Agree it's more about upbringing and messaging. And also relate a lot to this.

But also I think it's really hard to tell the "cause" of any given problem at an individual level. As recently as a few years ago, I would have put 80% weight on upbringing / messaging (which I agree aren't the identities themselves but something associated with them). Nowadays I'm more agnostic about it.

I think it's fine to seek out affinity groups and culturally-relevant advice to some degree. But also, there's a tradeoff between exploring identities versus applying generic mental health advice. Especially when you get to intersectionality-type stuff like trifectas where the number of things to explore is gets incredibly vast very quickly.

I can speak to two of those three identities (EA and Asian). I think one possibility that took me an unusually long time to consider was that maybe my identities didn't matter and I'd still feel the same problems if I was the "default person" in society. And I was working through a lot of identities.

It's a weird way of framing things since we can't have our identities counterfactually removed. Even if we did, we wouldn't be the same person. But I think it's a framework that usually doesn't get mentioned much in mental health circles , especially on the internet. Partly because it feels invalidating, partly because most people really want contextual advice, and partly because it feels "emotionally dumb and ignorant" to downplay sociological factors.

To do some fake math on this, if we could decompose mental health problems into the triple Venn diagram of Asian-women-EA (which is 6 different things if you count up the intersectionalities!) and include stuff outside that, it's possible for the Asian-women-EA sources of stress to be maybe only 10-25%.

Basically, part of the challenge of identity is not just figuring out if it matters but also how much. And maybe that amount is ultimately a small thing. Or maybe it's not as tractable as working on the identity-less portions

Agree the value is high. But practically, there's two big questions that pop to mind since I work / study around this area:

• If aggregating existing datasets, what's your value-add over what J-PAL, World Bank, IDInsight, Our World in Data, and what numerous un-affliated academics are already doing? (See Best of EconTwitter Substack for "public goods" which are sometimes publicly accessible datasets)
• If gaining access to new datasets, what are you offering to LMIC governments in exchange? Even making a single batch of batch of data publicly accessible is a lift. So in practice, they need to see some value, analytically or logistically, to be willing to work with you

This is really good. 

What struck me was all the concrete detail. While it is personal, it's also in service of giving useful lessons to other people. It helps establish how generalizable the career advice would be to other people and it reframes some standard career advice in a way that centers the constraints as a first-order consideration.

I would not have taken the adversity quotient framing seriously otherwise.

The one addition that might help is mentioning whether there were aspects of your career path that felt unusually lucky or aspects of your life circumstances that felt strong relative to others in your situation. Structural barriers can be a subtle thing (like someone getting a decent math education because they went to a decent school in a bad neighborhood). Mostly this helps with generalizability to readers.

Do any of you have heuristics for when to “give up” or “pivot” in a job search? Examples could be aiming lower / differently if no response after 10 applications.

Thankfully this is not something I have to worry about for a long time. But I think it’s useful to have some balance to the usual advice of “just keep trying; job searching takes a long time”. Sometimes a job really is unrealistic for a person’s current profile (let’s operationalize that as 1000 job searching hours would still only result in a 1% chance of getting a certain set of jobs).

Thanks for this. I'm surprised how consistently the studies point in favor of vegan diets being cheaper on the whole (though I'll caveat none of these are too convincing: the headline RCT is testing a low-fat vegan diet instead of a general vegan diet and the rest are descriptive regressions / modeling exercises).

All that said, I'm wondering if perception of vegan diets being more expensive could be explained by:

• Fully plant-based diets are cheaper but various "halfway points" are more expensive.
• Meat-eaters mostly get exposure to the "halfway points". These could be:
  • The only vegetarian in a meat-eating group who's stuck buying the heavily marked-up vegetarian option at the steakhouse
  • The only vegetarian in a meat-eating household who buys groceries and/or does the cooking but can't economize on legume-based recipes.  
  • The lone transitioning vegetarian who's goes through a long learning period since they don't have a plant-based community to learn cooking techniques or new cuisines or hear where to get affordable produce.

There's some descriptive evidence from "Some vegetarians spend less money on food, others don't" (Jayson & Lusk 2016) pointing in this direction. The researchers do a neat classification trick where they split vegetarians into partial vegetarians and pure vegetarians. Partial vegetarians are those that identify as vegetarian but still report purchasing / consuming meat products. Spending is highest for partial vegetarians followed by meat-eaters followed by pure vegetarians.

Those results are confounded by demographics. But I still think it points to some things that seem under explored in these studies. Would love to hear of other studies about financial costs for transitioning vegans / social taxes for vegans in meat-eating communities

Agreed, but I'd be careful not to confuse good mentorship with good management. These usually go hand-in-hand. But sometimes a manager is good because they sacrifice some of your career growth for the sake of the company.

I like the archetypes of ruthless versus empathetic managers described here. It's an arbitrary division and many managers do fulfill both archetypes. But I think it also captures an important dynamic, where managers have to tradeoff between their own career, your career, and the organization as a whole. Mentorship and career development falls into that

Edit: Another distinction I'd add is good manager versus good management. Sometimes it's the organizational structure that determines whether you'll get good training. In my experience, larger and stable organizations are better at mentorship for a ton of reasons, such as being able to make multi-year investments in training programs. A scrappy startup, on the other hand, may be a few weeks away from shutting down.

I definitely feel a few of my past managers would have been much better at mentorship if other aspects of the situation were different (more capacity, less short-term deadlines, better higher-up managers, etc.).

Not sure what the right numbers are but I really like the back-of-the-envelope approach you're taking here. It's simple and concrete enough that it's probably going to bounce around in my head for a while

Good point. In a toy model, it'd depend on relative cuts to labor versus non-labor inputs. Now that I think about it, it probably points towards exiting being better in mission-driven fields. People are more attached to their careers so the non-labor resources get cut deeply while all the staff try to hold onto their jobs.

Maybe I'd amend it to... if you're willing to switch jobs, then you can benefit from increasing marginal returns in some sub-cause areas. Because maybe there's a sub-cause area where lots of staff are quitting (out of fear the cause area isn't worth it) while capital investment is about the same.

But I admit that, even if we knew those sub-cause areas existed, it's not quite as punchy of a reason to stay in the cause area as a whole

Marginal returns to work (probably) go up with funding cuts, not down.

It can be demoralizing when a field you’re working in gets funding cuts. Job security goes down, less stuff is happening in your area, and people may pay you less attention since they believe others are doing more important work. But assuming you have job security and mostly make career decisions on inside views (meaning you’re not updating too heavily on funders de-prioritizing your cause area), then your skills are more valuable than they were previously.

Lots of caveats apply of course. The big one to me seems that some projects need a minimum scale to work. But I also think this idea is a nice psychological counterweight to the career uncertainties that pop up with changes in the funding landscape.

(Inspired by a comment Dean Karlan, a development economist, made on funding cuts to global health)