I've now spoken to  ~1,400 people as an advisor with 80,000 Hours, and if there's a quick thing I think is worth more people doing, it's doing a short reflection exercise about one's current situation.  Below are some (cluster of) questions I often ask in an advising call to facilitate this. I'm often surprised by how much purchase one can get simply from this -- noticing one's own motivations, weighing one's personal needs against a yearning for impact, identifying blind spots in current plans that could be triaged and easily addressed, etc.   A long list of semi-useful questions I often ask in an advising call   1. Your context: 1. What’s your current job like? (or like, for the roles you’ve had in the last few years…) 1. The role 2. The tasks and activities 3. Does it involve management? 4. What skills do you use? Which ones are you learning? 5. Is there something in your current job that you want to change, that you don’t like? 2. Default plan and tactics 1. What is your default plan? 2. How soon are you planning to move? How urgently do you need to get a job? 3. Have you been applying? Getting interviews, offers? Which roles? Why those roles? 4. Have you been networking? How? What is your current network? 5. Have you been doing any learning, upskilling? How have you been finding it? 6. How much time can you find to do things to make a job change? Have you considered e.g. a sabbatical or going down to a 3/4-day week? 7. What are you feeling blocked/bottlenecked by? 3. What are your preferences and/or constraints? 1. Money 2. Location 3. What kinds of tasks/skills would you want to use? (writing, speaking, project management, coding, math, your existing skills, etc.) 4. What skills do you want to develop? 5. Are you interested in leadership, management, or individual contribution? 6. Do you want to shoot for impact? H

As a community builder, I've started donating directly to my local EA group—and I encourage you to consider doing the same. Managing budgets and navigating inflexible grant applications consume valuable time and energy that could otherwise be spent directly fostering impactful community engagement. As someone deeply involved, I possess unique insights into what our group specifically needs, how to effectively meet those needs, and what actions are most conducive to achieving genuine impact. Of course, seeking funding from organizations like OpenPhil remains highly valuable—they've dedicated extensive thought to effective community building. Yet, don't underestimate the power and efficiency of utilizing your intimate knowledge of your group's immediate requirements. Your direct donations can streamline processes, empower quick responses to pressing needs, and ultimately enhance the impact of your local EA community.

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.