Julia_Wise
Bio
I'm a contact person for the effective altruism community: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/hYh6jKBsKXH8mWwtc/a-contact-person-for-the-ea-community
Please feel free to contact me at julia.wise@centreforeffectivealtruism.org.
I work at CEA as a community liaison, trying to make the EA community stronger and more welcoming. I also serve on the board of GiveWell.
Besides effective altruism, I'm interested in folk dance and trying to keep up with my three children.
Posts 62
Comments424
Topic Contributions4
I'm sure it's true that a different group of people would have come up with different projects that seemed most useful and practical to them. I don't remember noticing disagreement that seemed to be along demographic lines. My perception is that the main axis on which we often had different ideas was "centralization vs decentralization", for example with Ozzie often proposing more centralization and me leaning toward decentralization. My hunch is this is related to Ozzie's experience at small organizations and my experience at a larger (for EA) one.
[I'm married to Jeff.] As a counterpoint, around the same time Jeff was figuring out some of this earning to give stuff, I was having a crisis about whether I should also go into earning to give. I just couldn't think of any high-earning career I thought I would be ~happy in, so I stuck with social work. And then it turned out that my skills were a lot more useful in EA community work than I had anticipated.
I agree with Amber!
I'll also point out that a lot of animal advocacy is growing in low and middle income countries, and having locally-knowlegeable staff or activists is an important part of that work. A lot of animal-focused work also needs STEM (e.g. cellular agriculture, biology.) Example: https://gfi-apac.org/#gfi-brazil
The age when you're old enough to have formed a lot of your own views but don't yet have much practical independence from your family can be so tough. For people who don't fit the mold of their local and family setting, it can feel like forever until you're able to live life more in accordance with your own views and values. But careers are long, and in a few years you'll have so many more options as far as how to live your life and how to contribute to things you care about.
This seems really valuable!
There could be lessons learned from hospital initiatives around hand hygiene, where there were big cultural aspects (like doctors aren't expecting nurses to tell them what to do.)
Copenhagen Consensus has some older work on what might be cost-effective to preventing armed conflicts, like this paper.
We don't have immediate plans to do another one, but do think it would be valuable to do at some point.
Julia here from the community health team. As you might guess, we have a pretty different view on some of Ben's takes about our team. There are a variety of things that make this difficult to discuss publicly; we'll see if we can say more at some point. For now, we wanted to say that we're following the conversation and thinking a lot about these questions.
I love these kinds of writeups! Thank you for sharing your process and how you've found it so far!