APPLICANT
RESOURCES
HOW TO PREPARE
LOWER TIME INVESTMENT STEPS
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Skim or read our handbook "How to Launch a High-Impact Nonprofit"
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Learn more about our Research Process
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Plan & demonstrate that you have or are teaching yourself and practicing good evidence-led decision-making, for example
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Apply the principles taught in the handbook to your own decisions/work decisions
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Plan and undertake an independent project and then include this in your CV
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FOR THE CURIOUS
IN-DEPTH RESOURCE RECOMMENDATIONS
These are ordered by area. Get curious, get a sense of the landscape of things to learn about out there, and consider what might be most important for you to focus on - especially things you might know less about or be weaker on.
4. Learn more about Effective Altruism
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In general: Get a “degree” in Effective Altruism. Read the forum regularly, engage with other EAs, go to conferences, talks, and meetups. Get used to discussing challenging topics in thoughtful ways. Be critical. Listen.
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Learn more about EA concepts - there are a great many resources for this. Besides googling around for what you are curious about and reading what you find, we recommend the following:
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Read this forum post on deference culture in EA
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Things are heavy-tailed: Great article here (11mins.): + first 6 mins. of this video
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Expected Value (2 mins.) Another (4mins.)
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5.Get motivated to be ambitious
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Saving a Life Every Day blog post by Joey (2 mins.)
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Read the book “The Life You Can Save” by Peter Singer
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Read Doing Good Better by Will McAskill - especially Chapters 5 and 6 (30 mins.)
6. Get better at decision-making and meta skills
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Learn about Reasoning Transparency - Open Philanthropy (20 mins.)
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Read the blog post “when to focus and when to re-evaluate”
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Read the book “The Scout Mindset” by Julia Galef
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Read the book “Principles” by Ray Dalio or watch this video
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Read the book “Algorithms to Live By” by Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths
7. Get better at productivity systems
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Read this article on pareto productivity
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Read the book “Atomic habits” by James Clear
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Read the book “Ultralearning” by Scott H. Young
8. Get better at being fast and lean
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Read “The Lean Start-Up” by Eric Ries or watch this video about it
10. Get better at quantitative work, research, science
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Take a deep-dive into our research methodology
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Read Bayesian Mindset - Cold Takes (30 mins.)
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Read “How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of "Intangibles" in Business” by Douglas W. Hubbard
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Read “Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress” by Steven Pinker
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Learn how to quantify hard-to-quantify things:
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Alexander’s back of the envelope “importance” calculations - (20 mins.) - Feel free to choose the 3-5 BOTECs that interest you the most & try to understand the
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11. Learn more about scientific methods and evidence
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Read about Adjusted life year - EA Wiki (1 min.)
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Interpreting the Disability-Adjusted Life-Year (DALY) Metric - GiveWell (2 mins.)
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Quality-adjusted life year - Wikipedia. Feel free to only read the summary (2 mins.)
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The well-being adjusted life year (WELLBY) approach - Happier Lives Institute. Feel free to only read the short section (“The well-being adjusted life year (WELLBY) approach”) linked instead of the entire article (5 mins.)
12. Get more resilient and confident confident
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Read the book “Failing forward” by John Maxwell
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Learn more about the difference between gritty vs. irrepressible founders in this blogpost
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Listen to the 80k podcast episode about having a successful career with depression, anxiety, and imposter syndrome
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Read the book “Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It” by Chris Voss
13. Learn more about running a charity
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Learn more about what the overall space of effective charities is like
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Listen to this 80k podcast episode with Alexander Berger about Improving Global Health & Well-being in Clear and Direct Ways (1-3 hrs)
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Listen to this 80k podcast episode with our incubatee Varsha Venugopal on using gossip to help vaccinate every child in India
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Go take a deeper dive looking at our charities and their own websites describing their work, their values, their approach, their impact, their history
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Learn about how to build a theory of change
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A Short Introduction to Theory of Change - Ian David Moss (3 mins.)
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Build a Theory of Change - Karolina Sarek (3 mins.) Note: Feel free to only read the short section (“Build a Theory of Change”) linked instead of the entire article.
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Learn more about cost-effectiveness analyses
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Conducting cost-effectiveness analysis (CEA) - J-PAL (20 mins)
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List of ways in which cost-effectiveness estimates can be misleading - Saulius (20 mins.)
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Learn more about funding and funding gaps
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Joey’s post on “we need more nuance regarding funding gaps”
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14. Learn more about balancing difficult work with your own passion and excitement
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Tradeoffs - How can we balance our own needs with the needs of others? (5 mins.)
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Excited altruism - GiveWell - (10 mins.)