President 2021 of EA Austria | Co-Founder of EA Graz | Entrepreneur | Circling Facilitator | Running Applied Rationality Workshops
Open to meet potential cofounders or joining an existing EA-aligned startup. Read more: https://lukastr.me/about
Current Business: https://www.fwsim.com/
Thanks for sharing about your initiative. I do have some significant doubts about this project.
Have you interviewed charities and asked them whether they prefer donations through your scheme vs donations made directly to them?
Is there a chance that this project has negative impact, by cannibalizing direct donations and turning them into indirect donations via your platform - potentially against the will of the charities themselves, i.e., against their judgement that they could have more impact with direct donations?
Or alternatively, looking at the opposite: Have you got evidence that this will attract new donations to highly effective charities that wouldn't otherwise have happened - for example, by introducing these charities to people that have never heard about them before? (but even then, the same question applies - why your scheme instead of direct donations?)
Related: There is EA the actual movement, and EA the philosophy. I wonder how much we are losing out on by not having a clear line between the two. Maybe internally this distinction can be carefully navigated, but to an outsider it is one and the same. I wonder if that might be one of the things that could be improved about EA.
I imagine it feels challenging to share that and I applaud you for that.
While my EA experiences have been much more positive than yours, I do not doubt your account. For many of the points you mention, I can see milder versions in my own experience. I believe your post points towards something important.
Downvoted for several reasons: because I would expect colleagues in any work environment to hook up, because I think it's very unkind to assume sexual relations in the workplace are indicative of a problem, because I'm against outing people's sex lifes unless directly relevant to a scandal. And finally, because it seems unnecessary to mention polyamory when talking about two people hooking up.
(Retracted after more consideration. I still disagree with the wording of the comment I responded to but can now see it points towards a real problem)
Strongly disagree-voted because "I wish they had sat down" doesn't address the publicly stated reason why Binance pulled out. It makes it seem like they had no good reason, and a good conversation would have fixed the issues. Without knowing much, this seems implausible to me.
Also, I consider "I don't think he did anything in bad faith" to be somewhat irresponsible. If SBF actually did something wrong, then EAs going around and supporting him by saying "I don't think he did anything wrong" will hurt the optics of this further.
Location: Graz, Austria
Remote: Yes
Willing to relocate: For the right opportunity
Skills:
Résumé/CV/LinkedIn: https://lukastr.me/about
Email: lukas@fwsim.com
Available from and until: To be discussed
I frequently catch myself, and I'm embarrassed to admit that, being more likely to upvote posts of users that I know. I also find myself anchoring my vote to the existing vote count (if a post has a lot of upvotes then I am less likely to downvote it). Pretty sure I'm not the only one.
Furthermore, I observe how vote count influences my reading of each post more than it should. Groupthink at its best.
I suspect if the forum hid the vote count for a month, there would be significant changes in voting patterns. That being said, I'm not sure these changes would actually influence the votesorted order of the postings - but they might. I suspect it would also change the nature of certain discussions.
Related: this quote from the FAQ on their website
"They will spend your money directly" - seems like a strong statement, makes it sounds like charities usually do not invest any of the money they receive. Is that true? I don't know, just flagging this for further discussion.