why do i find myself less involved in EA? epistemic status: i timeboxed the below to 30 minutes. it's been bubbling for a while, but i haven't spent that much time explicitly thinking about this. i figured it'd be a lot better to share half-baked thoughts than to keep it all in my head — but accordingly, i don't expect to reflectively endorse all of these points later down the line. i think it's probably most useful & accurate to view the below as a slice of my emotions, rather than a developed point of view. i'm not very keen on arguing about any of the points below, but if you think you could be useful toward my reflecting processes (or if you think i could be useful toward yours!), i'd prefer that you book a call to chat more over replying in the comments. i do not give you consent to quote my writing in this short-form without also including the entirety of this epistemic status. * 1-3 years ago, i was a decently involved with EA (helping organize my university EA program, attending EA events, contracting with EA orgs, reading EA content, thinking through EA frames, etc). * i am now a lot less involved in EA. * e.g. i currently attend uc berkeley, and am ~uninvolved in uc berkeley EA * e.g. i haven't attended a casual EA social in a long time, and i notice myself ughing in response to invites to explicitly-EA socials * e.g. i think through impact-maximization frames with a lot more care & wariness, and have plenty of other frames in my toolbox that i use to a greater relative degree than the EA ones * e.g. the orgs i find myself interested in working for seem to do effectively altruistic things by my lights, but seem (at closest) to be EA-community-adjacent and (at furthest) actively antagonistic to the EA community * (to be clear, i still find myself wanting to be altruistic, and wanting to be effective in that process. but i think describing my shift as merely moving a bit away from the community would be underselling the extent to which i've

As a group organiser I was wildly miscalibrated about the acceptance rate for EAGs! I spoke to the EAG team, and here are the actual figures:   * The overall acceptance rate for undergraduate student is about ¾! (2024) * For undergraduate first timers, it’s about ½ (Bay Area 2025) If that’s peaked your interest, EAG London 2025 applications close soon - apply here! Jemima

The UK offers better access as a conference location for international participants compared to the US or the EU. I'm being invited to conferences in different parts of the world as a Turkish citizen, and visa processes for the US and the EU have gotten a lot more difficult lately. I'm unable to even get a visa appointment for several European countries, and my appointment for the US visa was scheduled 16 months out. I believe the situation is similar for visa applicants from other countries. The UK currently offers the smoothest process with timelines of only a few weeks. Conference organizers that seek applications from all over the world could choose the UK over other options.

There's been some neat work on making AI agent forecasters. Some of these seem to have pretty decent levels of accuracy, vs. certain sets of humans. And yet, very little of this seems to be used in the wild, from what I can tell. It's one thing to show some promising results in a limited study. But ultimately, we want these tools to be used by real people. I assume some obvious todos would be: 1. Websites where you can easily ask one or multiple AI forecasters questions.  2. Competing services that package "AI forecasting" tools in different ways, focusing on optimizing (positive) engagement. 3. I assume that many AI forecasters should really be racking up good scores in Metaculus/Manifold now. The limitation seems to mainly be effort - neither platform has significant incentives yet. Optimizing AI forecasting bots, but only in experimental settings, seems akin to optimizing cameras, but only in experimental settings. I'd expect you'd wind up with things that are technically impressive but highly unusable. We might learn a lot about a few technical challenges, but little about what real use would look like or what the key bottlenecks will be.

I feel like EAs might be sleeping a bit on digital meetups/conferences. My impression is that many people prefer in-person events to online ones. But at the same time, a lot of people hate needing to be in the Bay Area / London or having to travel to events. There was one EAG online during the pandemic (I believe the others were EAGxs), and I had a pretty good experience there. Some downsides, but some strong upsides. It seemed very promising to me. I'm particularly excited about VR. I have a Quest3, and have been impressed by the experience of chatting to people in VRChat. The main downside is that there aren't any professional events in VR that would interest me. Quest 3s are expensive ($500), but far cheaper than housing and office space in Berkeley or London.  I'd also flag: 1. I think that video calls can be dramatically improved with better microphone and camera setups. These can cost $200 to $2k or so, but make a major difference. 2. I've been doing some digging into platforms similar to GatherTown. I found GatherTown fairly ugly, off-putting, and limited. SpatialChat seems promising, though it's more expensive. Zoom seems to be experimenting in the space with products like Zoom Huddles (for coworking in small groups), but these are new.  3. I like Focusmate, but think we could have better spaces for EAs/community members. 4. I think that people above the age of 25 or so find VR weird for what I'd describe as mostly status quo bias. Younger people seem to be far more willing and excited to hangout in VR.  5. I obviously think this is a larger business question. It seems like there was a wave of enthusiasm for remote work at COVID, and this has mostly dried up. However, there are still a ton of remote workers. My guess is that businesses are making a major mistake by not investing enough in better remote software and setups.  6. Organizing community is hard, even if its online. I'd like to see more attempts to pay people to organize online coworking spaces