I have seen a few different posts here that boil down to "but what if I'm not a genius? :( " and many of the answers are kind of silly ("you might secretly be a genius!", "have hope, you can find a genius and do things to free up their time!"). The steelman of it is the argument from comparative advantage iirc, but that argument has this problem (which EA seems to have just in general too?) of demanding a lot of initiative on the part of people who are just starting out, have no idea how anything works, may feel overwhelmed by information, etc.
There should be a list, somewhere, of tasks. Simple things like any data entry/tagging for a project that can be reasonably outsourced to internet randos, spell or grammar checking for something, little internal research surveys new members can fill out, source-finding for some claims, cleaning up images, signal-boosting, etc.
There are a lot of relatively small tasks that are relatively easy to crowdsource, that people who are trying to participate but don't know how could be funneled towards while they get involved, such that they can see themselves clearly helping, very quickly, without having to be geniuses or do six hundred hours of reading.
This can in turn
Seems like a fairly low-hanging fruit.
If this already exists, it should be made more obviously available to people, and "what if I'm not smart?" posts should have redirection towards it as a default response.
Thanks for posting; I like this idea. I think I've made a few such lists over the years, but nothing recent.
But filtering for 'Volunteer' here might be a good place to start: https://ea-internships.pory.app/board
You can also submit other opportunities to that board as you come across them: https://airtable.com/shrepquFY2NxymyUy And of course you can link to the website from the "What if I'm not a genius?" posts you mention in the comments.
(I think the best response to the thought "EA should do X" is often "I should do X." https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Pz7RdMRouZ5N5w5eE/ea-should-taboo-ea-should I don't mean to say that people should only ever say that something should be done if they're prepared to do it themselves - sometimes other people with more time/initiative/info will implement a demand once it's voiced - but I also want more community members to feel empowered to create or contribute to resources they think should exist...especially new and uncertain/anxious ones 🙂)
I don't think the "Volunteer" section features any of the things that are like what I'm thinking about. And the same is true of anything that would reasonably fit on the board.
Like, here are some things I think people who are just starting out could easily help with:
Off the top of my head. Things a twelve-year-old could do. Things someone can do when they're a little bit drunk. Things tired people who like the idea but are trying to throw this in between their two jobs or something can do. Low barrier of entry. Easy. Individual tasks you can finish in an hour.
Here are some things when you filter for volunteer:
I could go on. The next ten are not radically different from the first ten. All of these things are big commitments. Most of them are basically jobs. Which is, to my understanding, what the board is for, right? So that makes sense. None of these are a thing a person could do to "test the waters" for 20 minutes every night for a week, or every other thursday.
The closest thing to this that I can think of is the wiki, insofar as people can edit it. It seems to be well-maintained, and doesn't have an easily-available "this article is a stub, you can help by expanding it" shortlist. That would be an obvious low-hanging-fruit here.
Maybe after I've spent more time here, I can more reasonably do something like that myself, but it seems like something that requires a much more comprehensive understanding of current ongoing projects than I have, and a much more "inside" view so to speak. A lot of these tasks seem to be getting done by having people whose job it is to do them, given the proliferation of personal assistant / executive assistant stuff going on. But once again, those are jobs, there isn't exactly a pipeline in which you can get involved by slowly increasing the extent of your participation, beyond maybe making arguments here.
I'm comfortable doing that, because I like arguing and am not very invested in this community yet. But that's because I got lucky. If I was more anxious and insecure, I probably would not be interacting, and as there is no clear and obvious way of participating on the smaller scale, I would not be able to "build up to" interacting.
Long time lurker first time poster here. I want to make this a bigger post, but also am not sure if I will be a good fit in this environment, so instead of sitting down and getting all my citations in a row, I'll just do this to test the waters.
I'll edit this into a bigger post with citations or something if anyone actually cares / thinks this is worth engaging with.
Personally I have no idea if this is a worthy use of the median EA's time, but this is exactly the kind of interesting thinking I'd like to see.
Without asking for rigor at this particular time, do you think some languages are better than others for one or more of these outcomes?
Thanks!
Re: specific languages, I think there's a few ways to think about it.
In terms of "best for your brain" re:dementia, traumatic brain injury, etc:
I think the more different the better. So if your first language is synthetic, you should go with an analytic language and vice versa. In that same vein of thought, any language that has another alphabet and/or an entirely alternative writing system would be better too. Honourable mention also for sign languages, which combine additional motor skill practice on top of the linguistic and visual processing brain workout, and also everyone should know a bit of sign language anyway, because sometimes places are really loud or your throat is sore and it's hard to talk.
So, Hindi, Mandarin, Korean, Japanese, Mongolian, Arabic, Greek, Russian, Javanese, ASL, etc.
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In terms of trying to intellectually "weaponize" languages:
Any language that can be very easily and comfortably associated with a specific mode of thought. E.g. If you were very interested in reading a lot of communist philosophy in the original Russian, and wanted to create a "communist "mode in your brain, or if you were very interested in learning to think more about theology and metaphysics (I personally think a lot of old metaphysics philosophical takes are going to start becoming much more useful in the near future with the rise of AI and hyperglobalization) and wanted to read a lot of Jewish philosophy in Hebrew, or old Catholic philosophy in Latin, Islamic philosophy in Arabic, etc.
The priority there is a language that has a very rich "backlog" of the thing you want to work with intellectually.
So that would be things like Latin, Arabic, Mandarin, Hebrew, Russian, German, Sanskrit, Spanish, French, etc.
One interesting note about the "mode" thing is that this is the one place where a language being dead might actually be a plus. But studying a dead language has its own drawbacks and is usually more demanding.
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In terms of trying to avoid being WEIRD / blinded by your own WEIRD-ness:
Native/Indigenous languages. Most languages considered "native", and most languages that are predominantly spoken by populations that did not have a lot of industrialization 50 years ago generally, will still have a lot of the affectations, vocabulary, and other interesting features of their recent history, and will have a lot of stories, sayings, and associated modes of thought that are non-WEIRD.
So, Navajo, Cherokee, Igbo, Cree, Quechua, Maori, etc.
A lot of them are simply going to be missing the words for a lot of things, which means that in the process of translating something, you'll have to reverse-engineer what the thing in question is and what you should call it, which I think is generally really good for intellectual rigour.
I don't think the "Volunteer" section features any of the things that are like what I'm thinking about. And the same is true of anything that would reasonably fit on the board.
Like, here are some things I think people who are just starting out could easily help with:
Off the top of my head. Things a twelve-year-old could do. Things someone can do when they're a little bit drunk. Things tired people who like the idea but are trying to throw this in between their two jobs or something can do. Low barrier of entry. Easy. Individual tasks you can finish in an hour.
Here are some things when you filter for volunteer:
I could go on. The next ten are not radically different from the first ten. All of these things are big commitments. Most of them are basically jobs. Which is, to my understanding, what the board is for, right? So that makes sense. None of these are a thing a person could do to "test the waters" for 20 minutes every night for a week, or every other thursday.
The closest thing to this that I can think of is the wiki, insofar as people can edit it. It seems to be well-maintained, and doesn't have an easily-available "this article is a stub, you can help by expanding it" shortlist. That would be an obvious low-hanging-fruit here.
Maybe after I've spent more time here, I can more reasonably do something like that myself, but it seems like something that requires a much more comprehensive understanding of current ongoing projects than I have, and a much more "inside" view so to speak. A lot of these tasks seem to be getting done by having people whose job it is to do them, given the proliferation of personal assistant / executive assistant stuff going on. But once again, those are jobs, there isn't exactly a pipeline in which you can get involved by slowly increasing the extent of your participation, beyond maybe making arguments here.
I'm comfortable doing that, because I like arguing and am not very invested in this community yet. But that's because I got lucky. If I was more anxious and insecure, I probably would not be interacting, and as there is no clear and obvious way of participating on the smaller scale, I would not be able to "build up to" interacting.