Red-teaming working for Outcapped

• Part time role, ~8 poms a day, new company started by the head of internal ops from Alvea, who managed me for ~5 months
• “Like what we did at Alvea, but for other orgs”
• https://www.outcapped.com/
• Note that this note is not me doing a good job of red-teaming
  • I’m more naming a possible refutation, then writing from my current POV re: why the refutation is wrong - it’s a very shallow red-team.
  • But this is what felt like the right thing to do on day 1 → clarify my current thinking

Cons of working for Outcapped

1. “It’s not very EA”

“It’s not an explicitly Effective Altruist-aligned org” (although their clients so far have included e.g. Bluedot)

• Counterpoint
  • I turned down an interview at AISI because:
    • I just don’t care intrinsically about AI safety
    • I want something remote
      • And remote EA jobs are rare, and highly competitive!
• Another counterpoint
  • I don’t intrinsically care about EA → Questioning Effective Altruism

2. Opportunity cost

“Taking this role will preclude the ability to take other roles”

• Counterpoint 1: I haven’t seen anything else that I’d miss out on
  • I’ve been looking at 80,000 Hours job board and opportunity board for months and it’s rare that something ideal comes up → Longview and Kairos are the only two like, A-tier roles, maybe AISI too
  • Kairos was the only remote-first role that has been great (maybe PAN too?), and it was hella competitive, >1000 applicants (I made it to the final ~20)
• Counterpoint 2: it’s completely congruent with my current mission, so there’d be no loss
  • I currently feel that I want to work on my family, continue learning how to think, and have a part time job, so this fits that nicely
  • See e.g. Questioning Effective Altruism
• Remote ✅ good pay ✅ part-time ✅

If I don’t care about EA atm, what about pitching non-EA places?

• E.g., Headgum? (Podcast network, I’ve listened to 2+ hours of their shows per day for ~2 years)
• I can keep thinking about this during a 3-month probation period w/ Outcapped
• My current gut sense is that I really just… don’t want to pitch places. I’m kind of exhausted dude, I’ve been job hunting since ~March, ~5 months

3. What do I want to do?

3a. Healing family

• Propositional & perspectival knowledge → learning about family systems
• Participatory knowledge → changing how I show up (and as such, changing the system)

3b. Keep figuring out what I want to do → live in the uncertainty

• A part-time, remote, contractor role is ideal for that
• “Learn to think, put out fires, make some money, go from there”
• “Live in the uncertainty”
• Socrates/Plato + family systems + discover some Popperian truths
• 3 month initial contract & keep thinking

3c. Get some career capital

• I know that I don’t have quite enough experience on my CV for the roles I’ve been trying to get (e.g., Kairos, “your vibes were off the charts, but we couldn’t explain to the board “he didn’t have as much experience but we really like him so that’s why we’re hiring him”)
• This will be more experience in the stuff I did at Alvea (and partially at Refract) → I only have 1-2 years of solid stuff on my CV, so this is more of that
• Lack of experience on my CV is a bottleneck to getting roles, so, get more ✅

3d. Working with CoS/COO-style founders

• I’ve been pursuing close-to-founder work (like helping Cate Hall, or being an ExA at Longview)
• This is that - I’d be a trusted team member, as I’ve worked with Rob before, he said I’d immediately take on stuff that other contractors wouldn’t
  • Similar to working with Brent at for Refract, but for a startup that is already making money & has clients
  • So, a kind of Refract-Alvea hybrid, with a more likely path to growth than Refract, a more validated value add, etc
• It’s ops, which I had been saying I didn’t want to do
  • Automation, systematisation, rather than e.g. strategy
  • Perhaps there’s scope for more “generalist” stuff → I did name in our first call that I’ve been aiming to become a CoS/COO
  • Plus, Longview executive assistant role would have been a big chunk of stuff (66% of my time) that wasn’t relevant (answering emails, calendar scheduling), in order to be close to Gavin & Simran, see how they operate
    • (Although saying that, emails & calendar stuff is actually high context, you learn a lot through doing it, it’s not low-value work (proven by the fact that before hiring an ExA, Gavin and Sim were doing it themselves, because they saw it as high value work))
• 🚨 So, I should make sure Rob knows about this
  • 🚨 Writing up a model of what I’m looking for, what I’m hoping to get out of it
• 🚨 Explicitly name “learning from a COO/CoS-type” as something that I’m after
• 🚨 Don’t necessarily want to be just an automations/systems guy
  • 🚨 Question for Rob - what might my AORs be? Because the “learn how to set up companies” sounds cool, but maybe the other contractors will do that kind of thing?
• What systems would I build?
• First 1-3 months?

4. Eight poms a day is kind of a lot?

• That’s the majority of my poms
• I have a hard limit of around 14 poms, but 12 is more typical
• If I do 12/day,
  • then the job will take up 66% of my working day, leaving only 4 poms for other stuff
• If 14/day,
  • then 57%, 6 poms for other stuff
• If 16/day,
  • then 50%, 8 poms for other stuff
• Experiment with different setups
  • Because e.g. Cal Newport does claim that there’s a hard limit on deep work per day
  • But maybe e.g. a midday nap, or gym/swim at lunch, could act as a hard reset?
  • I’m worried that I’ll either deplete my energy doing my own stuff first, or fall into the trap of neglecting my own stuff because there’s less of an immediate feedback loop and I’m aware of all the work stuff that I could be doing

Make sure I do it second?

• E.g., log on after noon, once I’ve already done my most important stuff
• I’ve had eras of getting up at 6 (or even 5!) and doing like 10 poms by noon. Could do a similar thing here.
• Use my morning freshness on my own stuff, then, slightly depleted, do my work, where I have the boost of a tight feedback loop and concrete results, tight OODA loop, which I don’t have for non-work projects

5. What if I were to move away?

• 8 poms me, 8 poms work, evening, sleep, is fine when I live here and have a simple life. What about elsewhere?
  • Well, it’s part time hours for ~full time pay → seems fine

6. What about a full time job and more money for training and therapy and stuff

• Socrates pointed this out
• Like “you don’t need to learn about family systems yourself, wouldn’t it make sense, if you needed heart surgery, to pay an expert to do it, rather than picking up the scalpel yourself?”
  • My intuitive sense here is that this is an imperfect analogy by Socrates. In the book on Bowen family systems that I’m reading, they stress that learning about family systems theory gives you propositional + perspectival knowledge (this is my wording), which you can then use to see the system differently, and change your participation. I don’t think it’s true that you can outsource this learning to an expert.
  • There’s the thing of “the work is what happens between the therapy sessions”, that is, sure you may get help for 1 hour a week, but the “proof of the pudding” is all the other waking hours
  • So lets say I landed a ~£100k job, and got ~£4.5k/month after tax (damn, that is a lot actually!).
  • Ok maybe that would be enough to e.g. pay to become an Aletheia coach, or pay the bio-emotive framework guy, and change my own experience fast. Damn ok, maybe that would be efficient af
  • BUT, I have not seen myself get close to earning that much! I got close to earning I think £60k-£75k with Longview, which would have been at most ~£3.8k/month, which, with ~£1k London rent + bills, ~£400 food, £400 living costs, would leave ~£2k/month, and I’d be living away from home
  • And going back to the Questioning Effective Altruism point about care - I got paid ~£100k at Alvea because of my unusual care for meta-learning - that’s what got me the role - I don’t think I currently have the same legible care that will make a high-paying EA job fall on my lap again
  • So, I’ve gotten close to earning £3.8k/month once this year, and it would involve moving to London, losing the “Trojan Horse” thing of living at home (with my family), and after rent etc, I’d have the same take-home pay for training/therapy/etc as I will have from living at home and working remotely for Outcapped

7. From a friend: “what about getting an even higher paying non-EA remote job”

• Initial answer to this is that referrals/getting jobs by knowing someone is much easier
• So to turn this down, in order to find something else → much harder, unless I can think of other people who I already have worked with, and the p(they’re hiring) is low (see e.g. Cate Hall)