All of Karla Still's Comments + Replies

Thank you Gergő for initiating this! On EA Finland's part we are just happy if we can save other group organisers' time.

Thank you for sharing your outreach strategy at ET with such detail! I bookmarked this post earlier and finally found a good moment to read it :)

For EA Finland my main takeaways from the post are:
- We should take some time to develop/unify the branding of EA Finland further and especially our tone of voice. 
- Identify more broadly which our most promising target audiences could be and organise discussions/ 1-1s with people from the reference groups to get insights to qhat kind of communication appeals to them and if they are interested in EA in the fi... (read more)

Impressive work you have done and clearly written report! Looking forward to follow how you scale it up/duplicate your effort to other countries :)

Could you tell more about the engagement metric? What was the questions asked to the respondents? Wondering if it about engagement with other EAs or local groups or generally with EA ideas and how the different levels are defined

My blockers for donating more: 
1) Not being confident that I give to the very best program(s). I feel dissatisfied about my current donation behavior. I’d like to have a stronger personal hierarchy of the charity recommendations by GWWC. Now I give roughly 1/3 of my pot to GiveWell (because of their strong evidence base), 1/3 to either ACE’s recommended charities fund or Humane League (because of neglectedness in animal welfare funding), and 1/3 to Founders Pledge Climate change fund (as a relatively safe longtermist bet). These also seem highly cost ... (read more)

I've been thinking along the same lines but wouldn't have verbalised it as well as you. Thank you for writing this up!

I assume that especially in countries with less EA presence of direct impact orgs, the local EA communities can play an vital role in supporting people to get more engaged with EA ideas and potentially become leaders of their own high-impact projects.

I thought having many different forms of engagement at each stage was implicit to the funnel model as well, but having it explicit as "action, ideas, and diverse connections" seems like a useful framework. I'll think more about what this could mean in practice for us in my group

Thank you for your kind words! 

It would indeed be interesting to see impact assessments across groups and projects to get a rough idea of the expected value of different projects and improve intuitions on community building.

I found this a bit hard to read maybe because my biology literacy isn't strong enough. I also skipped the details...

I didn't quite understand why iron deficiencies are "very bad". Here's how I understood it. Is this what op refers to as very bad? 1)

Successful iron supplementation led to improvements averaging >0.5 standard deviations in attention, learning, and memory Iron supplementation

2. Iron supplementation increases endurance.

Do you mean bad on a society scale or is it pointed at the reader?

Thanks for the update! It would be interesting to get more statistics on CEA. Like

• by how many people CEA has grown with. (I guess it's something between 15 and 35 but there's quite a big difference)
• how big a budget do you have?
• how do you allocate employees/budget/hours between the projects/areas and how has this changed?

(Maybe these exist elsewhere?)

The last four paragraphs are well said👌

Thanks for writing this post! Very interesting

Here is now EA Finland's Start a Mini EA Group in Finland document. Tried to make it as detailed as possible to make it easy to do and added some more bonus activities like setting up posters at your campus. 

Great idea! Somehow I hadn't thought about the value of inactive groups vs no group.

I know a few university cities in Finland with only 1-2 EAs who don't have time to commit to running a group many hours a week. I will ask them if they'd be interested in this and do a ~10-step manual on how to set up a mini group and how EA Finland can support them. (Maybe calling it a contact group 🤔) Maybe an incentive to start the group (in addition to having a bigger impact) could be that they automatically get invited to EA Finland's organizers only-events and retre... (read more)

How would technological change make current biodiversity efforts irrelevant? And by irrelevant, do you mean that the technologies reduce environmental burden and degregation e.g. by being more resource efficienct or that they would be actual new solutions aimed at reducing biodiversity loss?

We discussed this post in one of our article reading club meetings and I thought I would share some of the discussions we had around the topic in bullet points. As a disclaimer, I am writing this comment 6 weeks after the meeting so I have probably misinterpreted some of my notes.

- How are these kinds of models built? Operalization was a new concept for a few participants. 

- What do we think is the most important for well-being looking at the answers the different models provided? We mostly talked about meaningfulness, mental health and relationships.... (read more)

External controlling factors such as rewards, salary, grades, controlling praise, and punishment almost always undermine autonomous motivation (Deci et al., 2001)

What do you think about the this? Does it mean we shouldn't thank volunteers for the work they are doing and at the same time suggest another project we think would be a good fit for them? Or that the writing competitions with financial incentives can actively harm autonomous motivation unless people have already internalised the values. But in that case do we need the financial reward? I also wonder if this suggests rewarding organisers with gift cards or job certificates undermines autonomous motivation.

I'm wondering why so few of the theories involve physiological needs

As a community builder, I've lately thought about how much you can or should push and support other volunteers and new participants to engage more with EA. That could be offering 1-1 calls, sending private and group messages about specific opportunities and asking for help in organizing events among else. For context, this is mostly a reflection on what I think we (the other organizers and I) should maybe do in EA Finland.

Arguments for more pushing: 
I obviously believe what we're doing as a community is important and want more people to engage more in... (read more)

Thank you for writing this post! I recently had a discussion with some EA intro fellowship participants who experienced that EA is very demanding with expectations on changing your career etc and that it gives a very cultish or religious impression. Some said they are interested in EA and implementing some tools and mindsets in their life but that's it. I think we should embrace that too