This link should now be fixed!

This is an interesting and thoughtful post. 

One query: to me, the choice to label GHD as "reliable human capacity growth" conflicts with the idea you state of GHD sticking to more common-sense/empirically-grounded ideas of doing good. 

Isn't the capacity growth argument presuming a belief in the importance of long-run effects/longtermism? A common-sense view on this to me feels closer to a time discounting argument (the future is too uncertain so we help people as best we can within a timeframe that we can have some reasonable level of confidence that we affect).

For sure! Though my rough take would this would add up to maybe $60-70k all in? (perhaps I'm undershooting average salary estimates based on UK numbers)

$110,000 for a single community builder in Boston seems awfully high? 

I'm guessing this is meant to include budget for event delivery on so on, but I think it would be worth being explicit in that given the perception at times of very liberal spending within community-building and that this is cited as an example of a marginal donation to CEA.

I definitely agree with and share the concerns over government adoption as a silver bullet of sorts on the charity's side. Outsourcing all the costs when the government's money and resources are more counterfactually precious than the charity's is not the way we want things to go!

Our aim is closer to your last sentence: government adoption to leverage the cost-savings from delivery through their existing systems of training/data collection/material distribution, with MHI continuing to pay for the costs involved that the government wouldn't incur anyway.

[disclosure: I work for a family planning organisation (MHI), these views are my own].

It’s eminently reasonable to hold philosophical views that call into the question the work of an organisation such as FEM.

I worry though that it’s somewhat against the spirit of EA and worldview diversity to suggest that donations to other charities may be more appropriate based on views that are not consistently shared across the community?

Is there not the risk of a double-standard here given people with person-affecting views may view donations to a good number of longtermist projects as a harmful misallocation of resources by prioritising future lives over present ones?

I'd love to see this as a short post of its own at some point, such a great explanation!

Changed!

Cheers for this! Think I’d skimmed the top of that thread and missed the last reply you highlighted.

Looks a little clunky but worth adding.

Thanks!

And yes, I completely agree that a voting system would be a nice addition. To the best of my knowledge and research, I couldn’t find any way of doing this through Airtable.

Would happily add this though if someone can tell me how.

Thanks for flagging this. It does seem from this that I've oversold the potential value quite significantly! I'll add a note to the section to flag this comment and that this doesn't appear to be as helpful as hoped.

I've worked on this full-time thanks to the grant, so sadly not much in the way of helpful tips. 

The only rough point I can offer here is that I took the job as a waiter last summer (2021) quite intentionally. This allowed me to work 30-35 hours over 3 days, enough to cover my living costs and leave me 4 days free. One of these days was always lost to full slug-mode tiredness/ recovery, but then I'd have 3 days clear - of which 2 I'd try to treat as fairly full-time idea/ pitch development time. 

I think this was a pretty effective method in helpi... (read more)

This makes sense and seems pretty plausible. Can speak to personal experience of the intensity of the sun in Australia!

Appreciate these thoughts. We're planning a more tailored model for our upcoming procrastination report (find the category that seems to best fit the cause of your procrastination and then skip to the solutions that fit best with that category) - might be a little more along the lines of what you're suggesting here.

(also a general thank you for leaving detailed feedback on things like this - genuinely very helpful)

Thanks for this! We do have a contact form on our website (https://effectiveselfhelp.org/contact) but I don't think I highlighted that here or that it's necessarily that obvious. Think I'll start emphasising that though instead of an email link so thanks for the prompt :)

Sorry to have to cancel this but I've come down quite ill this weekend and won't be able to present this workshop today. Thanks for your interest and we hope to reschedule this soon! Ben

This is the idea of what I'm writing up! 

I think I could have made this clearer in the short description above but I'm trying to synthesise all the recommendations that currently exist into a database (see rough Google sheet here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1InTlwLwAKprqFeD65oF0XXz64lZTHuhBxzHDt8fqzNM/edit?usp=sharing)

It seemed worth giving people a new opportunity to share any new/ further recommendations but the idea is to include everything suggested in all past posts on the same topic on the EA Forum, LessWrong, etc.

Thanks for everyone's suggestions!

Cheers! Really enjoyed chatting and hopefully see you in London!

Nice! Great to have additional perspective on something like this. I think your reasons make a lot of sense, which is all very encouraging in terms of people successfully organising lots of 1:1s.

Really impressive work! I think the idea that protest movements could be very high-impact is pretty convincing. It's a lot of ground to cover to try and find more concrete answers to how much impact movements have and how this can be maximised but I think this report makes good progress towards that. 

More generally, great to see in-depth research on plausibly impactful topics that we've not looked at much as a community. 

Edited! And thanks, most of these I haven't listened to but I can personally recommend
'Clearer paths and sharper ideas' (Spencer Greenberg) and 'Creatures of Habit' (Making Sense with Sam Harris), as well as the 80k, Ezra Klein show, The Tim Ferriss Show, and Planet Money more generally.

Thanks! I haven't come across anything specific to work addiction I'm afraid. Just had a quick search though and this looks relevant and likely a high quality discussion: https://hbr.org/podcast/2018/04/you-may-be-a-workaholic-if 

Also personally found the LessWrong articles about taking a Sabbath very useful as motivation to protect time for rest and recovery.

This sounds like an exciting and very high-potential project! I'd be curious if you've thought about the potential for impact through directing new people to EA (in terms of work as well as donations). 

It seems plausible that people might discover EA organisations, and ultimately the community as a whole, through the effective charities listed and the background info of the app. Expanding the community in this way might further increase the overall impact and also make it valuable if funding remains a relatively low constraint in the community. 

Hi Misha, I'd say a quick breathing exercise and PMR might be particularly helpful, especially as you can pretty much do them at any time/ location. Otherwise, it's maybe worth experimenting with things you particularly enjoy as a way of quickly relaxing 
- e.g. personally, I find it surprisingly effective to spend even just 5 minutes strumming on my ukulele if I'm feeling quite highly stressed

Thank you! Feel free to reach out about getting involved at any point when you have more capacity. These are some great points that I've mostly started working on but there's (always) a lot more to do. 

I have many more people I want to reach out to about the project and certainly I'm now working on building a wider community/ collaboration team for moving forward. And absolutely, I want each review to be a living document and for the recommendations to be consistently improved and updated over time. I think I'll add a note on the stress and sleep articles to reflect that.

That's a great point! I definitely intend to review what evidence is available for the size of individual differences in benefit from a given intervention. As you point out, if there are ways of accounting for this in how to select/ prioritise interventions, that could be particularly useful. 

Thanks!

There's definitely room for improvement with the rigour of the research analysis. I've discussed some of these areas in my reply to David Moss so I won't repeat it all but to note a few quick things:

- There's a lot more time that could be spent collating and reviewing evidence here but I'd expect that the effect sizes and recommendations would not change drastically. I definitely hope to come back and improve this article in future; as this is an early stage project I have no doubt there are improvements to be made.
- I have combined different measures of i... (read more)

Plant/ green space exposure definitely has a significant effect on its own, possibly in part through the smell given off.

I appreciate the detailed notes/ feedback on the research process. I think the points you make are very reasonable and definitely helpful.

I expect that I will come back to this stress article, and the sleep one before that, to improve the quality of recommendations through a better research process. I can see a number of ways to do that including points that you bring up.
 - I'd like the evidence tables to cover 90+% of interventions that appear valuable from the outside/ have been suggested elsewhere, which I agree is not a bar I think this article re... (read more)

I appreciate these thoughts, good suggestions and I agree on both counts. Running a survey like that hadn't come to mind but is definitely something I'll do now (even just a basic initial version like asking it as a question post here on the Forum)

I appreciate the detailed write-up but felt that this lacked a fair attempt to present the strongest arguments in favour of degrowth and then critique them (steelmanning). 

It's been a few years since I studied degrowth in my undergrad degree so my understanding may be weak/ rusty/ simply wrong. All the same, my impression is that a pro-growth attitude is the majority opinion in EA which makes a fair presentation of the alternative argument particularly important as many readers may be predisposed to agree with you. 

I'm not an advocate for degrowt... (read more)

This is great! I appreciate the detailed response and the friendly but valuable critique. As much as anything, I wanted to start a conversation around how a project like this may work best and these are some really useful points.

I think you're right that there are competing goals in what I've laid out and also that a project reporting from an EA lens on general topics might be more impactful in the long term than one focused on reporting on EA topics.

I can see how it could come across like that. No particular attachment to The Altruist as a name - I'm sure there are likely better options with a bit more thought/ crowdsourced feedback!

That's a fair point that the pitch is likely overly inward-looking. Perhaps weighting the reasons in favour of creating something like this may have been clearer (or ordering them by importance) but I view increasing community growth and improving outreach resources as most (say 80%) of the value from an EA newspaper.

Looking at particularly popular previous topics for EA coverage and diving deeper into Future Perfect as a case study are both great suggestions for developing this. I'll defend the B-tier interviews though. If something doesn't yet exist, it'... (read more)

For the example, I'd lean on the side of reporting the embezzling though I think it would obviously depend on the specifics of the case. I think the risks and consequences of a perception that the community works to bury bad news like that are high and likely outweigh the costs of reporting.

Thanks! I can see that there's potential for cross-purposes between improving the community and supporting good critique. Ideally, something like The Altruist would be a place for both on the basis that good critique builds a healthier community and highlights EA as a place of open discussion.

The studies used for all our figures can be found in the evidence table. These are average effect sizes across the studies found that were relevant. In the case of diaphragmatic breathing, this is an average in effect size vs. control between the results of Ma et al. (2017) and Perciavalle et al. (2016). I hope that clarifies it a bit!

I appreciate how this straddles both "frontpage" and "personal blog". I'll be publishing a case for the value of the project as a cost-effective mental health intervention later this week, which may help better demonstrate this as a 'problem area' somewhat separate from more general life advice.

Happy to defer to collective opinion though on the best placement of the content.

Thanks! Re:

1. Yes, almost certainly given the high time investment for CBT and Sudarshan Kriya Yoga.
2. I'd expect that a short breathing exercise could be pretty valuable at the start of meetings for helping people to settle in and boosting attention. More anecdotally, I think practices like this can serve as a useful anchor, helping people reset their focus and creating a separation from what they were previously doing.  
   
   It seems plausible to me that a few minutes of breathwork at the start of an hour meeting could be cost-effective time-wise but I would h

Thank you! I'm thinking now that I may try to launch a trial version of this next month!

It could start small for sure! A cheap, maybe solo trial version would make good sense. I think the larger concept of the project benefits from scale though, to add credibility for interviewing people and a size of readership/ projection that could usefully compete for attention with current news sources on EA topics.

Project Proposal - The Altruist

Rough notes on an idea for a potentially large, high-impact project: launching an EA-focused, online long-form newspaper

"News, articles, and interviews on doing the most good"

What?

Concept: a news agency providing journalistic coverage of EA topics and organisations. 

• Via a website and possibly with a monthly/ quarterly digital newspaper distributed by email.
• Provisionally titled 'The Altruist'
• This would mirror the kinds of articles produced say by Vox's Future Perfect team (e.g. https://www.vox.com/future-perfe

EA groups should focus more on demonstrating value to new students

Aritcle idea posted here so I might be more likely to write it up properly in future. In the spirit of the best being the enemy of the good.

My relatively uninformed opinions on why some uni groups might be struggling to grow, or not growing as large/ fast as they could be...

1. I think the current standard uni group programs can be off-putting to a significant proportion of potential participants

• Intro fellowships and book clubs require work/ commitment on the part of the participant (application