Nice job bringing up an interesting idea. Having not read any of the research, here are some naïve ideas and musings:

• It would be interesting to a see a quick-and-dirty cost-benefit analysis: what would it cost to replace 99% of "traditional" lawnmowers with autonomous mowing robots? How much money (or QALYs) would be gained/saved? What price would a robot mower have to be for a person with a one acre lot to justify buying it. Or maybe alternative models exist, in which I rent the robotic mower for two hours rather than purchasing it.
• We could make a clear argument that people simply shouldn't spend money/time/effort moving their lawns, as the risks/costs aren't worth it. But many people (in the USA at least) would continue to do so because they place social value on the appearance of a well-kept home.
• If there are about 82 million homes in the USA (this is from quick Google search, so I trust the number about as much as I ought to for having not looked at the sources), that implies 85,000/82,000,000 that about 0.1% of homeowners go to the ER each year for mowing injuries. This is of course completely ignoring non-home mowing, such as sports fields, corporate/office landscape, etc. This is also ignoring all the people that get injured but don't end up in an ER visit.
• Safety features have presumably improved in movers during the past few decades. I wonder what the distribution is of the injuries in relation to how safe/new the mower is. Maybe a majority of the injuries are caused by half-broken mowers, or mowers from the 1980s, or from mowers that don't have an dead man's switch.
• I wonder if there are other, more important causal factors. Maybe most of those 85,000 involved people mowing the lawn while drunk, or elderly men insisting they they are still "man enough" to take care of the yard, or teenagers goofing around. To the extent that is accurate, the narrative might change from 'mowers are dangerous and should be replaced' to 'drunk people operating machinery are dangerous.' The parallels to cars are petty obvious: cars don't cause accidents, people cause accidents. But that doesn't deny the fact that a robotic car can avoid many of the accidents.
• I'm guessing (again, I want to emphasize that this is a naïve guess rather than a well-informed guess) that a majority of the injuries occur in situations that a robotic mower wouldn't be very suitable for. I'm mainly thinking of small lots and areas with steep angles, such as the picture below. There are strong parallels to Roomba-style vacuums: they are great for houses with particular layouts, but many homes exist that are simply not practical/feasible for that type of robot vacuum.

• 

There are a variety of organizations that hire for remote roles, and from your brief description of "analytically and in terms of people skills and business acumen" this person might be capable of a variety of things: operations, technical, strategy, people management, etc. My off-the-cuff recommendations for some options would be:

• Check the job boards once a week, and keep an eye out for part-time roles, full-time roles that might be flexible, or anything else that might work. 80,000 Hours job board and Probably Good Job Board are both good, but EA NYC's Job board is also good.
• Email a few people at a few different organizations to ask if he can volunteer, intern, or do some modestly paid work.
• participate in and then be a coordinator for the virtual programs.
• Join Blue Dot's AI safety courses.
• offer mentorship, coaching, etc.

This is all assuming that he has some understanding of the content and the context that is relevant. If he isn't familiar with some basic ideas relating to AI safety (or to more broad EA-type ideas, like impact, expected value, utilitarian ethics, etc.) then doing some reading about that kind of stuff might be the first step.

It means highly-engaged EA. I think that the term isn't used as much as it was a few years ago, but it can be helping in a movement-building/strategic context for folks that are very central to effective altruism, and it still serves as a convenient label to differentiate different stages in the 'funnel.' But I think that it isn't terribly common these days, and I expect that plenty of people who are quite involved in EA wouldn't recognize "HEA" it or know what it means.

Thanks for sharing.

I really appreciated that you shared the sources of the money and the tidbit about how much of it came to you without needing to work for it and somewhat unbidden or underserved. As a reader, I appreciate seeing that level of self-awareness or reflection.^[1]

Also, cute/fun poem! That brought a smile to my face.

1. ^{^}

   As opposed to reading that someone donated large amount of money within a year or two of starting working, which would make me wonder "how the heck did they get all this money?"

You've put into clear words the struggle that I have always had. If I had a guaranteed income or  some high level of confidence that I would always be able to find employment and gain income of a certain level, then I'd find it quite easy to give away money. It wouldn't be as scarce of a resource.

There are certain parallels to the idea of put on your own oxygen mask first, as we do need to make sure we are okay before helping others. But I also suppose that the really tricky part is considering what is okay 'enough' for us.

I'm going to repeat something that I did about a year ago:

A very small, informal announcement: if you want someone to review your resume and give you some feedback or advice, send me your resume and I'll help. If you would like to do a mock interview, send me a message and we can schedule a video call to practice. If we have never met before, that is okay. I'm happy to help you, even if we are total strangers.

To be clear: this is not a paid service, I'm not trying to drum up business for some kind of a side-hustle, and I'm not going to ask you to subscribe to a newsletter. I am just a person who is offering some free informal help. I enjoy helping people bounce ideas around, and people whom I've previously helped in this way seemed to have benefited from it and appreciated it.

A few related thoughts:

• There are a lot of people that are looking for a job as part of a path to greater impact, but many people feel somewhat awkward or ashamed to ask for help. If I am struggling in a job hunt, I don't want to ask friends or professional contacts for help due to shame; I worry that they will think less of me for not being competent. So asking a stranger that you've never met and that isn't connected to your life can be a nice option.
• There is a lot of 'low-hanging fruit' for making a resume look better, from simply formatting changes that make a resume easier to understand to wordsmithing the phrasings. Sometimes you just need a helpful person to look with a critical eye.
• There is also something about 'playing the game.' I think of this something like informal coaching. Some people don't know that when you are asked about a time you had an interpersonal conflict, instead of telling about a time you had an interpersonal conflict you should instead tell about a time you had an interpersonal conflict and you resolved it and it makes you look good.

I have a thought on this. It related to the level of effort from the advice giver, and the willingness to understand the recipient's context. Often advice is given with only a few seconds of effort, or with  the giver applying a sort of cookie-cutter template to their understanding of the recipient. That is when useless advice comes from. When the giver dedicates some time minutes toward understanding and exploring the receiver's context, toward actually paying attention, then the advice is able to be of much better quality.

This is specifically fresh in my mind because a few days ago I helped John Doe review his resume. John told me that I was not the first person to help, several other people had looked at his resume and told him that is was pretty good. But I did more than merely glance at his resume; I read through it with a critical eye. I had a page full of notes for him. Some of the notes were preference/stylistic things, but plenty of the notes were 'errors' that other people hadn't bothered to notice: the text used two different shades of dark blue, there was inconsistent formatting in the dates. John was amazed that multiple people had reviewed his resume, and nobody had noticed or bothered to tell him that he was using two different colors (it was not intentional on his part to use two different colors).

In contrast, I've heard and (heard of) plenty of career advice within EA that simply isn't apt. Recommending a recipient with no interest in an area to pursue that area, or ignoring a recipient's visa/legal status, ignoring a recipient's financial constraints, etc. I was once told to treat people to coffee and to use my parents' professional networks. Both of those things are true in general, but I don't live within a hundred miles of a place where I could treat networking contacts to coffee, and my retired working class parents don't have professional networks. It reminds me a little bit of trying to try; how much effort do people actually put into the act of giving helpful advice.

Meandering and exploratory follow-up.

Even if the justification is reasonable, it is quite exclusionary to candidates outside of the required time zone. Think of a company who wants to hire a data analyst, but instead of the job posting listing 'skilled at data analytics' it instead lists 'MA in data analytics.' It is excluding a lot of people that might be skilled but which don't have the degree.

I think the broader idea I'm trying to get at is when X is needed, but Y is listed as the requirement, and they are two distinct things. Maybe I need someone that speaks German as a native language for a job, but on the job describing I write that I need someone who grew up in Germany; those are distinct things. I'd reject all the German expats that grew up abroad, as well as the native-German speakers who grew up in Switzerland or Austria.

There might also be something here related to the non-central fallacy: applying the characteristics of an archetypical category member to a non-typical category member. Most people in distant time zones probably wouldn't be able to manage an abnormal working schedule, but that doesn't mean we should assume that no people in distant time zones can handle it.

Of course, the tradeoffs are always an issue. If I would get 5 additional candidates who would be good and 95 additional candidates who are poor fits, then maybe it wouldn't be worth it. But something about the exclusion that I can't quite put my finger on strikes me as unjust/unfair.

There is a reasonably high base rate (off the cuff: maybe 30 percent?) of candidates claiming overconfidently in interviews that they can meet a work schedule that is actually incredibly impractical for them and end up causing problems or needing firing later on. 

That is a very real concern, and strikes me as reasonable. While I don't have a good sense of what the percent would be, I agree with you that people in general tend to exaggerate what they are able to do in interviews. I wonder if there are good questions to ask to filter for this, beyond simply asking about how the candidate would plan to meet the timing requirements.

For the time zones, I had been thinking of individuals that had done this previously and can honestly claim that they have done this previously. But I do understand that for many people (especially people with children or people who live with other people) it would be impractical. Maybe my perception of people is fairly inaccurate, in the sense that I expect them to be more honest and self-aware than they really are? 😅

I want to try and nudge some EAs engaged in hiring to be a bit more fair and a bit less exclusionary: I occasionally see job postings for remote jobs with EA organizations that set time zone location requirements.^[1] Location seems like the wrong criteria; the right criteria is something more like "will work a generally similar schedule to our other staff." Is my guess here correct, or am I missing something?

What you actually want are people who are willing to work "normal working hours" for your core staff. You want to be able to schedule meetings and do collaborative work. If most staff are located in New York City, and you hire someone in Indonesia who is willing and able to do a New York City working schedule, for the organization and for teamwork that isn't different  than hiring someone in Peru (which is in the time zone as New York City).^[2]

I've previously spoken with people in Asian time zones who emphasized the unreasonableness of this; people who have the skills and who are happy/able to work from 9pm to 4am. If someone who lives in a different time zone is happy to conform to your working schedule, don't disqualify them. You can disqualify them because they lack the job-relevant skills, or because they wouldn't perform well enough in the role, but don't do it due to their location.^[3] If they have stable internet connection and they state that they are willing to work a particular schedule, believe them. You could even have a little tick-box on your job application to clarify that they understand and consent that they need to be available for at least [NUMBER] hours during normal business hours in your main/preferred time zone.

1. ^{^}

   Such as must be located between UTC and UTC +8, or must live in a time zone compatible with a North American time zone.

2. ^{^}

   You might make the argument that the person in Indonesia would be giving themselves a big burden working in the middle of the night and (presumably) sleeping during the day, but that is a different argument. That is about whether they are able to conform to the expected work schedule/availability or about how burdensome they would find it, not about whether they are physically located in a similar time zone. Lots of people in low income countries would be happy to have a weird sleeping & work schedule in exchange for the kinds of salaries that EA organizations in the UK and USA tend to pay; that is a good tradeoff for many people.

3. ^{^}

   There are, of course, plenty of other reasons to care about location. There are legal and tax reasons that a organization should only hire people in certain locations. Not all employers of record can employee people in all countries. And there are practical reasons related to the nature of the job. If you need someone to physically be somewhere occasionally, location matters. That person should probably shouldn't be located a 22-hour trip away if they need to be there in-person twice a month; they should be able to travel there in a reasonable amount of time.