Writing Internship: Craft High-Impact Articles
If you want to chat with established EAs, be the first to hear about their latest high-impact ideas, strengthen your writing skills, and build your personal brand, then this might be the role for you.
Lots of EAs have great ideas but never get around to publishing them. We’re hiring some people who’ll talk to them and write up these ideas for them.
Deadline: 14th of February 2022, 11:59pm EST
Fill out this form to apply. It only takes a few minutes.
ROLE DESCRIPTION
At first, the role will consist of talking to Kat or Emerson about various ideas and writing those up. You'll also help improve other people's writing and do editing.
If this works out well, we’ll scale up the program, ideally so that all EAs can have their ideas written up.
We'll invest in your professional development by having you read certain books about how to improve your writing abilities and we’ll discuss evidence-based methods of improving your writing. We’ll also help you with making sure you actually implement these best practices.
In addition to talking to you about their ideas, Kat and Emerson will also coach you on writing.
Emerson became a New York Times bestselling author after publishing his first book at the age of 19. He also founded Mugglenet at age 12, the #1 Harry Potter site and one of the internet's largest communities. Later, he founded Dose, a top digital media company with an audience of similar size to the New York Times. He’s been named to Forbes’ “30 Under 30” list.
Prior to founding Nonlinear, Kat co-founded multiple high-impact charities, including Charity Entrepreneurship (which has incubated multiple charities that have received funding from GiveWell and OpenPhil) and Charity Science Health (funded by GiveWell). She is a contributor to How To Launch a High-Impact Nonprofit and you can see her writing on LessWrong and the EA Forum.
BENEFITS TO YOU
THE CASE FOR IMPACT
Ideas are at the heart of Effective Altruism. We take ideas seriously and act on their implications. Many have switched careers after hearing about certain crucial considerations. More generally, good ideas can spur people to action or lead them to make important decisions differently. Hence, helping the best ideas come to light should be a top priority for our community.
But lots of good ideas get lost in an unread notebook. So much impact is being left on the table when this happens.
Blog posts are a great way to make ideas spread at scale. Most of the time if you hear about a good idea, you only persuade a few of your friends at best. If you write, on the other hand, dozens or hundreds of people will read it.
Furthermore, the highest-impact people often have the best ideas, so saving their time can be especially high leverage. By helping them write you both save them time and help them publish more ideas than they otherwise would have. Even the most prolific writers usually have a massive backlog of ideas they haven't gotten to yet and might never.
In this role, you’ll be a core part of the EA idea pipeline.
IDEAL CANDIDATE
WHAT ISN'T NEEDED
APPLICATION PROCESS
If you have any questions regarding the position, get in contact via [email protected]
Lots of EAs have great ideas but never get around to publishing them. We’re hiring some people who’ll talk to them and write up these ideas for them.
Deadline: 14th of February 2022, 11:59pm EST
Fill out this form to apply. It only takes a few minutes.
ROLE DESCRIPTION
At first, the role will consist of talking to Kat or Emerson about various ideas and writing those up. You'll also help improve other people's writing and do editing.
If this works out well, we’ll scale up the program, ideally so that all EAs can have their ideas written up.
We'll invest in your professional development by having you read certain books about how to improve your writing abilities and we’ll discuss evidence-based methods of improving your writing. We’ll also help you with making sure you actually implement these best practices.
In addition to talking to you about their ideas, Kat and Emerson will also coach you on writing.
Emerson became a New York Times bestselling author after publishing his first book at the age of 19. He also founded Mugglenet at age 12, the #1 Harry Potter site and one of the internet's largest communities. Later, he founded Dose, a top digital media company with an audience of similar size to the New York Times. He’s been named to Forbes’ “30 Under 30” list.
Prior to founding Nonlinear, Kat co-founded multiple high-impact charities, including Charity Entrepreneurship (which has incubated multiple charities that have received funding from GiveWell and OpenPhil) and Charity Science Health (funded by GiveWell). She is a contributor to How To Launch a High-Impact Nonprofit and you can see her writing on LessWrong and the EA Forum.
BENEFITS TO YOU
- Writing experience and career capital. Writing well is one of the most valuable skills you can develop. It’s relevant to almost any role and any cause. In his post about career advice for longtermists, Holden Karnofsky singles out “communicator aptitudes” as one of a few sets of aptitudes with “relatively high potential for contributing directly to longtermist goals”. For each post you write, you’ll be able to see changes the original idea generator makes and to observe the reception by your general audience. A perfect opportunity to improve. And not only will you build your skills, but you’ll also publish lots of articles that help you demonstrate these skills to future employers.
- Build lots of EA connections. You’ll be talking to high-profile EAs about their favorite ideas and helping them publish those. That means many valuable connections.
- High impact. Ideas matter -- unless they’re never published. Help us improve EA epistemics. See section “The case for impact”.
- Build online name recognition. You’ll be listed as a co-author on every post you write. That means lots of well-deserved online presence. This leads to all sorts of things, like increasing your ability to find employment, get funding, hire people, and get people’s time to discuss an idea.
- Spend your time thinking about new exciting ideas. You wouldn’t be here if you didn’t like that. And in writing these ideas up, you’ll absorb them much better than you would from just reading the final post. You’ll deeply understand the arguments and know all the nuances.
- Comments, upvotes, and DMs. Let’s be honest, we all like internet points. If you do your job well, you’re bound to get lots of EA Forum and LessWrong upvotes. Furthermore, you’ll see what comments people leave; that’s useful feedback to you as a writer and often motivating too.
- Make your audience happier, more impactful, or both. Not only can writing be intrinsically fun, but you’ll be helping your audience achieve their goals. That feels great!
- Get into flow state. Writing up ideas you’re excited about can be very flow-inducing.
- Learn and grow on the quest for truth. Writing will inevitably force you to understand important concepts, look things up, consider different perspectives, etc. It’s one of the best tools for thought. If you value finding the truth, you should love writing.
- Seeing people apply your ideas. Someone might take an important decision because of a post you’ve written and tell you about it. This feels amazing when it happens.
- Short self-contained projects. Many tasks take ages till they’re done, or it’s never really done. Endless to-do lists are the norm. But with writing posts, there’s a very clear start and finish, and it can take as little as a morning to finish. You get frequent wins.
- Remote & flexible hours. This position can be done remotely according to your own schedule.
- Pay: This is an unpaid, part-time internship. However, if you do well, there is the opportunity to graduate into a full-time, paid EA writer.
THE CASE FOR IMPACT
Ideas are at the heart of Effective Altruism. We take ideas seriously and act on their implications. Many have switched careers after hearing about certain crucial considerations. More generally, good ideas can spur people to action or lead them to make important decisions differently. Hence, helping the best ideas come to light should be a top priority for our community.
But lots of good ideas get lost in an unread notebook. So much impact is being left on the table when this happens.
Blog posts are a great way to make ideas spread at scale. Most of the time if you hear about a good idea, you only persuade a few of your friends at best. If you write, on the other hand, dozens or hundreds of people will read it.
Furthermore, the highest-impact people often have the best ideas, so saving their time can be especially high leverage. By helping them write you both save them time and help them publish more ideas than they otherwise would have. Even the most prolific writers usually have a massive backlog of ideas they haven't gotten to yet and might never.
In this role, you’ll be a core part of the EA idea pipeline.
IDEAL CANDIDATE
- Strong writer in English. The application form asks you to link to past writing of yours.
- Naturally curious about new ideas and quick to understand them. You need to be able to turn half-structured rambling into a coherent, well-argued blog post.
- Avid consumer of EA and EA-adjacent content. Do the following organizations, people, or expressions ring a bell? Open Philanthropy; longtermism; Toby Ord; biorisk; AI timelines and bio-anchors; importance-neglectedness-tractability framework; hinge of history hypothesis. It’s okay if you don’t know one or two of these, but if you know none or only a couple, this role probably isn’t for you.
- Minimum time commitment of 10 hours per week.
WHAT ISN'T NEEDED
- Experience in a similar role
- Credentials
APPLICATION PROCESS
- The application deadline is the 14th of February 2022;
- Fill out this form to apply. It only takes a few minutes to fill out if you have your CV or LinkedIn ready;
- The strongest candidates will be contacted for the second stage test task.
If you have any questions regarding the position, get in contact via [email protected]