Vaidehi AGARWALLA

Cause Areas of Interest in EA:

• Improving institutional decision making

• Climate change

• EA community building

• Farmed animal welfare

• Biosecurity

• Global priorities research

Tell us a little bit about yourself

I grew up in Singapore but my family was from India originally. I went to Haverford College in the United States for my undergraduate studies. That was when I first found out about Effective Altruism ("EA"). There was a college group in Haverford, which I joined. I graduated in May 2019 with a Bachelor of Arts in Sociology. After graduation, I worked as a boutique consultant in Philadelphia for almost a year, before moving back to Singapore due to COVID-19. I first got involved in EA three years ago during college.

How did you first learn about effective altruism?

A friend of mine introduced me to a blog called Slate Star Codex. Through that blog, I found out about GiveWell and 80,000 hours (“80K”). I think GiveWell and 80K had roughly the same impact on me. I was immediately drawn by GiveWell because I was already interested in social non-profit in developing countries, and when I found 80K it was sort of the perfect answer – how to use my career to have impact in global development. I read the whole 80K Career Guide before I even knew that there was a local EA group in my college. 

I applied for GiveWell’s summer internship position, and ended up interning with a non-profit in India that had worked with the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab or J-PAL on one of their randomised control trials. I thought working with them would be good because they had a demonstrated interest in evidence-based interventions. I also wanted to see what it would be like to work at a charity and determine if I was really serious about doing this kind of work for my career. 

At the same time, I was also reading the 80K Career Guide, which was the push I needed to take my career more seriously. Up until that point I had been avoiding networking and job applications. As I was reading 80K, I realised that my fear of failure and rejection was not a good enough excuse for inaction. 

After working at the non-profit, I realised that I could have a big impact but I needed to skill-up a lot with regards to general skills like operations and management. The Career Guide also mentioned that a corporate career is a good way to build this kind of career capital. This was why I decided against working in a non-profit straight out of college and focused my efforts on consulting instead. Another reason was because it is much easier to go from a corporate job to a traditional non-profit than vice versa.

I want to highlight that this decision worked for me given my specific context – I wanted to work in non-profits in the global development sector. For other EA members who are interested in different cause areas or career paths which may require expertise or domain-level knowledge (e.g. 80K’s other current top priorities or research-based roles in global health and development), it might be more advisable to look at the possible career paths you could follow, think about the organisations and roles you want to work in, and then develop specialised skills.

How did you first get involved with the EA community?

I only got involved in the community when I joined the local group at Haverford and met actual people to discuss EA ideas with. I think joining an EA group is great because it brings a human, social element to EA engagement. I appreciated knowing real EA members that I could bug with all of my silly questions, and get exposed to different perspectives. In general, I have found that having back-and-forth conversations are more fruitful compared to just reading an article and reflecting on it on your own.  I also ran a High Impact Careers Fellowship which got me to engage more deeply with 80K’s advice.  

I think I also really felt connected to the community when I attended EAGx Boston. It was an opportunity to meet EAs from all over the United States, and to see that many people were similar to me – both in terms of what we liked and disliked about the EA movement. That was when I became much more engaged with broader community-building efforts.

How are you engaged with EA and EA Singapore at the moment?

EA SINGAPORE:

I am helping EA SG’s community organiser, Yi-Yang, run the inaugural Singapore Arete Fellowship! The goal of the Fellowship is to get a group of students and fresh graduates who are interested in EA and bring them together to discuss EA ideas in more depth. The course will start with an overview of the core EA concepts, frameworks and cause areas. Then, we will look at how those ideas apply to careers, and how the Fellows can figure out what their next steps should be. I am especially excited about the fellowship because EA and 80K have had such a positive influence on my career trajectory, and I want to share that with other students. I also help to organise monthly events for EA SG members.

GLOBAL EA COMMUNITY:

I also founded the Local Career Advice Network in October 2019 after a call with a dozen or so EA group organisers from various countries. We all found that existing EA career advice (e.g. 80K) has limited value outside of the United States and the United Kingdom (and even for many EAs in those countries). Because a lot of careers advice is not portable across countries, it has been hard for EA group organisers to give high-quality career advice to their EA members. The aim of the Network is to connect group organisers from different countries to enable them to do things that any one organiser may not have the time or resources to do. The Network also serves as a platform for group organisers to share best practices across cities, countries and regions.

The Network is actively working on two projects. First, the group organisers in the Network are conducting research on EA career opportunities in their area e.g. doing cause prioritisation on a country level by thinking about the comparative advantages that their country might have. The group organisers are also thinking about what their members can do locally if they want to work on certain promising cause areas (e.g. what degrees their members can pursue, what organisations they can work in). Second, the Network will also be organising a workshop in a few weeks to equip EA group organisers with the skills to give better career advice. 

I am also one of the organisers of an online EA community – Effective Environmentalism – for those concerned about climate change. The community aims to apply the EA framework to the issue of climate change. We started this community because we found that there are a lot of EA members who care about climate change. Unfortunately, we do not know nearly enough about climate change interventions from an EA perspective. There has been some research done from the philanthropy side, but there is currently no career advice available. I think it is worth asking more questions about climate change (e.g. What are the most impactful things that can be done in climate change? Are all the low-hanging fruits taken? Are there some areas of climate change that are neglected and worth working on?). The group bridges this gap by serving as a platform for members to share resources and discuss ideas. If you’re interested in getting involved in this, please reach out!

What challenges have you faced with your EA journey?

I came into EA from a global development perspective, so long-termism and X-risks were new concepts for me. Although I always cared about future generations and the potential impact of climate change on these people, I did not fully agree with all of the conclusions of EAs working on long-termism (specifically the value of preventing human extinction over other existential risks that might cause civilisational collapse). About a year ago, I spent some time thinking more seriously about long-termism and understanding extinction risk arguments, which I now mostly agree with (at least in theory). I think there is a pretty large intellectual challenge when it comes to grappling with long-termism. I am still trying to process what implications long-termist arguments might have on my career and actions. For now, I am hedging my bets and working on movement building!

I did not have as many hesitations in relation to the other EA cause areas (e.g. global health and development, animal welfare). Those cause areas were much easier for me to understand and appealed to me more intuitively, even if I did not appreciate the full nature of the problem (e.g. the neglectedness of farm animal welfare as a cause area).  

What would you like to see more of in EA communities?

EA SINGAPORE:

I think Singapore is a really great spot for individuals to do high-impact work since it is the natural headquarters for efforts in South East Asia. There are so many different cause areas that are relevant in Singapore’s context – be it animal welfare or AI safety or philanthropy. If you are in Singapore, I think there are a lot of opportunities you can exploit. As a community, I think we can also afford to be quite ambitious on what we want to achieve. While I do not have a wish list, I would be excited to see more people undertaking different EA projects in Singapore.

GLOBAL EA COMMUNITY:

Globally, I would like to see EA grow more outside of the West. The reason for this is very simple - the Global South is going to comprise the majority of the world’s population in the future and it will have more sway across the EA cause areas. The EA community should start building relationships with individuals in the region if we want these individuals to trust EA recommendations and ideas in the future. I am very keen to see even more EA chapters and hubs pop up in different areas across the Global South like Latin America or Africa or Asia in the next 10 years.

Recommend some resources to EA members

For new members:

I would highly recommend the 2017 80K Career Guide. It provides a framework for thinking about how to approach your career e.g. the next steps you can take and it is more cause-neutral compared to 80K’s Key Ideas Series. 

I would also recommend the resources on the EA website, though I am sure most people would be familiar with them. The EA Resource Hub is also wonderful, especially the Reading Lists. Some resources may resonate more with you than others. That is perfectly normal. 

For more experienced members:

I would recommend this collection of good 2012-2017 EA forum posts. A bunch of really interesting and thought-provoking ideas are discussed in these posts. 

I also highly recommend the entire Charity Entrepreneurship (“CE”) website, especially if you are interested in global health, animal welfare, charity entrepreneurship and/or intervention research (e.g. how to find high-impact charity ideas). I have spent dozens of hours on CE’s website and it is one of my favourite EA resources. I respect the high level of transparency that the CE team has committed to. They have posted about their entire process of incubating high-impact charities and made their resources publicly available so that everyone can benefit from it. They have also recently made their Online Course on charity entrepreneurship available, so definitely check that out if you are considering a career in charity entrepreneurship. CE resources will be most relevant for those who are interested in the charity sector. However, I have personally used their frameworks for my own non-charity, movement-building projects.

What advice do you have for EA members grappling with guilt about not doing more?

For new members: 

My first recommendation is always to reach out and talk to other members of the EA community, both organisers and members. From my own experience, a lot of things only started to make sense for me when I began talking to other people, challenging ideas, and having my own views challenged. In my view, conversing with other EA members is one of the best ways to figure out if EA is actually something you want to spend a lot of time on, and if EA ideas really resonate with you – this turned out to be the case for me but it may not be the case for you. A lot of the people that I talk to also tend to say that they wish they had gotten more involved in EA earlier in their life, when they had more flexibility and options in terms of career choices. 

If you have already read a little bit about EA and are not sure who to reach out to or how to get more involved, you can start with joining the next EA SG introductory meetup or event.

If you have reservations or hesitations about something, I encourage you to post about it in the EA SG WhatsApp Group or any EA Facebook group. Just treat these groups as ‘no-dumb-questions’ spaces and ask away. You might find that other people also have the same reservations. These groups are also good platforms if you want to find people working on a particular cause or career path you are interested in. 

For more experienced members: 

All of the above may apply to older members as well, especially those who have known about EA for a while but have not engaged much with the local EA community. I would definitely encourage EAs to meet fellow members one-on-one. 

There are many ways to be involved in the EA community without having an EA job or being a community organiser. You could donate, run your own small projects or do research on a specific topic. I would be happy to talk to anyone who is in this boat to try to figure out what you can do.   

For people who are grappling with guilt or scrupulosity: 

I think sometimes EA members can start being hard on themselves because they think they can always be doing more. Julia Wise’s posts on her blog are especially helpful in dealing with this, in particular “You have more than one goal, and that's fine”. She argues that you can optimise for impact (e.g. donating to GiveWell-recommended charities or working at a job that is high-impact) while accommodating the other goals or wants or needs in your life (e.g. going out with your friends, taking care of your pets, cooking really fancy meals). Julia shares that it is okay to have non-EA goals and wants and needs. It is okay to spend your whole Saturday just going on a bike ride or hiking or something. Those non-EA desires are a part of you and not every part of you has to be optimised for impact. I am the kind of person who likes to optimise in every aspect of her life but I derive pleasure from optimisation. I know that not everyone feels the same way and that is okay. The main thing you should remember is that you are not doing any of this alone. We are in a community and you have the support of the community. I find that it is also really important to have a strong social network inside and outside of EA. Do also feel free to write to community organisers or the Centre for Effective Altruism’s Community Health Team! The Team, in particular, is there to talk through this kind of issues with members. They are trained to help.