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All of georgie_mallett's Comments + Replies

.impact updates 3 of 3: Impact Missions, peer-to-peer fundraisers, matching donations
georgie_mallett7y0
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We don't plan on doing any mass media. I can see how the bit you quoted might be related to mass media, but hopefully the rest of the post clarifies that our focus will be on resources for LEAN, since our LEAN survey showed significant demand for this.

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.impact updates 3 of 3: Impact Missions, peer-to-peer fundraisers, matching donations
georgie_mallett7y1
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Ah sorry Bernadette I misunderstood your first question!

I think 'pin down an explanation' was probably too strong on my part, because I definitely don't think it'd be conclusive and I do hope that we have some more qualitative research into this.

We do have professionals working on the survey this year (is that what you meant by professional involvement?) and I've sent your comment to them. They're far better placed to analyze this than me!

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Bernadette_Young
7y
Thanks Georgie - I see where we were misunderstanding each other! That's great - research like this is quite hard to get right, and I think it's an excellent plan to have people with experience and knowledge about the design and execution as well as analysis involved. (My background is medical research as well as clinical medicine, and a depressing amount of research - including randomised clinical trials - is never able to answer the important question because of fundamental design choices. Unfortunately knowing this fact isn't enough to avoid the pitfalls. It's great that EA is interested in data, but it's vital we generate and analyse good data well.)
.impact updates 3 of 3: Impact Missions, peer-to-peer fundraisers, matching donations
georgie_mallett7y0
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Me too! We're in the process of creating the survey now and will be distributing it in January. This is one thing we're going to address, and if you have suggestions about specific questions, we'd be interested in hearing them.

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Bernadette_Young
7y
Unless you have a specific hypothesis that you are testing, I think the survey is the wrong methodology to answer this question. If you actually want to explore the reasons why (and expect there will not be a single answer) then you need qualitative research. If you do pursue questions on this topic in a survey format, it is likely you will get misleading answers unless you have the resources to very rigorously test and refine your question methodology. Since you will essentially be asking people if they are not doing something they have said is good to do, there will be all sorts of biases as play, and it will be very difficult to write questions that function the way you expect them to. To the best of my knowledge question testing didn't happen at all with the first survey, I don't know if any happened with the second. I appreciate the survey uses a vast amount of people's resources, and is done for good reasons. I hate sounding like a doom-monger, but there are pitfalls here and significant limitations on surveys as a research method. I think the EA community risks falling into a trap on this topic, thinking dubious data is better than none, when actually false data can literally costs lives. As previously, I would strongly suggest getting professional involvement.
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EricHerboso
7y
Please include a question about race. At the Effective Animal Advocacy Symposium this past weekend at Princeton, the 2015 EA Survey was specifically called out for neglecting to ask a question about the race of the respondents.
.impact updates (1 of 3): New leadership, organizational overview and changes, LEAN
georgie_mallett8y0
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Hey Ben :)

We do support GWWC chapters and 80k chapters, any local EA groups.

The groups that we've seeded have been general EA groups, but if for some reason the group leaders wanted to focus on GWWC or 80K, that would be fine and we'd still support them.

Most of the support we offer applies to any local group. The websites we make for groups are from a standard template we made, so they're general EA sites, but we let the groups adapt them, so I suppose they could turn them into GWWC/80K specific sites if they wanted to.

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.impact updates (1 of 3): New leadership, organizational overview and changes, LEAN
georgie_mallett8y2
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Hey! Thanks for the questions :)

  1. Both .impact and CEA are completely independent, other than helping each other out in a general sense, or choosing to collaborate on particular projects where it makes sense to do so.

  2. The purpose of LEAN (Local Effective Altruism Network) - a .impact project - is to seed local EA groups and support their leaders with guidance, expertise and technical resources. The purpose of the EA Hub (eahub.org) - also a .impact project - is to have a centralized site where EAs can put up an individual or group profile, record their ac

... (read more)
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Ben Millwood
8y
How would you compare LEAN with GWWC's chapters? Do you support GWWC chapters directly?
.impact updates (1 of 3): New leadership, organizational overview and changes, LEAN
georgie_mallett8y0
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Thanks for this, I don't think we disagree all that much actually - let's chat about it in our Skype.

And for anyone else that wants to chat: calendly.com/georgiedotimpact

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.impact updates (1 of 3): New leadership, organizational overview and changes, LEAN
georgie_mallett8y2
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Thanks for the question, although I’m sad that you didn’t include my jokes... ;)

I had this in an earlier iteration of the post (I’d cut it for the sake of brevity) so I’ll just paste here with some additions:

“There will be comparatively more time spent on converting medium-sized groups into large groups: we know that most of the impact so far has come from this. [In addition, focusing on city group growth is more likely to be counterfactual than focusing on university group growth]

So why spend any time at all on making sure that groups don’t die out? Well... (read more)

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Kerry_Vaughan
8y
Thanks for this.However, I'm still a bit confused. You seem to be saying that devoting resources to smaller groups is useful for: But, presumably, all of these goals are better accomplished by spending resources on the groups with the most people since all of these benefits depend on the number of people in the groups. It could be that you think preventing groups from dying out is important for improving diversity in the community, but this could only be true if some demographics are systematically more likely to trying to start an EA group and fail. Otherwise, we would expect the demographics of chapter leaders to roughly match the demographics of EA as a whole. The reason I'm asking all of this is to try to compare models of why groups succeed and why groups fail. Presumably, our goal is to create vibrant, self-sustaining communities like those in SF, London, Boston and elsewhere. I have a lot less on-the-ground experience than you do, but I think there are roughly four phases that a group needs to go through to be effective and sustainable. 1) The group is founded by (or quickly attracts) a highly dedicated, energetic, and skilled founder. 2) The founder is able to attract a small group of highly dedicated chapter members to help found the group. 3) The group establishes tactics for regularly attracting new chapter members. 4) The founder sets up a system for passing leadership of the group onto a highly dedicated chapter member. I think the skill of the founder matters a great deal because getting people to join a chapter is much harder early on than it is later. This is because chapters are more valuable the more people are in them. We should expect that recruiting the second person is going to be much harder than recruiting the 20th person. My rough hypothesis is that we probably lack the ability to substantially improve the skills and abilities of founders and so the supply of excellent founders is probably the bottleneck on establishing sustainable gr
The Effective Altruism Newsletter & Open Thread – April 2016
georgie_mallett8y2
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Hey - I'm replying from .impact's Local Effective Altruism Network project (http://dotimpact.im/focusprojects/lean/). There isn't a guide that I know of yet, though I think it'd be a good idea to create one.

There's some non-English language websites listed on the Hub (https://eahub.org/links#non-english-languages) and some inter-group calls to look out for (https://www.facebook.com/groups/localea/events/) - you might like to suggest a call for a specific language.

We'd always encourage local groups/individuals to translate materials if they have the time a... (read more)

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.impact is recruiting for jobs and internships!
georgie_mallett8y3
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That was a test for prospective employees...

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Peter Wildeford
8y
I thought maybe it was demonstrating .impact's commitment to pursuing multiple projects.