All of angelinahli's Comments + Replies

I realize belatedly my original post sounds like its talking in terms of absolute advantages still :) But having a general sense of the 'ratios' between the different skillsets the median young EA possesses would be useful for comparative purposes I think. Maybe presenting that information in terms of ratios rather than absolute figures can also help ward against the anxieties of being part of (at least what I perceive to be) such a highly talented community. This might be easiest to do with things like SAT scores, where you have actual numbers to work with. But if this is a bad/incorrect way to think about comparative advantages I'd appreciate the correction.

Come to think of it, this sounds less feasible but some sort of comparative advantage calculator (intending to do exactly what you describe in your edit but compared against the average EA) sounds like it could be useful, if difficult to achieve.

Will: Has 80k or someone else considered writing up a profile of the typical EA in the scenario you note (early career, willing to choose just about any career option if it maximizes good) to give people a better understanding of what standard we should be comparing ourselves to when assessing our comparative advantage? I can see this being particularly useful for people with many good options who don't know where to go. From what I see, most people I've talked to seem to be relying on informal conversations and intuitions about their peers that might easi... (read more)

0
angelinahli
8y
I realize belatedly my original post sounds like its talking in terms of absolute advantages still :) But having a general sense of the 'ratios' between the different skillsets the median young EA possesses would be useful for comparative purposes I think. Maybe presenting that information in terms of ratios rather than absolute figures can also help ward against the anxieties of being part of (at least what I perceive to be) such a highly talented community. This might be easiest to do with things like SAT scores, where you have actual numbers to work with. But if this is a bad/incorrect way to think about comparative advantages I'd appreciate the correction.
2
angelinahli
8y
Come to think of it, this sounds less feasible but some sort of comparative advantage calculator (intending to do exactly what you describe in your edit but compared against the average EA) sounds like it could be useful, if difficult to achieve.

I just received an email from the AMF that made me really happy: that by donating more than half of my research stipend this summer to various EA charities, I've moved 312 insecticidal nets to serve around 562 people. Somehow it feels more real to actually know the numbers :) I've also been writing more about EA things - I wrote an article about this summer online, which seemed to be pretty well received around my social circles. Hopefully I inspired some people to think more about their own donations.

1
Gleb_T
8y
Yeah, it's nice to feel the specific quantitative impact of one's donations!

That seems like a good idea! I'll keep the posts on this forum here for posterity but I'll move everything to facebook in a bit / post on .impact. Thanks for pointing me to those resources!

0
Gleb_T
8y
You're welcome!

Hmm, okay. I appreciate your thoughts - thank you very much for sharing them. I really appreciate it. I'd vastly prefer if other people also weighed in on this because I don't have any formal expertise on any of these issues, just saw an opportunity to help and took it. I also want to stress that I don't own the page and you should feel free to jump in and make changes you feel strongly about - that's the whole point of decentralized control. That being said, some thoughts:

One risk is that of increasing resource proliferation, i.e. that by adding more we

... (read more)
0
Markus Amalthea Magnuson
8y
I think the second best option is to put this on its own website, something like ealibrary.org or such. Then we would have complete freedom in modifying all parts (design, structure, meta data and similar for search engines, social link integration, etc. etc.) and it's more focused, easier to remember/point to/etc. I did something similar with http://whatistranshumanism.org/ that is entirely based on the existing transhumanist FAQ that I felt was pure gold content-wise, but hidden deep within the H+ website, poorly laid out, not working at all on mobile, and many other things. This website is now the third result on Google when searching "what is transhumanism". The website is hosted on GitHub meaning anyone with an account can suggest edits through pull requests, or make them directly if they have write access. Although decentralization can be a useful principle, I've found that having some sort of smaller group of editors makes vetting, structuring, and publishing a smoother process and yields a higher quality end result. Anyone is still free and encouraged to provide materials, of course. Considering your point of view regarding difficulty-then-topic versus topic-then-difficulty, I think you are right and that your suggested structure is the better one. Topic is probably a more natural way of digging in for visitors of any level. As long as difficulty is clearly communicated (words, color coding, etc.) it will be fairly easy to navigate in the sense at the same time. Maybe we could make an inventory of existing reading lists that could possibly be considered succeeded by this new one, and once up and running that the maintainers of these can be contacted about the possibility of being merged/redirected to the new website. (Obviously some existing ones should not follow this path and will instead be linked to from this website.) In other words, an inventory of potential "mergers" versus "co-existers". These are some of my thoughts on your questions, looking f

Excellent suggestion! I'll tinker with that idea on the wikia page. I'll also put the SHIC reading list onto my list of links to add.

Awesome - The EA wiki library looks like the best way to do this idea, so I'll start to work on that over the next few weeks.

Hi - this sounds like something the forthcoming Oxford Institute for EA might find worth taking up.

It sounds like a good idea, although I have a few concerns:

-increasing dialogue between the EA community and academic philosophers

I think there could potentially be greater benefits from EAs publishing their ideas in other journals that have wider readerships. I'd be surprised if publishability was a serious bottleneck for EA researchers right now; as far as I can tell many EAs have already been able to publish their articles elsewhere.

Perhaps if there a... (read more)

0
RandomEA
8y
1. I think the barrier to greater publication is that there are many EAs outside the academy with publishable articles who just feel like an academic journal would be the wrong place for their article. If there was a journal dedicated specifically to effective altruism and read by many in the movement, there would probably be more EAs submitting articles. 2. I would agree that most EAs currently learn about EA ideas in places other than journal articles, and I actually want that to continue even if a journal is started. However, I would imagine that many more people would read academic journal articles about EA if we have a single journal than in the current situation where EA articles are in many different journals. 3. It would probably be a good idea to make it free to submit and free to read, but that does require an EA organization to pay for the costs. 4. There does seem to be a tradeoff here: the more acceptable the journal is to the EA community, the less acceptable it will be to the academic community. For example, allowing the majority of the articles in the journal to be from nonacademics, allowing some reviewers to be nonacademics, and having an EA organization host the journal are steps that would make it more acceptable to EAs and less acceptable to academics.

I wasn't aware of the EA wiki library before but that seems like a good idea and I'll go do that. Thank you for suggesting it! If it becomes a comprehensive / worthy enough resource one way to make it more publicly known might be to post it as a stickied note on the facebook group / add it to this forum's other resources page. I'll look into SEO ideas also (since its a wikia page I'm sure other people will join.)

I haven't used stack exchanges much, but I'm curious to see how helpful they are. What do you envision the stack exchange being used for? My conce... (read more)

That's very kind of you - would you mind if I drew on this document for some of the links? I wasn't aware of EA Hub's library before but just stumbled across it, and it looks like the perfect platform to do this kind of thing in. I'll work on it when I have time over the next month or so - please feel free to contribute also! http://wiki.effectivealtruismhub.com/index.php?title=Library

0
othercenterism
8y
I don't mind at all about using material from the quote compilation document, if that's what you're referring to. The EA Wiki is quite large and confusing for me, so I hope that can work out. Another thing to draw ideas from could be something called the "List of Positive EA Media and Press", which sadly became inactive early on.

Got it, thank you! I'll add it to a list of things to add.

Thanks for the links! I wasn't aware the EAHub wikia library existed (http://wiki.effectivealtruismhub.com/index.php?title=Library) but it looks like what I'm thinking of should go here. I'll get to work collating links soon.