I think sharing links for these are surely worth! I heard that during peak Covid, there was an online EA New Year's Eve Party on Gathertown with people literally dancing in the rooms - I haven't attended, but it sounds pretty wholesome:)

Thanks for checking! I believe no, people tend to book way more 1-1s at offline conferences.

The "areas of expertise" and, to a lesser extent, the "areas of interest" features seem off on Swapcard. Many people put 5+ areas as their expertise. This is not only unlikely, but dilutes the filtering feature. Some people also don't put in anything (I think?), which means they will be left out of my search, even if they would be relevant to talk to.

Suggested improvement: make it compulsory to add at least one area of expertise, but cap it at 3, so people don't just put in everything.

Praise for Sentient Futures

By now, I have had the chance to meet most staff at Sentient Futures, and I think they really capture the best that EA has to offer, both in terms of their organisational goals and culture. 

They are kind, compassionate, impartial, frugal - the things that I feel like the movement compromised on in the past years in pursuit of trying to save us from AI.

I really hope this kind of culture becomes more prominent in the 4th wave of EA^[1], with similar organisations popping up in the coming months and years.

PS.: I have friends at the org, so this obviously makes me biased:)

1. ^{^}

   3rd wave described here in Ben West's post. If you go with this one, then what I'm describing would be the 5th wave.

• Short-form vertical video (TikTok, Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts)
• Short-form text a.k.a. microblogging (Twitter, Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads)

Then I think it’s not true. I think investing in those mediums would just be good money chasing after bad.

I think this largely depends on your goal of creating this kind of content. If you are just blasting them to the ether, that's likely not useful, but such videos can serve as a "hook" for people to then go on and engage with long-form content or even to take an intro course about EA.

Great post, strongly agree. Here are 3 posts I share with people who are in a similar position to what you describe, but yours will be the 4th one from now on!

How Unofficial Work Gets You Hired: Building Your Surface Area for Serendipity
There is No EA Sorting Hat
Why experienced professionals fail to land high-impact roles (FBB #5)
 

I second the point about the EA Hotel, its a great place to get work done if you don't have a financial runway! (Though people should pay for at least part of their stay unless they absoluately can't)

Great post! Just FYI the link here is not publicly accessible:

Constance Li has put together a longer list of orgs 

Yes, but there is still overlap in their work! It makes sense for orgs to find their nieche, but my stronger claim is that even if they didn't, it would still be good to have double the amount of fieldbuilding orgs, assuming they are doing good work.^[1]

 (I think people who think this is wrong have the intuition of fieldbuilding being a zero-sum game, while in reality, we have a large amount of untapped talent, and orgs just don't know how to reach them.)

1. ^{^}

   This is dependent on funding availability, though - the background assumption here is that funders (OP) can't give away money fast enough for some kind of fieldbuilding work (such as MATS)
   
   If MATS was struggling for money, I would rather have them get the marginal dollar than another org that is doing something very similar but at an earlier stage. (but you could argue against this. One might want to invest into something speculative if they think it has the potential to outperform MATS on the long run)

That said, I'd be wary duplicating existing programs; ie. the AI Safety Fellowship becoming a knock-off MATS.

This theme comes up a lot in AI Safety, and I really don't think the reasoning is sound behind it. (See my post on a related topic).

Imagine you could snap your finger and create another organisation like MATS. Wouldn't you want that, conditional on the org doing things just as well (or eventually becoming one that does things just as well)?

MATS is well-funded (having received a grant of over $30M recently, I believe), so it's not as if they can magically absorb the money that could go to startup fieldbuilding projects. (Not to mention that smaller projects tend to be more cost-effective as long as they are good).

Imagine we lived in a world where 80k is still the only organisation doing career support. 

Now we have HIP, Successif, Probably Good etc. These orgs are a blessing for the field, and if we could have twice as many of them, that would be great.

An addition point by them:
"The way I see it, the funders should be rejecting (or suggesting adaptations) to funding applications that don't have enough in there for marketing and comms."