All of DavidJanku's Comments + Replies

Effective Thesis is looking for funding. I believe the downside risk is very small and we could likely find a way to ensure U.S. tax deductibility. Since this is small meta project, it's not that easy to find institutional support and individual donations might thus have quite large impact on continuation of this project.

Thanks, David! My intuition a bit different - most people I talked to about how got they got into EA mentioned multiple factors, so I was curious whether there would be general patterns/strong clusters of e.g. "offline EA (e.g. local groups + personal contact)" vs "Online EA" or clusters based on type of activity/contribution, e.g. "donation cluster (Givewell + GWWC + TLYCS + ACE)" vs "direct work cluster (80K + EA global)" vs "producing/reading research (books/articles + SSC + LW)". I see it doesn't s... (read more)

2
David_Moss
5y
Thanks David. I agree the online vs offline idea is pretty intuitive. Arguably you can vaguely see some signs of this in the data, but not to a great extent. As the membership post shows, there's quite a lot of overlap between online (EA Facebook) and offline (Local Group): Yes, this is what the analysis in the previous comment aims to do. And yes, you are correct that controlling for time in EA is very difficult because of the very small numbers in the earlier years of EA, hence in the analysis above we just display results splitting by those joining before/after 2016.

Hi David,

have you tried cluster analysis on the question "Which factors were important in ‘getting you into’ effective altruism, or altering your actions in its direction?"? Since it is multi-select, if most people actually selected more options, information about whether there are some patterns/clusters of factors that are important for people to feel they "got into" EA seems to me like it might be more informative than simple ranking of each factor's frequencies independently.

This might be valuable to try for both, the whole sample as well as specifically for more engaged subgroups as Ben suggested.

Hi David,

We briefly looked into this and there was basically no interesting relation between “getting into” EA via the different factors. This isn’t particularly surprising to me, since a priori, for most of these factors, I wouldn’t expect getting more involved in EA via one factor to make you more likely to get involved in EA via a different factor relative to the other factors. For example, if you get more involved in EA via 80,000 Hours, should this make you more likely to get involved with local groups or online EA than if you got involved via GWWC? O

... (read more)

The update is on, in the section Promotion of the project.

Thanks for clarification! I think I have promoted it that way in the early stages, but I have deprioritised the direct impact that theses may create in the past year. The reason is that the value of long-term goals like influencing someone's (research) career focus or building skills/learning more about the issue in order to become better able to work on it afterwards seems much higher than direct impact produced by theses. Also, many organisations don't seem ready to take this kind of help from students and the process of soliciting the results ... (read more)

What do you specifically? The Effective Thesis is focused on helping students with their final thesis projects, there were just a few cases when we helped students with their module thesis or something smaller than capstone project, but I usually deprioritise these cases in favour of final capstone projects.

1
badbadnotgood
5y
I was thinking of a capstone projects that were around equivalent to a thesis
I'd have thought that nearly all the students would mostly benefit from "general advice on research direction", since specialized EA knowledge is something Effective Thesis has that professors and career offices don't.

That would be my guess as well. Maybe the average advice they would get would not be that good or they would get as good advice anyway from professors and career offices but they got it first from the Effective Thesis and therefore attributed the value to Effective Thesis. However, when trying to estimate the overall cou... (read more)

Most students haven't finished their projects yet, but I will make another post about long-term changes in students and the impact of their theses after I make impact interview with those who are finishing their theses now (so the post will come out probably during the summer). What specifically do you mean by "being used"? Is it being published in a journal, having reference from some current researchers that it helped them in some way / showed them something new or something else?

1
Kirsten
5y
Being referenced by a current researcher, policymaker, charity or organisation. I thought the point of Effective Thesis was for students to write something that would actually be used by someone.

Thanks for your comment!

Choosing a topic which gives you the best opportunity for learning could mean, for example, thinking about which people in your department you can learn the most from (whether because the best researchers, or because they are likely to be the most conscientious supervisors), and what topic is of interest to them so that they'll be enthusiastic to work with you on it.

I agree. This is one of the inefficiencies of the "list of predefined topics" concept we would like to improve by shifting to Thesis Topic Coaching. The pl... (read more)

Thanks for the comment!

So a good strategy might be something like: Identify topics in your field of study (that you find personally interesting, that are currently hot research areas, that your advisor is interested in, etc.), and identify EA topics that you think are important/interesting, then create a 2d grid where you examine intersections of topics in your field/EA topics and see which are fertile.

That's what we plan to do, with the fact that the grid work will be done by our coaches, who we believe have a comparative advantage in doing this since they have a better overview of EA research landscape and can assess better what students' opportunities are.

That´s exactly what we would appreciate in our Czech EA Chapter! I´ve tried to message you at the provided email address, but it came back undelivered saying "the group you tried to contact (effective-altruism) may not exist, or you may not have permission to post messages to the group". Would you please reply me at david.janku@efektivni-altruismus.cz?

0
mackgrenfell
6y
Thanks David! I believe I've fixed the error now, in case anyone else is experiencing this. I'll email you shortly David :)