Quick takes

Imperfect Parfit (written by by Daniel Kodsi and John Maier) is a fairly long review (by 2024 internet standards) of Parfit: A Philosopher and His Mission to Save Morality. It draws attention to some of his oddities and eccentricity (such as brushing his teeth for hours, or eating the same dinner every day (not unheard of among famous philosophers)). Considering Parfit's influence on the ideas that many of us involved in EA have, it seemed worth sharing here.

There are quite a few posts/some discussion on 1. The value of language learning for career capital 2. The dominance of English in EA and the advantages it confers See., e.g., https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/qf6pGhm9a7vTMFLtc/english-as-a-dominant-language-in-the-movement-challenges https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/k7igqbN52XtmJGBZ8/effective-language-learning-for-effective-altruists I expect these issues to become less important very soon as new AI-powered technology gets better. To an extent, the Babblefish is already here and nearly useable. E.g., the latest timekettle translator earbuds (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BTP57ZRM?ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_b_fed_asin_title&th=1) are getting rave reviews from some people (https://bsky.app/profile/joshuafmask.bsky.social/post/3lcm22p6nsc2o)

Part of this long but highly interesting blog series stood out to me What the heck happened here? Why such a big difference? Was it: 1. His spending was not high at the time the podcast happened. 2. It was high, but 80k/EA didn't know about it. 3. It was high, and 80k/EA did know, but it was introduced like this anyway. Does anyone have a sense or a link to if this was talked about elsewhere?  

In case you haven't seen it, CEA has redone their website. I like the new look and the content makes it much easier to understand the scope of their work. Bravo to whomever worked on this! 

EA in the wild: I'm having trouble adding a screenshot but I recently made an online purchase and at the bottom of the checkout page was a "give 1% of your purchase to a high-impact cause" - and it was featuring Giving What We Can's funds!  Always fun to see EA in unexpected places. :) 

I'm the co-founder and one of the main organizers of EA Purdue. Last fall, we got four signups for our intro seminar; this fall, we got around fifty. Here's what's changed over the last year: * We got officially registered with our university. Last year, we were an unregistered student organization, and as a result lacked access to opportunities like the club fair and were not listed on the official Purdue extracurriculars website. After going through the registration process, we were able to take advantage of these opportunities. * We tabled at club fairs. Last year, we did not attend club fairs, since we weren't yet eligible for them. This year, we were eligible and attended, and we added around 100 people to our mailing list and GroupMe. This is probably the most directly impactful change we made. * We had a seminar sign-up QR code at the club fairs. This item actually changed between the club fairs, since we were a bit slow to get the seminar sign-up form created. A majority of our sign-ups came from the one club fair where we had the QR code, despite the other club fair being ~10-50x larger. * We held our callout meeting earlier. Last year, I delayed the first intro talk meeting until the middle of the third week of school, long after most clubs finished their callouts. This led to around 10 people showing up, which was still more than I expected, but not as much as I had hoped. This year, we held the callout early the second week of school, and ended up getting around 30-35 attendees. We also gave those attendees time to fill out the seminar sign-up form at the callout, and this accounted for most of the rest of our sign-ups. * We brought food to the callout. People are more likely to attend meetings at universities if there is food, especially if they're busy and can skip a long dining court line by listening to your intro talk. I highly recommend bringing food to your regular meetings too - attendance at our general meetings doubled last year after I s

I think that EA outreach can be net positive in a lot of circumstances, but there is one version of it that always makes me cringe. That version is the targeting of really young people (for this quicktake, I will say anyone under 20). This would basically include any high school targeting and most early-stage college targeting. I think I do not like it for two reasons: 1) it feels a bit like targeting the young/naive in a way I wish we would not have to do, given the quality of our ideas, and 2) these folks are typically far from making a real impact, and there is lots of time for them to lose interest or get lost along the way. Interestingly, this stands in contrast to my personal experience—I found EA when I was in my early 20s and would have benefited significantly from hearing about it in my teenage years.

I'm going to be leaving 80,000 Hours and joining Charity Entrepreneurship's incubator programme this summer! The summer 2023 incubator round is focused on biosecurity and scalable global health charities and I'm really excited to see what's the best fit for me and hopefully launch a new charity. The ideas that the research team have written up look really exciting and I'm trepidatious about the challenge of being a founder but psyched for getting started. Watch this space! <3 I've been at 80,000 Hours for the last 3 years. I'm very proud of the 800+ advising calls I did and feel very privileged I got to talk to so many people and try and help them along their careers! I've learned so much during my time at 80k. And the team at 80k has been wonderful to work with - so thoughtful, committed to working out what is the right thing to do, kind, and fun - I'll for sure be sad to leave them. There are a few main reasons why I'm leaving now: 1. New career challenge - I want to try out something that stretches my skills beyond what I've done before. I think I could be a good fit for being a founder and running something big and complicated and valuable that wouldn't exist without me - I'd like to give it a try sooner rather than later. 2. Post-EA crises stepping away from EA community building a bit - Events over the last few months in EA made me re-evaluate how valuable I think the EA community and EA community building are as well as re-evaluate my personal relationship with EA. I haven't gone to the last few EAGs and switched my work away from doing advising calls for the last few months, while processing all this. I have been somewhat sad that there hasn't been more discussion and changes by now though I have been glad to see more EA leaders share things more recently (e.g. this from Ben Todd). I do still believe there are some really important ideas that EA prioritises but I'm more circumspect about some of the things I think we're not doing as well as we could (