This reminds me of a post describing firsthand accounts of what starvation actually feels like, or the process of being swallowed whole that makes up a large portion of wild fish deaths. Such posts are horrific, but very important in understanding why we do what we do. They can be very motivating. Thank you for writing, I am a big fan of your work in general.Â
This is so exciting to see! I've been facilitating for EA Virtual Programs for years, and have anecdotally seen a significant uptick in participants from the African continent in the last year+. I'm very excited to see the growth of EA values & community in new regions. Thank you for writing this retrospective! (also, 11 valuable new connections per participant seems quite good, I think? So well done on that!)
As a developer of fellowships and courses in EA, this is something I constantly consider as a failure mode-- building something that's interesting, and delights impressive participants, but doesn't have a strong ToC that actually makes the world lower suffering in expectation. Thanks for making this post, it's a really important consideration that might be given too little credence much of the time!
This was an extremely interesting post to me, and I hope it gets more comments, partly because I'm interested and partly because of the topic at hand. đ I think I probably originally found out about EA through GHD, and this all seems very important. I wonder if a GHD fellowship could help. Also, a group I'm part of called Effective Mental Health runs a Global Mental Health fellowship and runs some other programming in the space, and if you have any thoughts of how we could encourage EA Forum engagement through these, please do reach out or post here. We'd love to help build engagement, it seems very important and I don't know if anyone is taking it upon themself.Â