Building effective altruism
Building EA
Growing, shaping, or otherwise improving effective altruism as a practical and intellectual project

Quick takes

31
21d
Mini EA Forum Update You can now subscribe to be notified every time a user comments (thanks to the LessWrong team for building the functionality!), and we’ve updated the design of the notification option menus. You can see more details in GitHub here.
42
1mo
1
My biggest takeaway from EA so far has been that the difference in expected moral value between the consensus choice and its alternative(s) can be vastly larger than I had previously thought. I used to think that "common sense" would get me far when it came to moral choices. I even thought that the difference in expected moral value between the "common sense" choice and any alternatives was negligible, so much so that I made a deliberate decision not to invest time into thinking about my own values or ethics.  EA radically changed my opinion, and now I hold the view that the consensus view is frequently wrong, even when the stakes are high, and that is possible to make dramatically better moral decisions by approaching them with rationality, and a better-informed ethical framework. Sometimes I come across people who are familiar with EA ideas but don't particularly engage with them or the community. I often feel surprised, and I think the above is a big part of why. Perhaps more emphasis could be placed on this expected moral value gap in EA outreach?
8
8d
The Draft Amnesty banner, and other tweaks to differentiate the posts, are a bit delayed and should be up later today. There will be in-post banners, and little topic pills that you will be able to see in the frontpage list. This will all be applied retroactively, so feel free to post your Draft Amnesty posts whenever, as long as they are tagged with the Draft Amnesty Week tag. 
101
6mo
19
My overall impression is that the CEA community health team (CHT from now on) are well intentioned but sometimes understaffed and other times downright incompetent. It's hard to me to be impartial here, and I understand that their failures are more salient to me than their successes. Yet I endorse the need for change, at the very least including 1) removing people from the CHT that serve as a advisors to any EA funds or have other conflict of interest positions, 2) hiring HR and mental health specialists with credentials, 3) publicly clarifying their role and mandate.  My impression is that the most valuable function that the CHT provides is as support of community building teams across the world, from advising community builders to preventing problematic community builders from receiving support. If this is the case, I think it would be best to rebrand the CHT as a CEA HR department, and for CEA to properly hire the community builders who are now supported as grantees, which one could argue is an employee misclassification. I would not be comfortable discussing these issues openly out of concern for the people affected, but here are some horror stories: 1. A CHT staff pressured a community builder to put through with and include a community member with whom they weren't comfortable interacting. 2. A CHT staff pressured a community builder to not press charges against a community member who they felt harassed by. 3. After a restraining order was set by the police in place in this last case, the CHT refused to liaison with the EA Global team to deny access to the person restrained, even knowing that the affected community builder would be attending the event. 4. My overall sense is that CHT is not very mindful of the needs of community builders in other contexts. Two very promising professionals I've mentored have dissociated from EA, and rejected a grant, in large part because of how they were treated by the CHT. 5. My impression is that the CHT staff underm
109
7mo
11
GET AMBITIOUS SLOWLY Most approaches to increasing agency and ambition focus on telling people to dream big and not be intimidated by large projects. I'm sure that works for some people, but it feels really flat for me, and I consider myself one of the lucky ones. The worst case scenario is big inspiring  speeches get you really pumped up to Solve Big Problems but you lack the tools to meaningfully follow up.  Faced with big dreams but unclear ability to enact them, people have a few options.  *  try anyway and fail badly, probably too badly for it to even be an educational failure.  * fake it, probably without knowing they're doing so * learned helplessness, possible systemic depression * be heading towards failure, but too many people are counting on you so someone steps in and rescue you. They consider this net negative and prefer the world where you'd never started to the one where they had to rescue you.  * discover more skills than they knew. feel great, accomplish great things, learn a lot.  The first three are all very costly, especially if you repeat the cycle a few times. My preferred version is ambition snowball or "get ambitious slowly". Pick something big enough to feel challenging but not much more, accomplish it, and then use the skills and confidence you learn to tackle a marginally bigger challenge. This takes longer than immediately going for the brass ring and succeeding on the first try, but I claim it is ultimately faster and has higher EV than repeated failures. I claim EA's emphasis on doing The Most Important Thing pushed people into premature ambition and everyone is poorer for it. Certainly I would have been better off hearing this 10 years ago  What size of challenge is the right size? I've thought about this a lot and don't have a great answer. You can see how things feel in your gut, or compare to past projects. My few rules: * stick to problems where failure will at least be informative. If you can't track reality well eno
19
1mo
Mini EA Forum Update We’ve updated our new user onboarding flow! You can see more details in GitHub here. In addition to making it way prettier, we’re trying out adding some optional steps, including: 1. You can select topics you’re interested in, to make your frontpage more relevant to you. 1. You can also click the “Customize feed” button on the frontpage - see details here. 2. You can choose some authors to subscribe to. You will be notified when an author you are subscribed to publishes a post. 1. You can also subscribe from any user’s profile page. 3. You’re prompted to fill in some profile information to give other users context on who you are. 1. You can also edit your profile here. I hope that these additional optional steps help new users get more out of the Forum. We will continue to iterate on this flow based on usage and feedback - feel free to reply to this quick take with your thoughts!
43
3mo
2
People often propose HR departments as antidotes to some of the harm that's done by inappropriate working practices in EA. The usual response is that small organisations often have quite informal HR arrangements even outside of EA, which does seem kinda true. Another response is that it sometimes seems like people have an overly rosy picture of HR departments. If your corporate culture sucks then your HR department will defend and uphold your sucky corporate culture. Abusive employers will use their HR departments as an instrument of their abuse. Perhaps the idea is to bring more mainstream HR practices or expertise into EA employers, rather than merely going through the motions of creating the department. But I think mainstream HR comes primarily from the private sector and is primarily about protecting the employer, often against the employee. They often cast themselves in a role of being there to help you, but a common piece of folk wisdom is "HR is not your friend". I think frankly that a lot of mainstream HR culture is at worst dishonest and manipulative, and I'd be really sad to see us uncritically importing more of that.
3
4d
I am wondering whether people view EA vs. cause-specific field-building differently, especially about the Scout Mindset. My general thoughts are: EA - Focuses on providing knowledge and evidence to facilitate the self-determination of individuals to rationally weigh up the evidence provided to decide on updating beliefs to inform actions wherever they may go. Scout Mindset is intrinsically valuable to provide flexibility and to update beliefs and work on the beliefs that individuals hold. Field-Building - Focusing on convincing people that this is a cause area worth working on and will have a significant impact; less focus on individual thoughts based on the strength of the arguments and evidence field-builders already possess. Scout Mindset is instrumentally valuable to update and work on the beliefs that field-builders hold. Argument for Instrumental value: A more instrumental perspective is that it is much easier to ask someone to understand one thing and act on it rather than understand many things and struggle to act on any, which may be counterfactually more impactful. Argument for Intrinsic value: By focusing on the intrinsic value you're measuring for the internal change process that occurs in EA to see and understand the reason behind different cultural shifts across time with specific emphasis on the potential for value-drift.  The core difference between the two, as I see it, is whether the community builder focuses on promoting the individual or the cause. However, this may be an oversimplification or unfair misrepresentation and I am keen to hear the community's views.
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