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Lingering thoughts on the talk "How to Handle Worldview Uncertainty" by Hayley Clatterbuck (Rethink Priorities):
The talk proposed several ways that altruists with conflicting values can bargain in mutually beneficial ways, like loans, wagers, and trades, and suggested that the EA community should try to implement these more in practice and design institutions and mechanisms that incentivize them.
I think the EA Donation Election is an example of a community-wide mechanism for brokering trades between multiple anonymous donors. To illustrate this, consider a simple example of a trade, where Alice and Bob are donors with conflicting altruistic priorities. Alice's top charity is Direct Transfers Everywhere and her second favorite is Pandemics No More. Bob's top charity is Lawyers for Chickens, and his second favorite is Pandemics No More. Bob is concerned that Alice's donating to Direct Transfers Everywhere would cancel out the animal welfare benefits of his donating to Lawyers for Chickens, so he proposes that they both donate to their second choice, Pandemics No More.
The Donation Election does this in an automated, anonymous, community-wide way by using a mechanism like ranked-choice voting (RCV) to select winning charities. (The 2024 election uses RCV; the 2023 election used a points-based system similar to RCV.) Suppose that Alice and Bob are voting in the Donation Election—and for simplicity, we'll pretend that the election uses RCV. If their first-choice charities (Direct Transfers Everywhere and Lawyers for Chickens) are not that popular among the electorate, those candidates will be eliminated, and Alice and Bob's votes reallocated to Pandemics No More. This achieves the same outcome as the trade in the previous example automatically, even though Alice and Bob may not have ever personally met and agreed to that trade.
A number of people invited me to 1:1s to ask me for career advice in my field, which is software engineering. Mostly of the "how do I get hired" kind rather than the "how do I pick a career path that's most in line with EA strategic priorities" kind that 80,000 Hours specializes in. Unfortunately I'm not very good at this kind of advice (I haven't looked for a new job in more than eight years) and haven't been able to find anywhere else I could send people to that would be more helpful. I think there used to be an affinity group or something for EA software engineers, but I don't think it's active anymore.
Anyone know of anything like this? If not, and if you're the kind of person who's well-positioned to start a group like this, consider this a request for one.
You are right, EA Software Engineers group is no longer active. Their virtual events were quite useful, and you can still access the recordings and slides here.
EA Data Science group hosts events sometimes, and their channel on EA Anywhere Slack is pretty active.
In addition, I used to lead the EA Public Interest Tech Slack community, which was subsequently merged into the EA Software Engineers community (the Discord for which still exists btw). All of these communities eventually got merged into the #role-software-engineers channel of the EA Anywhere Slack.
I think there was too much fragmentation among slightly different EA affinity groups aimed at tech professionals - there was also EA Tech Network for folks working at tech companies, which I believe was merged into High Impact Professionals.
I'm not sure why the EA SWE community dissipated after all the consolidation that occurred. I think the lack of community leadership may have played a role. Also, it seems like EA SWEs are already well served by other communities, including AI safety (for which a lot of SWEs have the right skills) and effective giving communities like Giving What We Can (since many SWE roles are well-paid).