All of Lauren Zitney's Comments + Replies

Thank you so much, Lizka! I will take a look at these!

Thank you so much for these ideas and thoughts! (And my apologies it has taken so long to respond.) I plan to start with the list Lizka posted, but will absolutely think about whether I can pull off the strategy you mentioned if I come up empty handed from a more straightforward approach. 

I would also be interested in any recordings or notes you have from this conversation! I've wondered whether protests work for years, and the answer seems complicated and I'd love some entry points or summaries!

I love this idea! I somewhat recently realized it would be helpful to try to just build an EA community within RTI, more generally. But you're right that it's very unlikely I'm alone right now, and I could really use the extra hands and brains to make progress on these initiatives more quickly.  

Hi Linch, 

My apologies for the delayed response. 

I appreciate your questions, and I didn’t find the tone off-putting at all! Please read my frank tone as honesty and (attempted) clarity rather than a sign that I’m ungrateful for your input. :)

Your thoughts raised some new questions for me. Here are some responses, but for what it’s worth, I would not categorize all of them as “answers.”

I’d like to start with your final point because I think it will help contextualize both my original post and the rest of my thoughts that follow.

Linch re: sta... (read more)

I think this is excellent advice. 

Some additional thoughts: 

• It seems to be the case at many American universities that the deadline for finalizing your schedule is usually a couple weeks into the semester. This gives you time to try out a bunch of classes, and to only keep the ones you think will be most valuable. So, I would always recommend signing up for as many as possible, and then going to all of them for the first couple of weeks to figure out which ones are the best, and then dropping down to only the best opportunities. 
• Also, if you

Thank you for these suggestions! 

• It looks like Founders Pledge could be useful for thinking, specifically, about climate change. At the moment, I'm really unsure about whether, practically, it would make more sense for me to try to implement a general framework for evaluating the criticality of our research portfolio vs. trying to rank the criticality of potential interventions within one small sub-section of our research portfolio  to give the organization an example of what ranking criticality looks like (e.g., climate change). The answer is pr

Thank you for linking this post to those other posts! Definitely interesting, and I can see some overlap.