Effective Altruism Forum
EA Forum

Hide table of contents
by Nikola
3 min read 0

25

Building effective altruismCommunityAI safety groupsEffective altruism outreach in schoolsUniversity groups
Frontpage

This is a planning and execution checklist for socials that I quickly put together when delegating EA and AIS socials at Harvard. By social I mostly mean party/dinner party.

The process

Feel free to delegate parts of this to other people. It’s not that YOU have to do all of this, it’s that all of this has to get done, and it’s your job to make sure it does. Heroic responsibility.

Months in advance

  1. Look at the calendar and see if there are any dates during which you’d especially want to host socials.
    1. Themed / special occasion socials seem to attract many more (50% more or something) people. Something something scarcity.
    2. Some ideas for EA groups:
      1. Petrov Day
      2. Friendsgiving (ThanksGiving What We Can?)
      3. Borlaug Day
      4. Earth Day

One to two weeks in advance

  1. Plan social and find a space
  2. Add social to whatever calendar you use for social events
    1. Bonus tip: make a nice DALL-E image to go with it! I like prompts similar to "people sitting on couch and talking, watercolor"

A day in advance

  1. Get snacks and drinks
    1. Sample target order in appendix A
    2. Target’s delivery time of 1-2 hours is very unreliable. Order stuff at least 5 hours in advance to prevent the stuff being late. Instacart seems quite a bit faster.
  2. Publicize social to people over email/slack/facebook
  3. Make sure other people who should pub the social actually pub the social
  4. Think about who you want to be at the social and tell them about it so they can plan to be there

A few hours in advance

  1. Get food (schedule an order hours in advance, food places get angry/cancel orders if you make huge orders less than 2 hours in advance)
    1. Tell delivery people where to go in the delivery app. This often saves the both of you a phone call and confusion by answering the person’s questions in advance.
sample delivery instruction
  1. DM people who you want to come
    1. “Hey, are you coming to [the thing] at [time]?”
    2. This is typically around 8-16 people
    3. If it would be exceptionally good if someone were present, tell them this
  2. Clean and set up venue
    1. Arrive an hour before the social at least to start setup. Surprising how much work it is.
    2. Take out the trash. Bins need to be mostly empty by the time the social starts
    3. Stock the toilet paper and hand soap in the toilet if running low

Right before social

  1. Start music 5 minutes before social
    1. Hook up phone to bluetooth speaker
    2. A good playlist for chill vibes is Spotify’s “My life is a movie”
  2. Prop open door with door stopper a few minutes before social
  3. Make sure drinks, snacks, food, are all easily accessible, venue is in order
    1. Try to simulate what a person coming to the social would think when they enter.  Are the following things obvious:
      1. Where the food is?
      2. Where one can leave their backpack and/or jacket?
      3. The shoes on/off policy?
      4. Where the bathroom is?
      5. Where one can get water?
      6. What the wi-fi password is?
      7. Where paper napkins are?
      8. Which parts of the fridge (if any) are party stuff and which are personal stuff?

During social

  1. Greet people who enter
    1. Welcome them
    2. Introduce yourself
    3. Tell them where to go
      1. “We have snacks, drinks, and food in the kitchen, board games in the dining room, and video games in the living room.”
    4. If it’s their first time at the venue and you have time, give them a tour
      1. “The wifi password is ___. If you need anything talk to me or ____”
  2. Make sure people are comfortable during the social
  3. Clean up if messes occur. Trash is often left on the floor, spills happen, bins get full. Walk around every once in a while to check that everything is in order.
  4. Talk to the people you personally invited 
    1. Do not do this out of a sense of obligation though, do this because you want to (simply only invite people that you’d want to actually talk to).
    2. It’s a bad vibe to personally invite someone to a party and then not talk to them during the party. 

After social

  1. Turn off lights
  2. Lock door
  3. Clean up
  4. If you appreciated someone being at the social, send them a message, appreciation is nice :)

Appendix A: Sample Target order

(this order is for restocking things that are useful for socials. I think the quantities are off)


25

0
0

Reactions

0
0

More posts like this

Comments


No comments on this post yet.
Be the first to respond.
More from Nikola
View more
Curated and popular this week
Paul Present
 ·  · 28m read
 · 
Note: I am not a malaria expert. This is my best-faith attempt at answering a question that was bothering me, but this field is a large and complex field, and I’ve almost certainly misunderstood something somewhere along the way. Summary While the world made incredible progress in reducing malaria cases from 2000 to 2015, the past 10 years have seen malaria cases stop declining and start rising. I investigated potential reasons behind this increase through reading the existing literature and looking at publicly available data, and I identified three key factors explaining the rise: 1. Population Growth: Africa's population has increased by approximately 75% since 2000. This alone explains most of the increase in absolute case numbers, while cases per capita have remained relatively flat since 2015. 2. Stagnant Funding: After rapid growth starting in 2000, funding for malaria prevention plateaued around 2010. 3. Insecticide Resistance: Mosquitoes have become increasingly resistant to the insecticides used in bednets over the past 20 years. This has made older models of bednets less effective, although they still have some effect. Newer models of bednets developed in response to insecticide resistance are more effective but still not widely deployed.  I very crudely estimate that without any of these factors, there would be 55% fewer malaria cases in the world than what we see today. I think all three of these factors are roughly equally important in explaining the difference.  Alternative explanations like removal of PFAS, climate change, or invasive mosquito species don't appear to be major contributors.  Overall this investigation made me more convinced that bednets are an effective global health intervention.  Introduction In 2015, malaria rates were down, and EAs were celebrating. Giving What We Can posted this incredible gif showing the decrease in malaria cases across Africa since 2000: Giving What We Can said that > The reduction in malaria has be
Ronen Bar
 ·  · 10m read
 · 
"Part one of our challenge is to solve the technical alignment problem, and that’s what everybody focuses on, but part two is: to whose values do you align the system once you’re capable of doing that, and that may turn out to be an even harder problem", Sam Altman, OpenAI CEO (Link).  In this post, I argue that: 1. "To whose values do you align the system" is a critically neglected space I termed “Moral Alignment.” Only a few organizations work for non-humans in this field, with a total budget of 4-5 million USD (not accounting for academic work). The scale of this space couldn’t be any bigger - the intersection between the most revolutionary technology ever and all sentient beings. While tractability remains uncertain, there is some promising positive evidence (See “The Tractability Open Question” section). 2. Given the first point, our movement must attract more resources, talent, and funding to address it. The goal is to value align AI with caring about all sentient beings: humans, animals, and potential future digital minds. In other words, I argue we should invest much more in promoting a sentient-centric AI. The problem What is Moral Alignment? AI alignment focuses on ensuring AI systems act according to human intentions, emphasizing controllability and corrigibility (adaptability to changing human preferences). However, traditional alignment often ignores the ethical implications for all sentient beings. Moral Alignment, as part of the broader AI alignment and AI safety spaces, is a field focused on the values we aim to instill in AI. I argue that our goal should be to ensure AI is a positive force for all sentient beings. Currently, as far as I know, no overarching organization, terms, or community unifies Moral Alignment (MA) as a field with a clear umbrella identity. While specific groups focus individually on animals, humans, or digital minds, such as AI for Animals, which does excellent community-building work around AI and animal welfare while
Max Taylor
 ·  · 9m read
 · 
Many thanks to Constance Li, Rachel Mason, Ronen Bar, Sam Tucker-Davis, and Yip Fai Tse for providing valuable feedback. This post does not necessarily reflect the views of my employer. Artificial General Intelligence (basically, ‘AI that is as good as, or better than, humans at most intellectual tasks’) seems increasingly likely to be developed in the next 5-10 years. As others have written, this has major implications for EA priorities, including animal advocacy, but it’s hard to know how this should shape our strategy. This post sets out a few starting points and I’m really interested in hearing others’ ideas, even if they’re very uncertain and half-baked. Is AGI coming in the next 5-10 years? This is very well covered elsewhere but basically it looks increasingly likely, e.g.: * The Metaculus and Manifold forecasting platforms predict we’ll see AGI in 2030 and 2031, respectively. * The heads of Anthropic and OpenAI think we’ll see it by 2027 and 2035, respectively. * A 2024 survey of AI researchers put a 50% chance of AGI by 2047, but this is 13 years earlier than predicted in the 2023 version of the survey. * These predictions seem feasible given the explosive rate of change we’ve been seeing in computing power available to models, algorithmic efficiencies, and actual model performance (e.g., look at how far Large Language Models and AI image generators have come just in the last three years). * Based on this, organisations (both new ones, like Forethought, and existing ones, like 80,000 Hours) are taking the prospect of near-term AGI increasingly seriously. What could AGI mean for animals? AGI’s implications for animals depend heavily on who controls the AGI models. For example: * AGI might be controlled by a handful of AI companies and/or governments, either in alliance or in competition. * For example, maybe two government-owned companies separately develop AGI then restrict others from developing it. * These actors’ use of AGI might be dr
Relevant opportunities
View more