I like the analogy of creating muscle strength, where additional weight can create more muscles in some circumstances and injuries in others. I fear, however, that people might interpret this too narrowly, only looking at short-term altruistic actions and not a longer-term goal. When thinking about change, it's easy to get focused either on too many things or changes that are less relevant, leaving little capacity for bigger changes. Peter Wildeford's template for a quarterly review + plan discusses this using the rock, pebbles, sand analogy.
For some peopl...
Commitments for Excited Altruists
I recently read the book The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership, which I stumbled upon in Ben Todd’s Personal annual review process in the section ”What I found most useful in designing this doc”. Written by management consultants whose endorsements include one by Dustin Moskovitz, it is a self-help book for leaders interested in personal growth.
While the approach has the usual downside of this genre in relying on stories instead of evidence and trying to fit messy things into neat lists, I found it...
Heroes vs. Antiheroes in EA
“Name a person that inspires you” was an Icebreaker question that recently came up in a group setting. Somebody named a person in the EA community who is showcasing a lot of altruistic qualities like working long hours in their EA-aligned job while being frugal, donating a lot, being vegan etc.. I noticed that I strongly felt resistance to this and, on reflection, saw that I admire this altruistic person a lot while not being at all inspired by them at the same time. On the contrary, I feel like a failure as I can’t imagine mysel...
I agree. A funder interested in career changes in one cause area will probably only reach a subset of potential talent if they only target people who are already interested in this cause area vs. generally capable individuals who could choose directions.
In the business context, you could imagine a recruiter having the option to buy a booth at a university specialising in the area the company is working in vs. buying one at a broad career fair of a top university. While the specialised university may bring more people that have trained in and are spec...
The time of year when people start wishing each other happy holidays can be challenging for some. At least for me, the contrast between the joyous expectation from the outside and the inner feeling of dread feels especially big and can lead to a sense of solitude. I would like to tell people in the community: “It's OK to Have Unhappy Holidays”. We’re in this together with many facing challenges like:
Thanks for sharing! My intuition would be that the behavior of your friends are net negative for the EA movement as they risk demotivating you in your work and making it seeming like EA has standards that many people don’t want to follow. It took me some years to grasp the bandwidth of attitudes and behaviors that are compatible with adhering to the shared values and this delayed my switching to direct work. In that sense I would agree with the parallel you drew from the vegan community. That being said I feel myself self-censoring more what I post online since becoming more active, as I am aware of being judged by some people in and out of the community. I’m not sure if this is a good thing.
As Effektiv Spenden is active in the field of effective donations from small-scale donors to high-networth individuals in Germany, we see our advantage mainly in helping people get into more impactful careers. For these, we broadly see the top skills and high-impact career paths 80,000 hours have identified as good guidance. We think that career impact has a heavy-tailed distribution, with most of the impact EAD will have coming from supporting a few individuals.
One important consideration is whether EAD can contribute to reducing AI x-risk. One credible w...
Thank you for writing and publishing this here, Ezra!
As I already wrote to you in another channel, first of all, I want to say that I’ve been thinking of all of you I know in the EA Israel team since the terrorist attacks and you and your family after I heard that you were called up to the army reserves. I can’t image what you have been going through. The piece at least gives a glimpse, which I found very valuable to read.
The piece reminds me of You have more than one goal, and that's fine in the sense that the acute situation of war, of fearing for ...
Concerning 2 I think from an organization’s perspective it might be even helpful to have a salary agreed with you that makes it easier to replace you and so calculate a realistic runway for the organization.Then you can still voluntarily reduce the salary and claim it as donation. This is what I’m doing and it helps with my own budgeting and with that of my org. I was inspired by this post: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/GxRcKACcJuLBEJPmE/consider-earning-less
Seeing the other replies, it seems the specific experience of running a national EA organisation is not specifically represented, although, in our (EA Germany) case, Anne Schulze is part of the community. Bigger EA organisations like ours (>100 members, supporting 27 local/uni groups, providing fiscal sponsorship/employer of record services, having a community health contact, etc.) might bring an additional perspective.
However, I see that having a representative for each sub-group would make for a big forum and that it's okay to have people who represent multiple perspectives.
After transitioning from for-profit entrepreneurship to co-leading a non-profit in the effective altruism space, I struggle to identify clear metrics to optimize for. Funding is a potential metric, but it is unreliable due to fluctuations in donors' interests. The success of individual programs, such as user engagement with free products or services, may not accurately reflect their impact compared to other potential initiatives. Furthermore, creating something impressive doesn't necessarily mean it's useful.
Lacking a solid impact evaluation model, I find myself defaulting to measuring success by hours worked, despite recognizing the diminishing returns and increased burnout risk this approach entails.
Thank you for writing this up, I’m happy to see so much going on in Poland and was impressed when I visited EAGxWarsaw and talked to active members there.
Thank you for the inspiration! I reduced my salary from now to the end of the year and will be able to contribute a mid-four-figure amount more due to saved social security costs compared to donating it. Additionally, it helps save taxes as only 20% of salary is tax-deductible in Germany.
This post was pretty impactful!
I agree that community members should feel valued. At the same time, I don't think this model changes much in that services for community members have always been discriminatory. Not everyone is accepted for 80k calls, EAG(x) conferences or retreats. While it's important to have open local groups, I think having clearer priorities on national or international services seems less exclusive.
As discussed in the impact considerations section, we continued work on a more useful model for impact estimation and just published this post about it: A BOTEC-Model for Comparing Impact Estimations in Community Building
Having gotten into an EA leadership position in my late 40s last year these statements ring true. I’m very grateful to be able to work with young and smart people but I see the same risks and downsides I faced when running my first startup in my early twenties. I learned a lot when it failed and hope to be able to use this experience in building a more resilient EA organization.
[Writing this in my personal capacity]
Thank you for publishing this! As you mentioned, I encouraged you to write this post. Still, I wouldn't recommend your company to people in the EA community, and I think giving SageWealth a stage at three EAG(x) conferences was wrong.
For the background: After meeting a team member and seeing that you were presenting at EAGx Berlin and had attended EAG career fairs, I tried to find out more about SageWealth. What I found made me concerned about values, transparency, and your targeting of members of the EA community as p...
I agree that there are diminishing returns and wouldn't see too much value in continuing at this point. The time spent on strategy (about three weeks for the two of us) was also the first time working in this new role, getting to know each other and getting to know stakeholders in the community. As we wanted to lay the basis for the next years of the organisation, this didn't seem overly long, especially as we could present the document to the board within the first month of my joining.
Thank you for the detailed feedback! I’ll quickly try to answer:
Dustin Moskovitz commented on Twitter:
Actually the Bloomberg tracker looks pretty close, though missing 3B or so of foundation assets. The Forbes one is like half the Bloomberg estimate [shrug emoji]
Thank you for this post, I find it very helpful for clarifying my thoughts when working on community building strategy.
I like the framing and would like to see more discussion around this! I've left a comment on this post that has some overlap.
Thank you for the write-up. This was very helpful in getting a better understanding of the reactions from the academic field.
Don’t start with X-risk or alignment, start with a technical problem statement such as “uncontrollability” or “interpretability” and work from there.
Karl von Wendt makes a similar point in Let’s talk about uncontrollable AI where he argues "that we talk about the risks of “uncontrollable AI” instead of AGI or superintelligence". His aim is "to raise awareness of the problem and encourage further research, in particular in Germany and...
Thank you for sharing, I think your post will resonate with many people and show them they are not alone in their struggles. I've gone through similar phases of depression, guilt, feelings of rejection and not allowing myself to seek help or complain as I'm much better off than 99% of the world. This sucks.
The Celebrating Failure at the fUnconference that Ludwig mentioned felt cathartic to me as people shared professional and personal failures. In EA we're an unusual community as we try hard and constantly fail at our expectations. This goes for people app...
Having spent two weeks in Cape Town this March and meeting Jordan there I can confirm that it’s a great city to be in and I would love to see an EA coworking space there. Thank you for taking the initiative!
I can see your concern and coming up with a new name could be nice. On the other hand, I suspect most EAs wouldn't be too concerned if we use a tool internally in a way that works for us while it's also being used by others for less useful purposes.
Interesting. I read your post while researching for this one and found it very interesting. To me, it seemed that you were describing something bigger and more encompassing than a Mastermind that seems restricted in size, topics and frequency of meetings. But there is definitely some overlap and it's one of the few posts on the forum around the deliberate groups and their setup.
Thank you for this post, I was thinking along similar lines and am grateful that you wrote this down. I would like to see the number of people grow that make decisions around career, donations and volunteering based on the central EA question regardless of whether they call themselves EA. More than a billion people live in high income countries alone and I find it conceivable that 1-10% would be open to making changes in their lives depending on the action they can take. But for EA to accommodate 10-100 million people I also assume different shopfronts in...
Why do you think a conversion rate of 5% is shockingly low? Depending on the intervention this can be a high rate in marketing. A fellowship seems like a relatively small commitment and changing the career is a relatively high ask. As we’re not emphasizing earning to give as much as before I would also expect many people to not find high impact work.
Thank you for writing this! I found it very helpful as I only saw headlines about Gato before and am not watching developments in AI closely. I liked the length and style of writing very much and would appreciate similar posts in future.
I share your worries about the effects on culture. At the same time I don't see this vision as bad:
...For many months, they will sit down many days a week and ask themselves the question "how can I write this grant proposal in a way that person X will approve of" or "how can I impress these people at organization Y so that I can get a job there?", and they will write long Google Docs to their colleagues about their models and theories of you, and spend dozens of hours thinking specifically about how to get you to do what they want, while drawing up flowcharts
I was also surprised to be seeing management and scaling organisations described as "rarely people’s favourite activities", this seems to be a strong claim. For me, it's the most motivating activity and I'm trying to find an organisation where I can contribute in this area.
Agreed, I love management and improving organisational systems, and was really surprised by this comment!
At least one person earning to give (and not related to FTX) has a net worth of over a billion
Can't be Gary Wang, as he's related to FTX
For travel I calculate what offsetting would have cost, take the amount from my travel budget and donate it to EA recommend climate charities (via Effektiv Spenden in Germany).
Thank you so much Max for writing this! I started a draft forum post for a proposal just yesterday. My idea was to have groups of EAs that aim high and fail often and that support each other. Knowing that others are in similar situations and having a smallish group to discuss the strain and celebrate trying might make things easier. I at least would like it. I was planning to the share the draft with you anyway and would love to get your take on it.
Thank you for this post that touches on the important point of demandingness. Personally, I can see it in two ways.
On a global level giving 10% to effective causes is relatively rare. Giving What We Can has grown impressively but still, less than 1 in every 50.000[1] of the world's high-income population have taken it. 10% is higher than the average donations that are below 2% of GDP. Even in the EA survey, only 1/3 have said to donate at least this amount. While some of the top areas in EA seem less funding constraint, there is still much room for sp...
It’s interesting that this comment talks about more generalist roles being mentioned at EAG that haven’t been publicised. I wonder if it is more likely that specialist roles get ‘officially’ publicised, while the more generalist ones are likelier to not be, maybe to the extent of only living in someone’s head in the style, ‘we could really do with someone to help us out on operations…’
As I was only looking for operations roles I don't know if there is a difference to specialists. At the moment there seems to be a lot of dynamics with orgs getting new fundi...
I like your framing of public/private EAs and pointing out that this differs from the point of switching from pseudonyms (where you could easily find out the real name) to real names. I could see other cases where completely private names might be useful:
Thank you, this was a very interesting read! While I didn't have time to think through all of it, the idea of adjusting the impact of salaries and profits by bands that are income-adjusted seems intuitively right. If I can choose a job with the same salary in the same industry where one employer mainly sells to people with lower income while the other sells to people with higher income, I should have a higher WELLBY impact at first.
As a side anecdote: When I was selling the consumer product of my company at a market stand, the customers who told me t... (read more)