Quick takes

In light of recent discourse on EA adjacency, this seems like a good time to publicly note that I still identify as an effective altruist, not EA adjacent. I am extremely against embezzling people out of billions of dollars of money, and FTX was a good reminder of the importance of "don't do evil things for galaxy brained altruistic reasons". But this has nothing to do with whether or not I endorse the philosophy that "it is correct to try to think about the most effective and leveraged ways to do good and then actually act on them". And there are many people in or influenced by the EA community who I respect and think do good and important work.

I used to feel so strongly about effective altruism. But my heart isn't in it anymore. I still care about the same old stuff I used to care about, like donating what I can to important charities and trying to pick the charities that are the most cost-effective. Or caring about animals and trying to figure out how to do right by them, even though I haven't been able to sustain a vegan diet for more than a short time. And so on. But there isn't a community or a movement anymore where I want to talk about these sorts of things with people. That community and movement existed, at least in my local area and at least to a limited extent in some online spaces, from about 2015 to 2017 or 2018. These are the reasons for my feelings about the effective altruist community/movement, especially over the last one or two years: -The AGI thing has gotten completely out of hand. I wrote a brief post here about why I strongly disagree with near-term AGI predictions. I wrote a long comment here about how AGI's takeover of effective altruism has left me disappointed, disturbed, and alienated. 80,000 Hours and Will MacAskill have both pivoted to focusing exclusively or almost exclusively on AGI. AGI talk has dominated the EA Forum for a while. It feels like AGI is what the movement is mostly about now, so now I just disagree with most of what effective altruism is about. -The extent to which LessWrong culture has taken over or "colonized" effective altruism culture is such a bummer. I know there's been at least a bit of overlap for a long time, but ten years ago it felt like effective altruism had its own, unique culture and nowadays it feels like the LessWrong culture has almost completely taken over. I have never felt good about LessWrong or "rationalism" and the more knowledge and experience of it I've gained, the more I've accumulated a sense of repugnance, horror, and anger toward that culture and ideology. I hate to see that become what effective altruism is like. -The stori

Should the EA Forum facilitate donation swaps? 🤔 Judging from the number of upvotes on this recent swap ask and the fact that the old donation swap platform has retired, maybe there's some unmet demand here? I myself would like to swap donations later this year. Maybe even a low-effort solution (like an open thread) could go a long way?

I would like to publicly set a goal not to comment other people's posts with a criticism of some minor side point that doesn't matter. I have a habit of doing that, but I think it's usually more annoying than it is helpful so I would like to stop. If you see me doing it, feel free to call me out (I reserve the right to make substantive criticisms of a post's central arguments)

One of the benefits of the EA community is as a social technology where altruistic actions are high status: earning-to-give, pledging and not eating animals are all venerated to varying degrees among the community.  Pledgers have coordinated to add the orange square emoji to their EA forum profile names (and sometimes in their twitter bio). I like this, as it both helps create an environment where one is might sometimes be forced to think "wow, lots of pledgers here, should I be doing that too?" as well as singling out those deserving of our respect.  Part of me wonders if 'we' should go further in leveraging this; bestow small status markers on those who make a particularly altruistic sacrifice.  Unfortunately, there is no kidney emoji, so perhaps those who donate their kidney will need to settle for the kidney bean emoji (🫘). This might seem ridiculous (I am half joking with the kidney beans), but creating neat little ways for those who behave altruistically to reap the status reward might ever so slightly encourage others to collect on the bounty (i.e donate their kidney or save a drowning child) as well as rewarding those who have done the good thing. 

I’ve been working a few hours per week at the Effective Altruism Infrastructure Fund as a Fund Manager since Summer this year. EA’s reputation is at a bit of a low point. I’ve even heard EA described as the ‘boogeyman’ in certain well-meaning circles. So why do I feel inclined to double down on effective altruism rather than move onto other endeavours? Some shower thoughts: * I generally endorse aiming directly for the thing you actually care about. It seems higher integrity, and usually more efficient. I want to do the most good possible, and this goal already has a name and community attached to it; EA. * I find the core, underlying principles very compelling. The Centre for Effective Altruism highlights scope sensitivity, impartiality, recognition of tradeoffs, and the Scout Mindset. I endorse all of these! * Seems to me that EA has a good track record of important insights on otherwise neglected topics. Existential risk, risks of astronomical suffering, AI safety, wild animal suffering; I attribute a lot of success in these nascent fields to the insights of people with a shared commitment to EA principles and goals. * Of course, there’s been a lot of progress on slightly less neglected cause areas too. The mind boggles at the sheer number of human lives saved and the vast amount of animal suffering reduced by organisations funded by Open Philanthropy, for example. * I have personally benefited massively in achieving my own goals. Beyond some of the above insights, I attribute many improvements in my productivity and epistemics to discussions and recommendations that arose out of the pursuit of EA. * In other roles or projects I’m considering, when I think of questions like “who will actually realistically consider acting on this idea I think is great? Giving up their time or money to make this happen?” the most obvious and easiest answer often looks like some subset of the EA community. Obviously there are some echo chamber-y and bias-related reasons tha

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 (

I took the 10% Pledge earlier this year, but was contemplating it a lot for a while before. After taking the pledge, I noticed a couple of insights that I think would have probably made me pledge earlier. I think these insights most directly apply to people who were in a similar situation as I was[1]-  but they might be useful for others as well: * You don’t have to donate 10% right away. Today (!) I learned that "while studying or unemployed, it is within the spirit of the Pledge to give 1% of spending money instead of the income-based pledge amount" and the 10% kicks in once you start earning a stable income. When I first learned about the pledge, I was still at uni and thought I should wait until I had a full-time job and some comfortable savings. However, even if I were already full-time employed at the time and wouldn’t donate at all for the next 4 years, I’d only have to donate ~11%[2] for the rest of my career to compensate for the lack of donations over my lifetime. As someone having a ~median income in a high-income country, I believe that 11% is very doable. In fact (hot take!) I believe that 15-20% should be the norm for people in my situation.  * 10% is not as much as you might think. I think for me, there was a strong anchoring effect here - in my city, most people I know donate something like 30-50€ a month, so 10% (100+ €/month at the time I learned about the pledge) felt like a huge step. Instead of pledging, I decided to just donate what I could “easily miss”. This included instances in which I surprisingly saved money, birthday and Christmas gifts and occasionally deliberate decisions to not purchase “luxuries”. Tracking all of these was a bit tedious, but it showed me how I could easily donate more than 10%, by reframing my donations around what I could genuinely “easily” give away, instead of seeing it in relation to what other people give. * Nowadays I'd recommend people to take the trial pledge, but doing so at 10% for say 6-12 months. My