I moderate the Forum, and I'd be happy to review your next post.
I'm a full-time content writer at CEA. I started Yale's student EA group, and I've also volunteered for CFAR and MIRI. I spend a few hours a month advising a small, un-Googleable private foundation that makes EA-adjacent donations. I also play Magic: the Gathering on a semi-professional level and donate half my winnings (more than $50k in 2020) to charity.
Before joining CEA, I was a tutor, a freelance writer, a tech support agent, and a music journalist. I blog, and keep a public list of my donations, at aarongertler.net.
Posts
Comments
Aside from the online course in Progress Studies, what are some of the best resources you could share with a high school or college student if you want them to be interested in progress?
Traditional high school/college curriculums often introduce ideas that seem likely to make people less excited about progress (e.g. degrowth as a moral imperative, population growth as net-negative, discussions of technology risk without corresponding discussions of technology's benefits). I'm interested in resources that could provide a counterpoint to this.
H3 headers should be available again soon; the feature broke after a recent migration.
Congratulations to Sam Bankman-Fried, a longtime member of the EA community and GWWC member who was just named to Forbes' 30 Under 30 list (in the "finance" category).
Good to know, thanks!
This was interesting!
I do think that the forecasters seem to have been starting from a bad base rate (rather than using "sympathetic lies"). Relatively few posts about original topics (rather than e.g. org updates) hit 50 karma, and comments do so even less often. But the posts and comments we are most likely to read are unusually likely to be the high-karma ones; I wouldn't be surprised if people tend to overestimate their frequency.
I'm grateful to everyone who's ever written to me to report a bug, unexpected behavior, or suggestion related to the Forum. One of my favorite things about this community is that it's full of people who don't just want to help in big ways, but are also helpful in small ways.
Whenever I see someone accuse the community of being a giant virtue-signaling exercise, I think about the people who take time out of their days to send me detailed Intercom messages.
Tell me more!
I'm thinking about preparing more tutorial resources myself, and it would be nice to piggyback off of another person's work. Were Guy's resources in English? If so, could you share them with me?
It's difficult to raise money through streaming unless you already have a popular stream. I ran a charity stream for an audience of a few hundred people for three hours and raised roughly $150, and I may be the most popular video game streamer in the community (though other people with big audiences from elsewhere could probably create bigger streams than mine without much effort).
If anyone reading this is in contact with major streamers, it might be worth reaching out, but that can easily go wrong if the streamer has a charity they already feel committed to (so be cautious).
What has been most surprising to you about running an online course for high school students?
Related: If someone were creating a course about effective altruism aimed at high school students, what advice would you have for them? So far, attempts to teach EA concepts to this audience haven't been very successful, but people are still interested in trying new methods.