I expect I’ll spend at least a bit of my time and energy on “meta EA” work.^[3] I continue to think EA is one of the most promising positive forces in the world.

I’m also optimistic about CEA and the Online Team, and hopeful that they will nurture EA and support this community.

Separately, I’m also really grateful to the Online Team (and the rest of CEA), who’ve been incredibly supportive. I feel honored to have worked with them, and I’d be excited to work with them again in the future.

Assorted notes from my time at CEA

Some things about working at CEA that I probably wouldn’t have predicted

1. Working with a manager and working in a team have been some of the best ways for me to grow.^[4]

Meetings with my managers (@Amy Labenz, @Ben_West🔸, and @JP Addison🔸) helped me push forward complicated projects (and get better at project management skills in the process), stop worrying as much about things like minor mistakes, feel like I could do more ambitious things, and more.

I’ve also learned a lot by working in a team and adopting the practices and mindsets that I saw and liked. (I’ve written a bit about some of these things before, e.g. shipping fast and iterating, setting weekly goals, and the value of user interviews.)

2. I like CEA’s team values and principles a lot more than I expected to. (And I want to import many of them wherever I go.)

I’m instinctively somewhat snobbish about things that sound remotely corporate or pretentious, and I bet that my reaction when I first read them was something like “sounds good but probably just words.”

But I was impressed at how much I saw these values in practice at CEA. Some examples:

• “Alliance mentality” and “purpose first”
  • Soon after joining the Online Team, I needed to send a bunch of emails and the task had developed into a major ugh field (I needed to figure out how to use mail merges and was generally somewhat overloaded). At some point Ben — my manager at the time — offered to just set this up for me, with zero implication that this was beneath him. This wasn’t an isolated incident; there were other times when my managers helped me with tasks that got ughy or that I didn’t have time for without remotely making me feel like I’m asking them to do something “low-status” or “below their pay grade.” They seemed to just want to do whatever was useful, and I really like this mentality.
  • An example I’ve mentioned before: a few months into my time on the Events Team (my first role at CEA), Aaron was leaving his role on the Forum, and had reached out to invite me to apply for his job. I was really stressed about bringing this up to Amy (my manager). Her reaction was "I think you should absolutely apply!"
  • In general, people help other teams and organizations, celebrate each other’s wins, and actually drop projects that seem ineffective (e.g.) — even when a team has put a lot of love and care into them. (Also related to “perpetual beta”.)
• “Watch team backup” (or “WTBU,” which I still mentally pronounce as “whataboo”)
  • Many of us sometimes worry that a friend or colleague has forgotten to do something, is overlooking an important consideration, etc., but bringing it up is difficult; the other party might feel offended or get defensive.
  • I think this was a lot rarer at CEA in significant part because of the shared norms around WTBU. When WTBU is normal (and encouraged), you’re less likely to feel offended if a colleague seems to think that you might be overlooking something. If it turns out you did need the backup, you have an obvious and gracious way to respond (“thanks so much for the WTBU”). And if you’re worried about bringing something up, you can just explicitly flag it as “WTBU” as shorthand for “I think you’ve probably got it covered, but I wanted to double check...”
• “High fives”
  • This one isn’t listed as an explicit team value, but I really like that CEA has a “high5s” Slack channel, especially for celebrating and appreciating quieter or behind-the-scenes help. (More generally, I think that channel helps to reinforce some good aspects of CEA’s culture.)

3. A huge number of people I worked and interacted with are incredibly generous and compassionate, and this makes a big difference.

This sounds obvious, but I think that kindness is generally under-appreciated, and that people in EA are sometimes viewed — including by others in EA, at least implicitly — as “cold” (utilitarians). I personally was probably expecting that CEA staff would be polite, but extremely focused on their professional goals, at the expense of things like warmth, friendliness, and encouragement. This hasn’t been true for me, and I’m really grateful for that; it made me more motivated, and I think I become kinder when I’m surrounded by kindness and generosity.

Examples of what I mean:

• I showed up in Oxford (and at CEA) without really knowing anyone. Someone I didn’t know offered me a temporary place to stay, for free (although I didn’t end up needing it). A coworker I hadn’t yet met sent me a doc with helpful tips for expats (this was not their job). Someone from a different organization showed me around the office and made sure I felt welcome. Someone I had recently met invited me to dinner with their housemates.

• Coworkers and strangers have reached out to me with messages of support, unprompted, because they guessed — based on e.g. an uptick in heated discussions on the Forum — that I might be having a rough time.^[5]

• I’ve seen people get emotional about issues like homelessness or depression, missed opportunities to improve the world, events on the other side of the planet, and more. (For a public example, listen to the discussion about trying to accelerate COVID vaccines here, around the 30-minute mark.)
• People ping you if you’re working quite late, check if you’re ok, offer to help if they can.

• People in this community set up random calls with cold-emailers because they think the call might help the person.^[6]

Some things about my work at CEA that were difficult for me

1. My work was pretty public. This has some benefits, and also some real downsides.

The key downsides were probably:

1. I worried about making minor mistakes, since they would be extremely visible. (See more on this in this Quick Take.)
2. The amount of feedback and input I got was sometimes overwhelming (although I was also grateful for a lot of it). For instance, many of the casual conversations that I had in in-person professional EA spaces would end up being about the Forum; people would bring up ideas they had, ask about some recent drama, share their takes on recent changes, etc. This was often great — I in fact love talking about the Forum, and this was a cheap way to get user feedback — but if something about my job was already a bit stressful, it could quickly become exhausting, and there were periods when I deliberately stayed away from that kind of setting.
3. I sometimes felt like I needed to be able to prove beyond doubt that my personal opinions (on issues like cause prioritization) were not influencing my actions in my professional capacity or my informal role as a public CEA staff member (and therefore public representative of EA). As a result, I think I sometimes mentally “flinched” away from inconvenient beliefs or opinions.
4. Relatedly, I sometimes felt like a mediator between different groups or people who disagreed with what other parties were doing on the EA Forum, which made it harder to form my own opinions and sometimes made me feel like people on both sides were mad at me.
5. And I got a decent amount of anonymous, random trolling and extremely low-quality criticism (which bothered me less as time went on).

(See also this Quick Take about criticism.)

2. Many people seem confused about what CEA does, and seemed to assume incorrect things about me because I was a CEA staff member.

To be clear, I think a lot of the underlying confusion is not these people’s fault (in fact, I was also pretty confused about what CEA is or does before I joined). But it sometimes made me feel defensive about CEA (or my decisions) and stressed out about what other people at CEA were doing.

Here are some examples:

1. People seem to think that CEA “controls” the EA community and/or wants it to follow CEA orders.
   1. It’s true that some CEA staff think about things like “what version of EA would be healthier and/or more impactful?”, that CEA runs and manages some important EA infrastructure (like the EA Forum), and that some CEA staff make decisions that affect how the EA community will develop (like who to invite to an event). But in my experience a lot of people significantly overestimate the amount of influence CEA staff have over EA, the amount of influence they want to have, and how much strategic coordination there is on this front.

   2. My actions — including things like how I worded an announcement, what I included in a Forum Digest, or how I approached a moderation incident — were sometimes discussed as if they were part of a broader CEA plan to push the EA community in some particular direction. This was pretty weird for me. (A bit more in this footnote.^[7])

2. People would sometimes interact with me as if I knew about (and endorsed) everything the different teams and people did or didn’t do.

   1. In practice, the teams are pretty independent, staff generally make a lot of decisions on their own and often (strongly but almost always amicably) disagree with each other, and when CEA doesn’t do something, it’s generally because the relevant staff and teams don’t think it’s worth the CEA capacity or resources or just haven’t thought of it. (And I think that’s fine.^[8])

3. CEA, OP, and EV were also often conflated.
   1. Once again, I think this is pretty understandable, but for a staff member who has ~no visibility into how OP makes its decisions and no influence on projects like Wytham, it can be really disconcerting.

3. My job involved working on or maintaining many different projects, which made it difficult for me to focus on any single thing or make progress on proactive projects.

For instance, the monthly EA Newsletter seems quite valuable, and I had many ideas for how to improve it that I wanted to investigate or test. But I was also running the Moderation and Facilitation teams, running the Forum Digest, supporting other Online projects, etc. Each of those things seemed worth prioritizing. I had a bit of capacity for bigger or more proactive projects, but that capacity was scarce and competition was tight, so I never prioritized doing a serious Newsletter-improvement project. (And by the time I was actually putting it together every month, I’d have very little time or brain space to experiment.^[9]) Similar things happened with moderation, and to a lesser extent with some of my other projects.

It’s also notable to me that my current job (at least, so far) involves less than a tenth of the email and Slack volume that I faced at CEA.

4. Despite taking little of my time, moderation was quite draining for me.^[10] 

I don’t know what exactly made moderation stressful, but here are some factors that played a role:

• Moderation issues come in bursts. There were completely quiet weeks, and weeks in which serious and hard-to-navigate issues would arise every day.
• My role as a moderator meant that I was often looking for and focusing on the most problematic content. This could make me generally more negative and could make it hard to relax and enjoy reading other content (or even just enjoy reading what I liked in posts or comments that might have some issues).
• There were some difficult calls and cases where I wasn’t (and still am not) sure that we did a good job. And in some situations, I endorsed a general process or rule, but also thought its local application was harmful or at least quite stressful for many involved.
• I often had trouble switching off: I had periods when I’d feel the need to check on the Forum (and the moderation Slack space) as soon as I woke up, throughout the day, and right before I was going to sleep (on weekends, too). And sometimes open incidents would get stuck in my head, such that I’d have trouble focusing on other things while they were getting resolved (which could take days or weeks).
• Moderators’ work is quite public, and it’s something that people often have opinions on, which meant things like the wording of a comment could feel quite stressful. (And making minor mistakes was scary.)
• And involvement in moderation has probably hurt some of my interpersonal relationships.

(More notes here, and some stats on moderation/facilitation here.)

While I’m talking about moderation, a shout-out: I’m extremely grateful to the other moderators. A special shout-out to @Lorenzo Buonanno🔸  and @Ben_West🔸, who were the only two active moderators (besides me) during what was, for me, the worst period on this front. I honestly can’t imagine what would have happened if they weren’t helping. I’m also extremely grateful for the moderators who are making sure the Forum works now.

Looking back on my work

Besides projects listed below, here are a few things I’m proud of: I apparently published ~145 posts during my time at CEA — although a lot of these are admin-like posts or link-posts (if you want, you can see some of my “selected” posts here) — which I think is pretty cool.^[11] I also learned and changed a lot over this period. And I made a bunch of EA-themed (and other) art.

Overview of my major projects on the Online Team

Note: this will have a decent amount of overlap with what I wrote in About my job: "Content Specialist".

People have sometimes asked me some version of “What even is there to do in the ‘Content Specialist’ role? Why does there need to be a role like this?” (usually more politely or euphemistically)

So I thought it might be useful to share quick notes on what I actually worked on:

1. Running the weekly Forum Digest and the monthly EA Newsletter
   1. The data (and some stories) that the Online Team have collected suggests that these are quite impactful. I didn’t invest in them as I wanted to, and wish I had done some things differently, but overall I think my work on these was valuable, and I’m really happy about that.
2. Running "Moderation" (making sure people are civil to each other, etc.) and "Facilitation" (tagging new posts, approving new users and deleting spam users, etc.) — and also generally trying to make sure discussions on the Forum are healthy and highlighting good content (e.g. via curation):
   1. It’s harder to get data on this, but I think my work on moderation (and facilitation) has also been useful.
      1. When I visit other online spaces (or comment sections), I’m often reminded of how much nicer I think the Forum is. I think this is in no small part due to our moderation and facilitation teams. (Imagine the Forum with a bunch of spam users, rage-bait posts, general mockery, etc. I expect that version would lose a lot of our current users, and wouldn’t get nearly as many of the high-effort, high-quality posts.)
   2. I’m also quite proud of my work on building out capacity for moderation and facilitation.
      1. When I joined the team, these were all being done by a few (heroic and low-on-time) moderators (with a bit of support from e.g. the Online Team), mostly without systems for streamlining the work. This seems costly and I’m not sure how it would have scaled (the Forum has grown quite a bit since then).
      2. Examples of the changes I made (with help from others!):
         1. Streamlining/standardizing moderation somewhat, by creating default processes and templates, investing in our Slack, creating a log for past incidents, etc.
         2. Separating “Facilitation” from “Moderation” — while the lines have shifted a bit over time, the separation seems to have helped with things like capacity
         3. Hiring and onboarding more moderators and facilitators (this was partly responsive, to replace moderators who were leaving the team or account for growth on the Forum) <3
3. Helping to develop the Forum as a platform (see a list of updates/ feature changes here)
   1. ...which includes separating the community section from the rest of the Frontpage
      1. You can see some of my reflections on the community section here. (I continue to think that was a good change.)
4. Running and helping with Forum events
   1. I ran a number of events on the Forum, like the Criticism Contest, Draft Amnesty Day, Giving Season / Donation Election in 2023, and lots of smaller events (Petrov Day, Career Conversations Week, etc.). And I helped with two big events that Ben ran — the AI Pause Debate and EA Strategy Fortnight.
   2. I think these were useful in different ways, and to different degrees, but I won’t get into it now. (Over time, I’ve grown more convinced by the case for events.)
5. Other projects include
   1. Helping with some internal Online Team / CEA work, like sharing my thoughts on Online/CEA strategy
      1. Also helping with other CEA (and other) projects
   2. Helping with a revamp of effectivealtruism.org
   3. Running workshops or helping with talks at EAG(x) events
   4. Updating things like the Wiki / Topics system and the User Manual

Thank you!

I’m really grateful to my coworkers, to the wonderful mods and Forum facilitators, to the folks who’ve written thoughtful Forum posts and comments, and to many others I’ve interacted with over my time at CEA. I’ll be seeing many of you on this platform and around!

Also, thanks to Aaron, Jonathan, and others for giving feedback on a draft of this post!

1. ^{^}

    This includes spending time on non-Forum-oriented projects for CEA, applying to various jobs, and more.

2. ^{^}

    I wouldn’t be too surprised if I ended up back at CEA at some point.

3. ^{^}

    I think it’s probably quite useful for people to do a mix of community-building and “direct” work — see also this post.

4. ^{^}

   Spending a summer as a Research Fellow at Rethink Priorities (and being managed by @Linch) was my first exposure to how incredibly useful management can be. (My previous experience was limited and mostly in (math) academia.)

   CEA turned me into a card-carrying member of the management-can-be-amazing society.

5. ^{^}

    Imagine if it was normal to react to online drama by sending a compassionate email to the head moderator after guessing she might be sad.

6. ^{^}

    In early 2021, I reached out to Aaron Gertler with a very timid email asking if he had any advice for someone who wanted to use writing or art skills to work on impactful projects. I mostly had the idea that my skills were useless because I was studying pure math and literature, and didn’t want to be an engineer or an economist. Aaron offered to have a call.

   (We're now friends! It's not clear if there's a direct causal link here.)

7. ^{^}

    One example that got discussed like this is the decision to add a “Community” section to the Frontpage. I know that some people thought it was motivated by a desire to reduce the visibility of criticisms of CEA (or other things in this genre). This wasn’t the case; I was one of the people most involved in the decision, and the reasoning was what is outlined here.

   Another example: I’ve seen discussions that speculated that the Criticism Contest wasn’t actually interested in hard-hitting or foundational criticisms of EA — I am in fact interested in these, although I also believe they’re harder to do well[A] — and some discussions that assumed things about me or my intentions (as one of the people who ran it and wrote the announcement post) that were just straightforwardly not true.

   I might be forgetting something, but when I try to think of actions I took that I think could accurately be described as “part of a broader CEA plan to direct the EA community”, the closest thing that comes to mind is what I/we did for Giving Season on the EA Forum in 2023; various people at CEA, across different teams, had agreed that we should try to boost the visibility of “effective giving” in EA. 

   But this seems quite different in important ways.

   Note that ascribing intentions to CEA staff is different from suggesting that they might be biased in some predictable way (e.g. in favor of projects they’ve worked on, or by virtue of being selected to work at CEA). I'm focusing on the former thing here.

   [A] For what it’s worth, one example of a “fundamental” criticism of EA that seems potentially true (at least to an important degree) and important to me is related to this thread from Emmett Shear.

   (I realize that it’s a bit absurd to include a footnote in a footnote. Oh well.)

8. ^{^}

    IMO there are benefits to being on the opposite end of the decentralized-to-monolith spectrum (i.e. if CEA were an organization with a strong vision, where some central decision-makers fairly tightly control all outputs, etc.). But I also think there would be real downsides, and would personally prefer a version of CEA that’s closer to where it currently is.

9. ^{^}

    I often felt like I was in a local maximum, but in a very narrow way; if I had a bit more wiggle room or slack I would be able to reach better maxima.

10. ^{^}

     Moderation is often considered “inherently stressful,” but I know some folks who don’t seem to feel nearly as affected, and I want to be careful about extrapolating from my experience here. (Beware the typical mind fallacy!)

11. ^{^}

     Most importantly, of course, it got me a lot of karma.