All of abiolvera's Comments + Replies
Why the recommendation against having an organization email address? There seem to be some strong downsides to board members using personal email addresses for board matters: member's entire personal inboxes are vulnerable to search if any litigation against org happens; when members depart, it's difficult to ensure org-related emails are archived for record-keeping, particularly relating to org decisions; similarly, it's difficult to ensure org-related emails are deleted, to lessen the risk of leaks in the event of an email hack (since the email address won't be deactivated like a org-email would).
There already seems to be a strong publicly available database: GCR’s. We actually synced our publicly-available AI policies ideas to their database while working on this, strengthening GCR’s public database even more. This specific database allows for sharing of ideas that aren’t ready for prime-time, and that wouldn’t have been shared had they been meant for public dissemination. For example, this might be ideas that people are investigating or would like for folks to investigate, but no public report exists. I reviewed a lot of Google Docs that were previously not shared with a large groups of people. This expands access to that niche.
Based on my own experience of writing a book on college scholarship strategies for low-income students, I think you could write a < 200-page book fairly quickly, perhaps in <2 hours a day for 40-60 days, especially since you already have a lot of writing material to pull from. (I wrote my 120-page book in a month by writing 1200 words every single weekday, about 1.5 hours of writing daily.) I used an accountability program led by a self-help author. One trick to quicken the process is to take a week to create a REALLY detailed table of contents so th...
- For people who are struggling to switch over to policy from non-policy careers, the Foreign Service seems more accessible and provides a wider-range of exposure to EA issues than other entry or mid level policy options. For people already with established policy careers and a clear Theory of Impact, the Foreign Service might be a bit too open-ended (since you don't get to select for your first two assignments). For people considering alternatives that are not directly related to government work (like ops for EA orgs, GPR, field-building), I'd still recomme
There are definitely institutional pressures to focus on short-term considerations, especially for those offices that play bigger roles in quickly-evolving bilateral and multilateral issues. The more technical offices (also called functional bureaus) that have subject matter experts working on longer term strategic issues, and being called on to review the quicker/shorter-term considerations. These tend to have a higher number of Civil Service employees who are in the office for decades (unlike Foreign Service who are in a specific position for 1-3 years),...
This is a great note. Science and tech diplomacy is finally getting a lot more funding and strategic priority. State just created a bureau entirely devoted to Cyber. The opportunities for science diplomacy are probably the highest they've been in a long time.
This is a great point - diplomats are often reminded (even as early as onboarding) that we must be willing to implement policies we don’t agree with. This point perhaps didn’t come to mind when drafting because this scenario can be avoided by selecting diplomatic assignments where you agree with the mission. This is also probably easier for diplomats (like me) who are in the Economic career track. The offices/countries where I’ve worked, we’ve pursued long-term sustainable economic growth, energy resilience, earthquake preparedness, science/tech/health coo...
Thanks for the feedback. I actually would like the article to be considered by non-US citizens to consider joining their own Foreign Service. I was deciding between making the article more generalizable vs U.S. centric. I made the title more U.S. centric for efficiency/sorting purposes but have added a paragraph of my estimate for other countries' diplomacy careers at the very top. Overall, I think the scale of staffing size makes smaller countries' diplomatic careers competitive, despite the varying geopolitical influence of other countries.
Super glad you wrote this up! The over-representation of young people in EA might in some ways be due to more university outreach and early career resources. Overall, reaching out to mid-career professionals would require different methods - more articles like what you've written here.
The EA strategy of private donation would sell well to Republicans: both to minimize suffering due to poverty as well as mitigate poverty's destabilizing effects in regions critical to US interests. Some of the Republicans I've debated about poverty pointed to the role of the private citizen, churches, and NGOs to do that, not the government.
EA also lends itself to a Republican emphasis on national security, particularly nuclear strategy and short term artificial intelligence cyber warfare strategies.
The humanist/atheist, tech world, and Cali overrepresentation is probably the biggest reason EA is low on Republicans.
I agree that this has the potential to be highly impactful and it's definitely neglected. The fact that it can piggy-back on increasing exposure to non-EAs about EA topics makes this more persuasive, even if it the number of people helped might be small.
My only question would be whether that spare volunteer capacity could/would be used to persuade/train/target people within the DMV - since they are in a position to greatly increase the number of people who sign up by spending only an extra 2-3 seconds nudging people toward a yes, since it's a sta...
I'm curious why mass media campaigns would be the recommended action given that meta-analysis of mass media campaigns don't seem indicate a reduction in sedentary behavior nor achievement of recommended physical activity levels, (though they do promote some increase in walking.) Lobbying to invest in the built environment seems cheaper and also more effective in the long run. Organizations like Strong Towns, Bloomberg City Labs, various walking and biking safety groups advocate/lobby for walkable neighborhood changes that are very affordable, if not ... (read more)