Hazem Hassan 's Quick takes

The EA Forum Digest might be biased toward posts made on certain days. Had an LLM gather dates for the posts inside Digest #298 through #302, and compare their weekday frequencies against EA Forum posts made within the same window. Probably not enough data (n=50 for Recommended; n=86 for all Digest Posts) to be meaningful.

(Got the idea to check because I was imagining if I was responsible for writing the Digest and thought, "hmmm I feel like if I were sending out emails every Wed, I would be biased toward posts made on certain days because of the availability heuristic and/or the configuration of my weekly reading/writing schedule")

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.

EA intro fellowships should include a "consider community-building" CTA in their syllabus.

I looked at multiple syllabi and only found one that does this explicitly (shout out Yale EA!). The last section in an IF syllabus (titled "Putting It Into Practice" or "Taking Action" or something) often focuses on careers and doesn't prompt students to seriously consider organizing the group as a valid option.

I think career decisions take time (even small ones like "I should start rethinking my major"), and unpreparedness to Take Big Action sometimes results in no action at all. Community-building is a valid high-value plan that sharpens thinking and leads to the other things the Take Action section of every intro fellowship syllabus is trying to optimize for.

Also, meta EA isn't what people new to EA imagine when they think about what "doing good" looks like. That's not because they don't view it as such, but because they often don't see that framing (which is fair; it's an intro, you shouldn't be talking about the talking). But I feel like by the end of a 5-8 week fellowship they should think about meta EA and learn why it's so important (based on the EA principles they learend), the same way they learned about animals, AI, and biosecurity as "cause areas" they can do good in.

I think EAG/EAGx conferences should try (if possible) to avoid venues under active corporate campaign targeting for animal welfare failures.

I recently went to a protest against Marriott over their unfulfilled cage-free egg commitment and couldn't help but think back to EAGxDC which was held at one of their hotels in May.

I don't think the EAGxDC organizers intentionally ignored this; they probably didn't know, or the venue was just very logistically convenient (which I think outweighs this concern).

But I wonder whether organizers generally consider this when choosing venues. I feel like they should, assuming there are other options not under campaign targeting.