Fill out this census of everyone who could ever see themselves doing longtermist work — it’ll only take a few mins

By 80000_Hours, Niel_Bowerman, Nick_Beckstead, Benjamin Hilton @ 2022-06-21T22:49 (+219)

Often it’s really helpful to know who might be good at or potentially some day willing to join exciting projects.

We’re collecting that information, so we can share it with >20 longtermist orgs and >100 longtermist entrepreneurs and funders.^[1]

All you need to do is put your name, email and LinkedIn on this form. This will be quick if you have an up-to-date LinkedIn or online CV.

And if you want to, you can give us a bunch more information that might help connect you up with future projects.

Link to census of everyone who could ever see themselves doing longtermist work.

______

Who should fill this out?

This is a census of people who might (now or any time in the future) be interested in joining or launching a project aimed at improving humanity's long-term prospects. This includes employees of current longtermist projects.

Why are we doing this?

To populate a spreadsheet of people that various longtermist organisations and individuals might contact when hiring or looking for a co-founder;
To help us better understand the skillsets and current employment of people interested in longtermism.

Who will see my response?

Your responses may be shared with any organisation doing longtermist work, such as the ones on this list.

Your responses may also be shared with more than 100 donors and entrepreneurs in the longtermist space who are looking to fund and start new projects, including the Future Fund regrantors. We will ask these people and organisations not to share your information further.

Why would you not want to do this?

Your employer might see this! If you work for a longtermist org, your employer will understand that including your name does not mean you want to leave your job. We want you to fill this out, but feel free to skip any sections if that makes you more comfortable.
We’re going to share this database with lots of people (>100 people and >20 orgs). So there’s some risk this ends up being shared more widely without our consent. Of course, we would take any breach of your data seriously, but it would also help if you could avoid including anything you wouldn’t want to be widely known.
People might reach out to you pitching you on projects, roles and ideas. This is obviously what we want! But this might be a small cost on your time or your inbox.

Why should you do it anyway?

This might be an extremely high impact use of a few minutes of your time.
Organisations have been asking us (80,000 Hours) for a shareable list of people they can hire for years. So we’re finally going to have one!
Hiring is really difficult and is a big bottleneck to building new orgs and starting new projects.
We want to encourage more people to found new projects. This will also help connect founders to people who might be interested in co-founding or funding their projects.

Where can I comment on this census?

If you found a typo, or have an idea for how this census could be improved, please comment in this public doc so we can centrally track suggestions from across multiple sources. But feel free to comment below if you prefer.

Link to census of everyone who could ever see themselves doing longtermist work.

^{^}
Who’s we? This form is maintained by 80,000 Hours, and was designed in collaboration with Nick Beckstead at the Future Fund.

Rockwell Schwartz @ 2022-06-22T18:07 (+22)

Can you explain how the locations listed as potential places for people to move were selected? Are they locations that have a certain number of longtermist org headquarters that don't accommodate remote employees? I'm biased, but I was surprised NYC wasn't listed. And in general, I think this sort of suvery can end up propagating certain community-level perceptions through what is included and what is omitted (e.g. implying Boston, DC, and SF are longtermist hubs, but NYC is not).

Niel_Bowerman @ 2022-08-16T17:50 (+1)

Hey Rocky, it was mainly driven by my guesses of where longtermist orgs are hiring at the moment. I've been getting a bunch of requests to help hiring for roles based in DC, Boston and SF Bay Area, but not as many New York. I didn't want to add too many options for brevity.

But there are of course plenty of longtermist organisations hiring in New York at the moment, e.g. these: https://80000hours.org/job-board/?location=new-york-ny

Owen Cotton-Barratt @ 2022-06-21T23:31 (+14)

I feel maybe you should say something like "this will be quick if you have an up-to-date LinkedIn or online CV"? (I don't; I guess I'm unusual but not super-unusual among the population who would otherwise be happy filling this in. People might either not have got to updating a CV recently, or not be happy having one publicly available.)

Niel_Bowerman @ 2022-06-21T23:33 (+3)

Thanks, I've added your suggestion.

Owen Cotton-Barratt @ 2022-06-21T23:36 (+7)

For the group who have a CV but just don't want it publicly visible, maybe you should have a way of submitting that information that isn't giving a public link?

Niel_Bowerman @ 2022-06-21T23:52 (+1)

Good point - I had forgotten that some people might have this preference. I've added this option.

Niel_Bowerman @ 2022-06-21T23:44 (+1)

What do you think about link-sharing via Google Drive? Or would you rather have it shared with specific emails only? (The former should make sharing the results easier)

Owen Cotton-Barratt @ 2022-06-22T00:01 (+11)

I expect people will vary on this. Maybe most people who would be happy filling in the form at all won't mind much about google drive link-sharing. (I imagine a little more nervousness b/c it's easier for people to share a link to their CV than share e.g. a pdf of their CV)

Of possible interest: 2 minutes reflection from me says that I probably won't get to filling this in b/c "writing a CV" is something I will naturally feel perfectionist about // probably I'd need to spend 1-3 days on it to feel comfortable with it going to this group, and I probably don't want to spend that time (if someone made a bid that something was really important I could imagine myself pushing through the discomfort and doing something faster, but I'm more interested in myself as a stand-in for other people with the same hangups than literally getting a submission from me). If instead of asking for a CV you just had a series of questions about career that I could fill in on the form, I'd be decently likely to spend 20-30 minutes doing that. The key difference is that if I'm doing it for a form there's no social expectation that it's the kind of thing that people put time into polishing, so I don't feel bad about doing a quick rather than perfectionist version.

Niel_Bowerman @ 2022-06-22T00:04 (+5)

I'll think about this some more and may make a lightweight version of this tomorrow.

(Part of the reason for posting this census here before promoting more widely on mailing lists was to get this kind of feedback. So I appreciate it! )

Rebecca @ 2022-06-23T18:01 (+1)

I think updating one's LinkedIn with the minimum new information would be substantially easier than this, and potentially more likely than abandoning / procrastinating on the survey?

Owen Cotton-Barratt @ 2022-06-23T18:45 (+8)

(I'm a conscientious objector to LinkedIn. I think the business practices of requiring you to have an account to see other people's accounts, and of showing people who pay who's looked at their page, are super obnoxious.)

HowieL @ 2022-06-25T12:02 (+8)

Agree they have a bunch of very obnoxious business practices. Just fyi you can change a seeing so nobody can see whose pages you look at.

Hamish Huggard @ 2022-06-23T05:35 (+12)

"What obstacles are holding you back from changing roles or cofounding a new project?"

Where's the option for "Cofounding a project feels big and scary and it's hard to know where to begin or if I'm remotely qualified to try"?

jmsdao @ 2022-06-22T08:54 (+12)

In that case that our situation changes in the future, how can we update our answers?

Niel_Bowerman @ 2022-06-22T09:05 (+4)

Feel free to just submit the form a second time if your situation changes. If you want to retract or withdraw any of your answers, you can email census@80000hours.org

Evie Cottrell @ 2022-06-22T08:39 (+10)

Pretty confused by what some of the cause areas are (e.g. epistemic institutions). I expect my responses were less helpful/ accurate bc of not knowing what some of them meant.

Niel_Bowerman @ 2022-06-22T09:09 (+5)

Thanks for the feedback. Epistemic institutions are one of the FTX Future Fund project categories that they use in this post. I appreciate that that is fairly obscure! Do you think it would be helpful to link to this post and the 80k problem areas page from that question?

S_Jobs @ 2022-06-23T17:52 (+11)

It seems to me that a decent part of the angle behind this survey is to get longtermists to consider exiting their jobs in order to found projects on the FTX Future Fund list. Do you think this is a fair assessment?

Evie Cottrell @ 2022-06-22T11:35 (+3)

Given that I was aiming to spend only a few mins on the census, I don't expect that I would have scrolled through the post to find the description of the cause area.

But some people might, so could be useful.

Rebecca @ 2022-06-23T18:03 (+1)

I think so

CarolineJ @ 2022-07-01T19:25 (+7)

Exciting! Do you have a deadline for people filling this?

Niel_Bowerman @ 2022-08-16T17:53 (+2)

Nope.

Gabriel Mukobi @ 2022-06-28T06:26 (+6)

Thanks for making this!

In the future, you may want to ask just one full name question for people who don't fit neatly into the first name/last name split.

Christian Pearson @ 2022-06-22T06:00 (+6)

Great idea for a survey! I have submitted my answers.

I really liked that the list of cause areas is extensive, that you allow multiple choices, and that you offer an "Other" category. I appreciate that the survey was reasonable in length, and that it felt well thought-out.

One potential point of improvement: for the optional answer fields, I wasn't sure how long to make my responses. From a web form perspective, the fields look nice. However, I found that their single line default size led me to feel that a short response was preferred. It might be helpful to clarify the expected length of responses, such as by stating that there are no expected lengths — I reason that longer answer lengths would give organizations deciding on candidates more information.

Another idea is to summarize all the answers given, allowing one to tweak any mistakes. Though I'm not sure this is possible within the limitations of how you put it together.

Overall, excellent work! I sincerely thank you for taking the time to put this project together. I feel that it will be helpful for people who, like me, are very interested in forming connections to Effective Organizations.

more better @ 2022-06-22T21:15 (+5)

Have you considered making the survey questions preview-able for potential participants? People might feel more inclined to fill out the form if able to peruse before deciding to partake.

I appreciate the work you have done to help streamline this process!

Yonatan Cale @ 2022-06-22T20:38 (+5)

Lots of EAs (developers at least) find it hard to apply to jobs. I hope this is a useful workaround to a lot of that problem

Linda Linsefors @ 2022-06-27T13:25 (+4)

Great initiative!

I'm registering these prediction:

They'll get more than 1 000 responses -- 90% chance
They'll get more than 10 000 responses -- 40% chance

Niel_Bowerman @ 2022-08-16T17:53 (+1)

Nice! So far we've had around 3000 responses.

Ben Pace @ 2022-06-21T23:43 (+2)

Sure, done.

Niel_Bowerman @ 2022-06-21T23:45 (+1)

Thanks!

Ezra Newman @ 2022-06-21T23:13 (+2)

Do you mean for the title to say "<= 3 mins"? I think you have your ">" inverted. (It took me about 3 minutes for the first section, and about 10 minutes all-in)

Niel_Bowerman @ 2022-06-21T23:20 (+4)

I was meaning to say "3 or more minutes".

Jay Bailey @ 2022-06-22T00:24 (+24)

A good call to action, I feel, should be about the upper bound rather than the lower bound. I too assumed that was "<= 3 mins" purely because ">= X time" is very unusual to put in a title. Perhaps changing it to something like "<= 15 mins" would be a good idea.

Niel_Bowerman @ 2022-06-22T01:20 (+3)

Thanks for the helpful pushback. I've changed the title to include "it'll only take a few mins".

Ezra Newman @ 2022-06-22T00:17 (+1)

Okay, nevermind then!

hnykda @ 2023-01-05T09:18 (+1)

Hey. There is a link in optional questions to FTX Future Fund projects, but that is dead already, obviously, so you get 404. (https://ftxfuturefund.org/projects/)

Ondřej Kubů @ 2022-07-07T06:34 (+1)

80 000 hours email: I know the form has changed to allow a CV as a PDF file but I would recommend mentioning the possibility in the emails, too. Some people not using LinkedIn may not fill in the form because of it. (I had the time to look at the form, but if I was in hurry, I would probably not fill the form because of that.)