We do a monthly public forecast at the Swift Centre (swiftcentre.org) - just a chance for us to make predictions and insights on some topical events. As it’s EAG London month I thought I’d ask what topics/questions are on people’s mind so we can potentially throw them into the mix. Comment below!

My personal messy thoughts on some of the things EA Netherlands (and maybe other community building orgs?) should be doing in the near future (building on our recent post). Sharing to get input. Please tell me what you think I'm getting wrong.  Some Tenets  Community building, not talent placement. EAN is primarily a community-building organisation. The theory of change is community capital — career capital × coordination ability — which bridges two impact horizons. Individual community members accumulate career capital and reach one or more of three medium-term outcomes: a career switch into an impact-relevant role, significant donations to effective organisations, or community organising or advocacy for EA-aligned causes, solutions, and tools. The community as a whole accumulates coordination ability. Over time, these aggregate into long-term population-level outcomes: shifts in awareness and perception of EA and EA-style thinking, and eventually norm and institutional change. Talent placement is done well elsewhere — BlueDot for AI safety upskilling, AIM for entrepreneurship, MATS for AI safety research, etc. Community building produces multi-decade engagement across many roles; ecosystem creation; values persistence across career changes; and the candidate pipeline many placement orgs themselves depend on. Maybe the Dutch ecosystem needs a placement org, but that should probably be an EAN spinout (as was the case with Doneer Effectief).  Who we target with our outreach. EA-curious people with skillsets identified as being particularly valuable by sources such as the meta coordination forum survey.  Product-Market-Impact Fit (PMIF). Standard PMF asks "do people love and use it?" EAN's job is harder. PMIF resolves into three fits at once: people engage (PMF); the people engaging could plausibly drive the outcomes above (market-impact); and engagement actually causes the outcomes rather than merely correlating (product-impact). (h/t to people like Peter McInt

More EA undergrads should do political volunteering. It's impactful AND fun. Choose an election that's impactful (e.g. AI safety candidate) and neglected (e.g. primaries in always-blue/red places), couch-crash the weekend there, and volunteer with the campaign. I say this after doing 15 hours of street canvassing myself. I was surprised by how anecdotally impactful and fun it was. If you like people-watching, talking to strangers, and/or joining passionate projects for a weekend, I think you'll also love this. I wish I thought of this earlier. Literature on the impact (Claude-generated): Kalla & Broockman's meta-analysis of 49 field experiments finds zero average persuasive effect in general elections, but effects do show up when voters lack a partisan cue (i.e. primaries and ballot measures). Mann & Haenschen (2024) find mobilization effects (e.g. canvassing) are 33-76% larger in low-attention races than in high-attention ones. Your marginal volunteer hour goes much further in a primary.

How would you transcribe 1-1s at EAG? Assuming all parties have consented. Some ideas from others: * Use Mac's native software * Otter on phone, phone on the table * Google Meet

Should I point it out publicly when a post I read seem to have heavy markers of AI, to me? Especially if Pangram and other AI detectors[1] don't clock it.  Reasons not to: 1. I could be wrong (I think this is unlikely, but I'm not sure. I don't have ground truth. What I do know is that pretty much no pre-2021 writings trigger this in me). 1. I personally get very mad when people accuse my (fully human-generated) writing as AI, excepting occasional meta-jokes. So admittedly I'm on both sides of this. 2. False positives are far more harmful than false negatives. FWIW I'm only tempted to do this when my subjective probability exceeds say 90%. 2. Is this something people actually want to be aware of? 1. I can't tell if the situation is something like Writers: I consent to passing off AI writing as my own. B: I consent to reading AI writing as if it was written by a human. Linch: I don't. 3. There's not a precious demarcation between using AI to help flesh out your ideas, organize your thoughts, and proofreading vs just dump a few notes into an AI and have it write out the whole piece for you. If a piece wasn't written 100% by AI (and it probably wasn't, Pangram would've caught it if there's no human in the loop), should I care? 1. I certainly regularly use Claude for research assistance and editing feedback! Reasons to: 1. Seems dishonest 2. Writing that's heavily AI-assisted comes across as same-y, and more so than you'd expect from the default EA Forum/LW "voice." 1. ^ Pangram is the best AI detector on the market but they heavily optimize to have 0% false positives and are okay with false negatives.