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

Shortforms

37
13d
I mostly haven't been thinking about what the ideal effective altruism community would look like, because it seems like most of the value of effective altruism might just get approximated to what impact it has on steering the world towards better AGI futures. But I think even in worlds where AI risk wasn't a problem, the effective altruism movement seems lackluster in some ways. I am thinking especially of the effect that it often has on university students and younger people. My sense is that EA sometimes influences those people to be closed-minded or at least doesn't contribute to making them as ambitious or interested in exploring things outside "conventional EA" as I think would be ideal. Students who come across EA often become too attached to specific EA organisations or paths to impact suggested by existing EA institutions.  In an EA community that was more ambitiously impactful, there would be a higher proportion of folks at least strongly considering doing things like starting startups that could be really big, traveling to various parts of the world to form a view about how poverty affects welfare, having long google docs with their current best guesses for how to get rid of factory farming, looking at non-"EA" sources to figure out what more effective interventions GiveWell might be missing perhaps because they're somewhat controversial, doing more effective science/medical research, writing something on the topic of better thinking and decision-making that could be as influential as Eliezer's sequences, expressing curiosity about the question of whether charity is even the best way to improve human welfare, trying to fix science.  And a lower proportion of these folks would be applying to jobs on the 80,000 Hours job board or choosing to spend more time within the EA community rather than interacting with the most ambitious, intelligent, and interesting people amongst their general peers. 
61
21d
1
Reddit user blueshoesrcool [https://old.reddit.com/user/blueshoesrcool] discovered [https://old.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/13t23ti/effective_ventures_misses_reporting_deadline/] that Effective Ventures [https://ev.org/] (the umbrella organization for the Centre for Effective Altruism, 80000 hours, GWWC, etc) has missed its charity reporting deadline by 27 days [https://register-of-charities.charitycommission.gov.uk/charity-search/-/charity-details/5026843/accounts-and-annual-returns]. Given that there's already a regulatory inquiry into Effective Ventures Foundation [https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/C89mZ5T5MTYBu8ZFR/regulatory-inquiry-into-effective-ventures-foundation-uk], maybe someone should look into this.
5
10d
Rational Animations has a subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/RationalAnimations/ [https://www.reddit.com/r/RationalAnimations/] I hadn't advertised it until now because I had to find someone to help moderate it.  I want people here to be among the first to join since I expect having EA Forum users early on would help foster a good epistemic culture.
53
3mo
13
SOME POST-EAG THOUGHTS ON JOURNALISTS For context, CEA accepted at EAG Bay Area 2023 a journalist who has at times written critically of EA and individual EAs, and who is very much not a community member. I am deliberately not naming the journalist, because they haven't done anything wrong and I'm still trying to work out my own thoughts. On one hand, "journalists who write nice things get to go to the events, journalists who write mean things get excluded" is at best ethically problematic. It's very very very normal: political campaigns do it, industry events do it, individuals do it. "Access journalism" is the norm more than it is the exception. But that doesn't mean that we should. One solution is to be very very careful about maintaining the differentiation between "community member" and "critical or not". Dylan Matthews is straightforwardly an EA and has reported critically on a past EAG [https://www.vox.com/2015/8/10/9124145/effective-altruism-global-ai]: if he was excluded for this I would be deeply concerned. On the other hand, I think that, when hosting an EA event, an EA organization has certain obligations to the people at that event. One of them is protecting their safety and privacy. EAs who are journalists can, I think, generally be relied upon to be fair and to respect the privacy of individuals. That is not a trust I extend to journalists who are not community members [https://observer.com/2012/07/faith-hope-and-singularity-entering-the-matrix-with-new-yorks-futurist-set/]: the linked example is particularly egregious, but tabloid reporting happens. EAG is a gathering of community members. People go to advance their goals: see friends, network, be networked at, give advice, get advice, learn interesting things, and more. In a healthy movement, I think that EAGs should be a professional obligation, good for the individual, or fun for the individual. It doesn't have to be all of them, but it shouldn't harm them on any axis. Someone might be out ab
49
3mo
5
On Socioeconomic Diversity: I want to describe how the discourse on sexual misconduct may be reducing the specific type of socioeconomic diversity I am personally familiar with.  I’m a white female American who worked as an HVAC technician with co-workers mostly from racial minorities before going to college. Most of the sexual misconduct incidents discussed in the Time article [https://time.com/6252617/effective-altruism-sexual-harassment/] have likely differed from standard workplace discussions in my former career only in that the higher status person expressed romantic/sexual attraction, making their statement much more vulnerable than the trash-talk I’m familiar with. In the places most of my workplace experience comes from, people of all genders and statuses make sexual jokes about coworkers of all genders and statuses not only in their field, but while on the clock. I had tremendous fun participating in these conversations. It didn’t feel sexist to me because I gave as good as I got. My experience generalizes well; Even when Donald Trump made a joke about sexual assault that many upper-class Americans believed disqualified him, immediately before the election he won, Republican women [https://www.vox.com/2016/10/9/13217158/polls-donald-trump-assault-tape] were no more likely to think he should drop out of the race than Republican voters in general. Donald Trump has been able to maintain much of his popularity despite denying the legitimacy of a legitimate election in part because he identified the gatekeeping elements of upper-class American norms as classist [https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/a-modest-proposal-for-republicans]. I am strongly against Trump, but believe we should note that many female Americans from poorer backgrounds enjoy these conversations, and many more oppose the kind of punishments popular in upper class American communities. This means strongly disliking these conversations is not an intrinsic virtue, but a decision EA culture ha
45
3mo
1
Proposing a change to how Karma is accrued: I recently reached over 1,000 Karma, meaning my upvotes now give 2 Karma and my strong upvotes give 6 Karma.  I'm most proud of my contributions to the forum about economics, but almost all of my increased ability to influence discourse now is from participating in the discussions on sexual misconduct. An upvote from me on Global Health & Development (my primary cause area) now counts twice as much as an upvote from 12 out of 19 of the authors of posts with 200-300 Karma with the Global Health & Development tag. They are generally experts in their field working at major EA organizations, whereas I am an electrical engineering undergraduate. I think these kinds of people should have far more ability to influence the discussion via the power of their upvotes than me. They will notice things about the merits of the cases people are making that I won't until I'm a lot smarter and wiser and farther along in my career. I don't think the ability to say something popular about culture wars translates well into having insights about the object level content. It is very easy to get Karma by participating in community discussions, so a lot of people are now probably in my position after the increased activity in that area around the scandals. I really want the people with more expertise in their field to be the ones influencing how visible posts and comments about their field are.  I propose that Karma earned from comments on posts with the community tag accrues at a slower rate. Edit: I just noticed a post by moderators that does a better job of explaining why karma is so easy to accumulate in community posts: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/dDudLPHv7AgPLrzef/karma-overrates-some-topics-resulting-issues-and-potential [https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/dDudLPHv7AgPLrzef/karma-overrates-some-topics-resulting-issues-and-potential]
42
4mo
LEARNING FROM AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL'S MANAGEMENT MALPRACTICE CRISIS The recent discussions of harms caused by EAs vaguely reminded me of controversies around misbehaviour committed by leaders of Amnesty International. Very horribly, these apparently only came to light due to two suicides that were as I understand partially caused by workplace bullying at AI offices. From Wikipedia [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amnesty_International#2019_report_on_workplace_bullying]: POTENTIAL NEXT STEPS (I likely won't find time to do more here. :/ ) Amnesty hired the Konterra Group which subsequently wrote the "AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL Staff Wellbeing Review" [https://www.amnesty.org/en/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/ORG6097632019ENGLISH.pdf], which seems generally insightful and potentially applicable to EA on a very very quick skim. * Skim the report and extract useful lessons for EA. * Make a quick evaluation whether the report's quality and value suggests that EAs might want to work with the Konterra Group [https://konterragroup.net/evaluation-organizational-learning/what-we-do/] to review the EA community:
9
1mo
I'm hiring for a new Director [https://docs.google.com/document/d/1GbdjO-H3LjLKMKa42KGWnjXOAGGjBGoZ/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=115335349683161452379&rtpof=true&sd=true] at Social Change Lab to lead our team! This is a hugely important role so if anyone is at all interested, I do encourage you to apply. Any questions, please feel free to reach out as well.  - Social Change Lab [https://www.socialchangelab.org/] is a nonprofit conducting and disseminating social movement research to help solve the world’s most pressing problems. We’re looking for a Director to lead our small team in delivering cutting-edge research on the outcomes and strategies of social movements, and ensuring widespread communication of this work to key stakeholders. You would play a significant role in shaping our long-term strategy and the programs we want to deliver. See more information below, the full job description here [https://docs.google.com/document/d/1GbdjO-H3LjLKMKa42KGWnjXOAGGjBGoZ/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=115335349683161452379&rtpof=true&sd=true] and apply here [https://forms.gle/3WzrC3FiYc3FdJLW8]. * Application deadline: 2nd of June, 23:59 BST. Candidates will be considered on a rolling basis so early applications are encouraged. Apply here. [https://forms.gle/3WzrC3FiYc3FdJLW8] * Contract: Permanent, working 37.5 hours/week.  * Location: London or UK preferred, although fully remote or overseas applications will also be considered. * Salary: £48,000-£55,000/year dependent on experience.    If anyone is interested or knows someone who might be a good fit, please share the job advert with them or let me know. You can also see some more context on the leadership change here [https://www.socialchangelab.org/post/a-leadership-change-at-social-change-lab].
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