All of Manuel Allgaier's Comments + Replies

While I'm also interested in the finances, I fully understand if they prefer not to share all this info publicly. Afaik it's not common to share such detailed financial statements publicly, even for non-profits. 

MvK
3d18
9
1

"It's not common" wouldn't by itself suffice as a reason though - conducting CEAs "isn't common" in GHD, donating 10% "isn't common" in the general population, etc. (cf. Hume, is-and-ought something something).

Obviously, something may be "common" because it reliably protects you from legal exposure, is too much work for too little a benefit etc., but then I'm much more interested in those underlying reasons.

+1, I'd find this very useful too! 

For context: After working full-time in EA meta for >3 years, I've been thinking about renting or buying property in/near Berlin or in a cheaper place in Europe to facilitate EA/longtermist events, co-working and maybe also co-living. I know many others are thinking about this too, some of whom area already making plans, and such retrospectives would be really helpful to inform our decisions. If you prefer not to share it publicly, you can also email me

From the limited info I have, Wytham Abbey seemed a goo... (read more)

I like the idea but I also doubt a significant number of Palestinians from Gaza would accept that.

A more realistic option might be to try to make it easier for Palestinians to emigrate to any country that accepts them. Maybe Israel could offer everyone who successfully emigrates a $5-10k incentive / "starting budget for a new life abroad" and then maybe some other countries would be more interested in taking them if they have more money to spend. It might also help that most Gazans are young, speak Arabic and many also English, and could help fill labor sh... (read more)

2
chinscratch
5mo
Another wild idea I've been dreaming about is financialization of immigration. Assume for the sake of argument that Gazans tend to fall into two groups: Hamas-supporting radical terrorists, and peaceful people who just want safety. If there was a magical method to identify which group an immigrant falls into, then countries could accept everyone from Group 2, and leave the Group 1 people in Gaza to fight for their epic historical/religious purpose. There is no magical method, but there are some heuristics. Is the person a woman, child, or elderly? Are they willing to post a video to social media condemning Hamas? Are they willing to sign a statement recognizing Israel's right to exist and defend itself in some form? Etc. However, we can't predict with confidence which heuristics will work, and working heuristics are liable to degrade over time as terrorists figure out how to game them. Therefore, instead of trusting the government to tell the difference, imagine if any citizen could post an "immigration bond" for an immigrant Gazan -- analogous to a bail bond. Perhaps the bond would be $100K or something like that. If the immigrant Gazan commits a serious crime or terrorist attack, the person who posted the bond loses the entire amount. If the immigrant Gazan becomes a productive member of society, perhaps the person who posted the bond would be entitled a fraction of the income tax revenue they generate for the government, if that tax revenue exceeds the amount of money the immigrant receives through government programs. I'm imagining this bond program working via two channels: * Personal relationships. If my cousin is in Gaza and I believe she just wants peace, I post a bond so she can come to my country and live peacefully. If she ever gets tempted to commit a terrorist attack, I remind her that I stand to lose $100K if she does so, and it wouldn't be right to betray a family member like that. * Financial speculators. Imagine a hedge fund doing a bunch o

This is helpful, thanks!

I notice you didn't mention fundraising for AI safety.

Recently, many have mentioned that the funding bar for AI safety projects has increased quite a bit (especially for projects not based in the Bay and not already well connected to funders) and response times from funders such as EA Funds LTFF can be very long (median 2 months afaik), which suggests we should look for more additional funding sources such as new high net worth donors, governments, non-EA foundations etc.

Do you have any thoughts on that? How valuable does this seem to you compared to your ideas?

3
Jam Kraprayoon
6mo
Thanks for the question. At the time we were generating the initial list of ideas, it wasn’t clear that AI safety was funding-constrained rather than talent-constrained (or even idea-constrained). As you’ve pointed out, it seems more plausible now that finding additional funding sources could be valuable for a couple of reasons: 1. Helps respond to the higher funding bar that you’ve mentioned 2. Takes advantage of new entrants to AI-safety-related philanthropy, notably the mainstream foundations that have now become interested in the space. I don’t have a strong view on whether additional funding should be used to start a new fund or if it is more efficient to direct it towards existing grantmakers. I’m pretty excited about new grantmakers like Manifund getting set up recently that are trying out new ways for grantmakers to be more responsive to potential grantees. I don't have a strong view about whether ideas around increasing funding for AI safety are more valuable than those listed above. I'd be pretty excited about the right person doing something around educating mainstream donors about AI safety opportunities.

Agree. Inviting at least one person from a major neartermist organisation in EA such as Charity Entrepreneurship would have been helpful, to represent all "non-longtermists" in EA.

(disclaimer: I'm friends with some CE staff but not affiliated with the org in any way, and I lean towards longtermism myself)

Also appreciate the transparency, thanks Bastian!

TLDR: Recent funding decline seems unfortunate (for EA Berlin specifically), slightly updated that relying on one major doner is riskier than I thought and that groups should maybe diversify funding sources more.


Thanks for sharing!

Some anecdotal data: From EA Berlin's perspective, the sudden decline in funding earlier this year seemed particularly unfortunate.

I understand why funders were hesitant to fund city groups after the sexual harassment cases that came out in February, but it still seemed unfortunate that CEA withdrew the previously committed fun... (read more)

Hi Manuel,

Thank you for sharing your observations and concerns!

I think there are a few points of context that might be helpful. First, the funding for EA Berlin was not retracted. Rather, when EA Germany approached CEA in the fall (before FTX’s collapse) we said that running a hiring round was welcome, but that funding this position would not be guaranteed and that the bar for an additional FTE in Germany would be quite high. This became even more true after FTX's collapse and the funding situation changed. As the EA Berlin hiring proceeded after November,... (read more)

6[anonymous]9mo
Do you think the situation is: Due to CEA not receiving (or being able to spend) previously committed funds themselves, they were forced to withdraw previously committed funding from somewhere, and EA Berlin didn't make the cut? If not, that seems pretty bad in the absence of EA Berlin doing anything egregiously bad (which it seems they haven't).

Thanks for doing that survey and sharing it. This seems potentially quite helpful for EA meta workers & funders, much appreciated!

Minor question (feel free to ignore if busy): Results of EA surveys (both this one and others) seem to often be shared >6 months after the data was collected, and to me it feels at least somewhat outdated by then. Curious to hear if you have any thoughts on that and benefits/costs of sharing sooner.

2
BrianTan
9mo
Hey Manuel, sorry for the late reply, but thanks for your comment! I agree it would be better for the results of EA surveys (including this one) to be published earlier. The reason the census results came out in June was because:  1. In January-March, I had to prioritize other tasks/projects instead of analyzing and writing the census results 2. Analyzing and writing the census results took longer than I expected We'll try to publish the results for this year's census a bit earlier.
2
David_Moss
9mo
We've already personally spoken about the EA Survey (separate from this survey), of course. But for the sake of other organisers, I'll flag that we're generally happy to provide private analyses to orgs and other movement builders before the formal public posts go out. We've already provided 15-20 such private reports this year.

TLDR: Agree with the risks, unsure if it's better to restrict flirting for "x weeks" or for "however long there's a power dynamic and/or vulnerability etc"

Thanks for sharing! Good to be reminded that this is a risk in any community (especially communities with both personal and professional relationships) and that others may have thought more about this and found better solutions. 

This seems most risky in situations in which: 
- Alice is new to EA (still in the "orientation phase") and looking for jobs. 
- Bob is an experienced (paid or volunt... (read more)

4
Severin
1y
Yep, the problem this particular rule tries to fix is that of perceived power imbalance and all the troubles that come with it. It is an imperfect proxy for sure, but non-proxy rules like "No dating if there is a perceived power imbalance." are very, very prone to tempt people into motivated reasoning. It can get very hard for humans to evaluate their power imbalance with Alice when oh damn are these freckles cute. False beliefs, from the inside, feel not like beliefs, but like the truth. Because of that, I wouldn't trust anyone with power who would trust themselves with power. Note also that while "Bob has power over Alice's career" is a significant component of how power works in EA, power in humans has many more subtle nuances than factual access to resources. Even without explicit concerns like "If I don't do what Bob wants, Bob will make my career progression harder.", power is shiny and overpowering and does all kinds of funny things to our monkey brains. See for example how our brains automatically adjust what we consider good fashion choices to who we deem popular in our particular subcultural bubble, how we mold our habits by them, etc. For a more crass example, the 20th century had its wealthy share of spiritual leaders with sex scandals. Though e.g. Osho had no power over his followers' real-world careers, they worshipped him like a demigod. I think it goes without question that it would be if not impossible at least outstandingly difficult for him to have a truly consensual relationship with one of his followers. Because there's no true "yes" without an easy "no", and there's no easy "no" if the prophet himself calls you to his quarters. (Which is of course very sad and inconvenient for Osho and requirement to adhere to this rule might have turned him off guruing completely, because the list of documented 20th century female gurus is short.)

I feel like you're being unfair here.

The EA community engages quite a lot with its critics, more than the average movement. Of course reactions will differ in a community of ~10k active members, but the most upvoted posts & reactions I read are usually very empathetic and caring.

Also this post is about the Rationality community, and I think it'd be better to keep the discussion about that and not mix in EA community issues here (there are enough other posts about the EA community).

@David_Moss

Any updates on when you're able to share results?

3
David_Moss
1y
Thanks for asking. I'm hoping to begin publishing the series this week. We've been working on the FTX analyses first, since this seemed more time-sensitive.

Fwiw: This might locally differ. The EA coworking office in Berlin is going strong and a second related space (Aurea) just opened. I think there's probably demand for more co-living spaces and maybe also more coworking spaces in the coming year, and they probably could be (mostly) funded by members, so not depending on donors.

2
Jonathan Claybrough
1y
I think the information you give on Aurea is expired. They've closed their form, taken down their initial EA Forum post, and have not responded to emails in months. In short, they seem to have shut down (though there probably still are individuals working on longtermist issues living there). I personally see them as one of the most egregious failures for a longtermist hub from the info I was given. (I don't give more detail because I wasn't there and would prefer if they wrote a postmortem themselves).   EDIT : I've crossed out the before-last sentence as I don't endorse it anymore and shouldn't have written in that tone in the first place. I didn't have first hand information and was unnecessarily hostile. I wish instead that I'd simply expressed my confusion as to why they disappeared.

PS: I wonder if you could do both raising awareness of "investing to give" and advertising your products in different posts, without one affecting the other? I think this might be worth a try. You could include disclaimers wherever relevant. 

TLDR: I appreciate Marco, Sana & SageWealth, but do think that this is probably not a good place to advertise such products (based a.o. on feedback from their talk at EAGxBerlin)

Marco's co-founder Sana gave a talk at EAGxBerlin 2022, and as event lead, I read through all participant feedback. This was one of the more controversial sessions at EAGxBerlin- some (especially those new to investing) found it quite helpful, while others (including some with more investing expertise) were more critical for various reasons. 

I don't know enough about SageW... (read more)

-1
Marco Vega
1y
4
Manuel Allgaier
1y
PS: I wonder if you could do both raising awareness of "investing to give" and advertising your products in different posts, without one affecting the other? I think this might be worth a try. You could include disclaimers wherever relevant. 

Rejections always suck, I feel you! :(

If you still want to go, is there an EAGx nearby you could apply to? In my experience as EAGxBerlin 2022 organiser, for most people EAGx conferences provide about the same amount of value than EAG's but the admission bar is lower.

EAGx's also get similarly high average participant ratings - our EAGxBerlin last year had ~900 attendees (similar to pre-pandemic EAG London) and was rated 8.7/10, and I heard that some smaller EAGx's got even better ratings up to 9.x/10.

3
Wil Perkins
1y
The closest one will be Boston, which I will most likely apply to if they do an EAGx. I’ve heard EAG might switch from DC to Boston this year though so there may not be any in my area. I have a lot of thoughts on why EAGx’s are not a substitute or equivalent to having a worldwide, big event billed for all EAs. May write up a post about it.

Which "core EAs"? Many engaged EAs have their own preferences and theories re. EAG size, but in the end, only the CEA events team decides on admissions (sometimes consulting others afaik).

Some comments below that might be reasonably interpreted as being about 'quality of conversation':

Eli Nathan:

  • EAG is primarily a networking event, as one-to-one conversations are consistently reported to be the most valuable experiences for attendees. I think there’s less value in very new folks having such conversations
  • Very involved and engaged EAs might be less eager to come to EAG if the event is not particularly selective.

Habryka:

I would probably also just stop attending an open-invite EA Global since I don't expect it would really share my culture or b

... (read more)
2
sapphire
1y
You can ask buck for his list of the core EAs.

If raising the retirement age is not feasible, another option might be to create more and better opportunities for retired people to engage with and contribute to society in part-time paid or volunteer work? 

My impression is that here in Germany, it seems like the potential of retired people might still be underused (based on very anecdotal evidence, I didn't research this). 

3
Erich_Grunewald
1y
In Sweden, at least among the middle classes, it's not unusual to hire seniors for odd jobs (it's cheaper, you pay less taxes), e.g. via services like this one. It's kind of a win-win situation: one party gets to hire someone for pretty cheap to get something done (e.g. some garden work or handiwork -- I'm guessing quite often things they wouldn't have paid anyone to do otherwise), and the other gets some extra money, human interactions and the satisfaction of non-backbreaking manual labour.

This seems valuable, thanks for setting it up! 

It's been three months now - can you share any updates on how it's going so far? If you have any numbers you can share here or on the website (such as # of candidates who signed up, # of organisations who used the service and # of successful matches), I'd find that helpful to decide whether to sign up. If there's a bottleneck on either side (orgs or candidates), let us know!

2
Grayden
1y
Thanks for the nudge. I've just posted an update here: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/nEnDvu2Ha9HLguvK8/update-from-the-ea-good-governance-project

Excited to hear that you're considering variable ticket pricing!

This worked very well for us at German EA retreats - people paid anywhere from 50-200€ per ticket and we reached our target of 100€ on average.

I wonder if cheaper venues further out could be worth considering?

If most conference attendees don't live in the city but only travel there for the conference, they might not care much if it's in the center or else where. I (and many others I spoke to) actually would prefer an EAG London in a less expensive, less central part of the city.

1
JoshuaBlake
1y
Or even some other, much cheaper, well connected UK city (eg Birmingham, Manchester, York, or Edinburgh).

I'd also be happy to join an "EA managers" Slack!

2
Ozzie Gooen
1y
I'd also be interested. Seems pretty necessary at this point. I could also help out with it more generally. 

FWIW: I also would that info interesting, mainly to see if they got a jail sentence that seems appropriate to their frauds, but it's not essential indeed. 

Thanks for writing this! Quick suggestion: It might be worth mentioning the database in the title as well. Some forum readers may not read it because they're already convinced by the value of accountability buddies and then miss the database. 

1
Samuel Nellessen
1y
Thanks Manuel! That's a great suggestion. Added it to the title :)

Hm, from an organiser perspective (I'm organising EAGxBerlin), even just trying this once seems costly. 

- Organising a conference with 10,000 people takes a huge amount of work and funding. Would you trade in five 1000p conferences to have one 10,000p conference? 
- If this event fails, up to 10,000 people will have had a bad experience and even if just 10% of the people get upset that's 1000 people upset with EA. 

(there are obviously a lot more costs and more benefits which I currently lack time to write up, I just wanted to point out that it may be more costly than you'd think to try out such a large conference)

Agree, thanks a lot!

Right now, anyone can say anything about EA, and while most people are very thoughtful in their communication and some give really thoughtful constructive criticism, a few people just seem to spread verifiably false claims like "EA does not care about global poverty anymore" (while most of the funding in EA still goes to global poverty), "EA is only white privileged men" (agree that EA could be more diverse, but it's definitely not only white men) etc. I guess any community that spends 100s of millions dollars per year and influences th... (read more)

Thanks for writing this up!

A friend of me came up with "Zukunftssicherung" which might also work well, though not sure if it's better than Zukunftsschutz. 

1
constructive
2y
Interesting rec. Intuitively, Zukunftsschutz sounds more actionable/ virtuous. Zukunftssicherung sounds somewhat passive.

*US, UK or any other country with an EAGx conferences. Just in case anyone reading this missed the news, there are now EAG(x) conferences planned on five different continents! :) 

--> www.eaglobal.org

What about democratically elected non-profit boards?

Most national EA organisations with paid staff (like EA France, EA Norway or EA Germany just to mention a few) are registered associations that have their board (re-)elected by its members every 1-2 years. That way board members can be fired by the association members they represent.

I don't think this is perfect, the average member often does not have enough info to judge the performance of a board member and elections have their own downsides (like sometimes favoring popular and charismatic candidates ov... (read more)

5
Holden Karnofsky
1y
This sounds like it could be good for some organizations (e.g., membership organizations), though it's less clear how to make it work (who gets a vote?) for many other types of organizations.

Thanks for writing this up! 

Have you considered also publishing this as video

You could run people through the functionality while at the same time showing what you're doing on your recorded screen, and you could upload it on Youtube and add timestamps to the different sections, so people can find what they need quickly. 

FWIW: As I'm more of a visual person than a reader and most of the forum is text only, my threshold to reading more text is quite a lot higher than my threshold to watch a video with the same content, and for manuals like t... (read more)

Agree, thanks for writing this up! 

I wonder if gentle nudges or reminders like this could be linked in the comment field default text (the one that says "Write here. Select text for formatting ... "). 

If you feel like there's not enough space to add that and you have to prioritise - I personally would find gentle nudges or reminders like this one more useful than knowing whether or not you support LaTeX. The commenting guidelines also seem like a good place, but they're only shown when writing an original comment and not when writing replies to other comments, so for this specific reminder, they wouldn't work. 

Congrats for taking the step and thanks for writing it up! 

Side note: "I've built up a deep understanding of the web platform and advertising ecosystem, and while this domain knowledge isn't especially altruistically useful"

This sounds potentially very useful for EA initiatives that would benefit from reaching a lot more people, like GWWC, GiveWell or the German platform effektiv-spenden.org. If you have any thoughts on this, please share (no worries if you don't have time, though!). 

I suspect my knowledge isn't that useful here? It's about how the infrastructure works at a technical level and how to make changes to the platform, which is a pretty different set of skills from how to run good ad campaigns.

Luke Freeman asked this same question a while ago on Facebook (EA Hangout group iirc) in a poll, have you seen this? Quite a lot of people responded there.

8
Luke Freeman
2y
Here's the link: https://www.facebook.com/groups/477649789306528/posts/1061641704240664/

Offer this for graduates and early career (EA) professionals as well? 

This seems potentially quite useful not only for students but also for early career professionals - especially those who don't (yet) have a team nor a good manager or mentor to work with (e.g. people doing independent AI alignment research funded by EA Funds) - as well as graduates who are currently planning their career. Career planning is one of the hardest things to do in general, and probably even more difficult for people with executive dysfunction due to lack of deadlines and ... (read more)

Have you considered using Spatial Chat? 

I've extensively used both Gather Town and Spatial Chat for online events and coworking during the pandemic, and I found Spatial Chat a bit more user-friendly and intuitive (especially for new people). Both platforms seem to work, though, and there might be good reasons for choosing Gather Town over Spatial Chat. 

Thanks for setting this up, really appreciate! I'll try it out in the coming weeks. 

3
Arepo
2y
I had a look at it, but my instinct was the reverse - it feels much more natural to me to walk an avatar through a virtual space than to drag a video feed of my face around. But if there's a lot of EAs who prefer Spatial Chat, maybe there'd be enough demand to support both at some point. My instinct would be to avoid splitting the space any more just yet, but since these places can all link to each other, over time we could build a linked network of virtual spaces (we already have a 2-way link to an EA VR space, for eg).
2
Emrik
2y
I looked at it for a bit, and it seems interesting! But announcing a move would be risky, given that we might lose people in the transition, so the difference in quality of the space would have to sufficient to overcome that risk, and I'm not sure it is. Also, if you have a Gather Town in Germany, we could link it via a portal; or alternatively you could copy the whole space into EAGT, and it could be linked via a door (like with EA Denmark's space). The latter option has the advantage that it benefits the larger community, encourages more intermingling between groups, makes it easier to find EAs to cowork with, and even if you're just inside your own local rooms you still show up as "online users" and gives the space a livelier feel. I can help with either option if it sounds interesting. :)

Interesting! I work in CB full-time (Director of EA Germany), and my impression is still that it's challenging work, pays less than what I and my peers would earn elsewhere and most of the CB roles still have a lot less status than e.g. being a researcher who gets invited to give talks etc.

Do you think some CBs are motivated by money or status? What makes you think so? I'm genuinely curious (though no worries if you don't feel like elaborating).

3
Ben Jamin
2y
I think I am mostly comparing to how different my impression of the landscape of a few years ago is to today's landscape. I am mostly talking about uni groups (I know less about how status-y city groups are), but I there were certainly a few people putting in a lot of hours for 0 money and not much recognition from the community for just how valuable their work was. I don't want to name specific people I have in mind, but some of them now work at top EA orgs or are doing other interesting things and have status now, I just think it was hard for them to know that this is how it would pan out so I'm pretty confident they are not particularly status motivated. I'm also pretty confident that that most community builders I know wouldn't be doing their job on minimum wage even if they thought it was the most impactful thing they could do. That's probably fine, I just think they are less 'hardcore' than I would like. Also being status motivated is not neccesarilly a bad thing, I'm confused about this but it's plausibly a good thing for the movement to have lots of status motivated people to the degree that we can make status track the right stuff. I am sure that part of why I am less excited about these people is a vibes thing that isn't tracking impact.

Thanks for sharing, appreciate it! Sounds intense, good that you canceled the retreat and glad to hear that you're fine now.

I wonder why that EA retreat had to start Monday morning after EAG. I wouldn't be surprised if other people who attended both events had similar problems. Most people cannot just keep conferencing non-stop, and a break of one or two days between conferences/retreats seems really important to me, both to recover and to process all the new input.

4
MaxRa
2y
Hmm, I associate retreats with being relaxing and with a lot of down-time for reflection, very different from conferences.

Very reasonable, but I'll say to the opposite that for people dealing with flights and things and trying to get back to go to class, bunching things has a serious benefit.

Thanks for your inside view, Alex, really appreciate it! 
Your points seem reasonable and I no longer think this could help end the war sooner. 

Sorry to hear that you did not even get a visa to come to EAG London, that sucks! :/ 
If there's anything we can help with, let us know! 

Thanks also for linking that forum post! 

Appreciate this update! 

> NPS [...] violates survey best practices.

Agree. For our EA retreats in Germany, we've also always just used the mean. I'm surprised that NPS is so widely used in industry. 

I appreciate all the thought you put into this, but I'm not sure we should build a new social network because: 

1) it's really hard to build something better than Linkedin, Facebook, Twitter etc. that people will actually use

2) if only some people use it, it may lead to resource diversion and may even do more harm than good. (I generally feel like the EA community is currently spread over too many different platforms which leads to unnecessary duplicating efforts, so I would prioritise getting more people to use the same platform over adding additional... (read more)

1
Mindaugas
2y
2) We live in this beautiful world because of innovation. Every new idea that were successful improved our life. And life was improved because of innovation happening. I think duplicating efforts is a great thing. The more people diverge and try different things, the more likely something new will be created, and by extension life will be improved. 3) I don't know concept like this existing. This idea is not proven to work. Almost all new ideas fail. So this has to be proven first before adding to the forum. Thanks for practical feedback :)

Maybe even offer cheap or free housing for Ukrainians in case you (or your parents, friends etc) happen to have empty rooms or an empty house altogether? Lots of rural parts in Germany (especially East Germany)  have empty houses

I agree that this conflict is certainly not neglected right now (I edited my question accordingly) and that it's probably difficult to find effective (neglected) interventions in such cases. Lots of people in EA are already thinking about this, though, so I thought it might be worth spending at least a few minutes brainstorming ideas to see if we missed anything. 

7
Charles He
2y
The truth is that I am doing nothing to help the Ukraine crisis. I am also doing nothing to help the Afghan crisis. I did not intend to critique you or make you edit your post. I think you should do exactly what you're doing, if you think it is right.   I wanted to extend with my comment and write something more. This is orthogonal to your post. While it doesn't contradict your intentions, it seems inappropriate right now.

Just want to say that I think Charles's critiques are fair, but that doesn't change the fact that I appreciated that you posted this. Time-sensitivity/presence of a limited window of opportunity is an underappreciated lever for impact in the EA toolkit; arguably it should be a formal part of the ITN framework.

UPDATE: From what I heard many European countries such as Poland and Romania are very open to Ukrainian refugees, so this might not be a bottleneck (comment if you disagree!)

 

Lobby for taking up Ukrainian refugees in your country? (if you live in a suitable country)

It looks like there are some low hanging fruit: Ukrainians are already allowed to stay in Germany for up to 90 days without visa, but only if they have a biometric passport, which half of Ukrainians don't have (and might not be able to get any time soon because of the war). Germany could te... (read more)

3
Ula Zarosa
2y
The bottleneck is now transport for women and children from different cities in more central Ukraine.
9
Manuel Allgaier
2y
Maybe even offer cheap or free housing for Ukrainians in case you (or your parents, friends etc) happen to have empty rooms or an empty house altogether? Lots of rural parts in Germany (especially East Germany)  have empty houses. 

Donate to effective humanitarian aid non-profits in Ukraine? 
Does anyone know what some effective non-profits are, and how funding constrained they are? After quick Google search, I just found these suggestions, but I don't know how effective any of them is. 

3
Michael
2y
I've submitted a very rough draft of how we could profile charities (and perhaps other organizations) to get a feel how they contribute: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/gacpE79RKke2foG9K/rough-attempt-to-profile-charities-which-support-ukrainian I appreciate your feedback, I'd be happy to get this ball rolling.

Help others (especially misinformed Russians) get a clear picture of what's happening
Russian state TV is framing the invasion as a "liberation of Ukrainians from their nazi government" to justify the war. Ukraine's president Zelenskyy has responded with an address to the Russian people directly in Russian that I personally found quite powerful. Any guesses on how many Russians have already seen this? If you know any Russians personally who might not have seen it already, maybe sharing it with them could help? Any other good news sources (in English or Russian) that more people should see?

7
Ula Zarosa
2y
I know people from Belarus living in Poland, who are partly buying the propaganda, that it's all USA fault, that Ukraine should give away Donetsk and Luhansk and stay away from NATO, and that now afraid Ukrainians will attack Belarus. But my mum is talking to them, showing other perspectives, also explaining why Poland wanted to be in EU and in NATO, why we have more prosperity etc.  The other side is my family in Belarus who we tried to call, but who can't talk to us about anything Ukraine-related. They just say "it's hard" on the phone and that's it :( But we are pretty sure they don't support any war, and Russian propaganda, they are just afraid to express that in any single way. That's why all these people protesting on the streets are heroes! Getting arrested and still protesting the war. Such bravery.

Effective and easy intervention: Help EAs new to your city settle in

Many EAs move to Berlin for jobs, many of them (especially non-Germans but also Germans) don't find good housing right away and some find it difficult to make friends (for example if they only found housing far away from the city center). A single 1-1 conversation / chat with some advice and introductions to people who share their interests can really make a difference, and it's easy to do: Just reach out to new people on your local meetups, in your local EA facebook group etc and offer th... (read more)

That's a really great interview, thanks for doing this and writing it up for us!

And cool to hear that Rutger found GWWC, took the pledge and now also considers various other near- and long-term causes in his work! I've seen a few appearances of Rutger and I liked his way of communicating these ideas in a way that makes it seem like common sense to a wide audience.

I would recommend the interview at Trevor Noah & his unaired interview with Tucker Carlsen from Fox news, btw.

Agree!

In our current hiring round for EA Germany, I'm offering all 26 applicants "personal feedback on request if time allows", and I think it's probably worth my time at least trying to answer as many feedback requests as I can.

I'd encourage other EA recruiters to do the same, especially for those candidates that already did work tests. If you ask someone to spend 2h on an unpaid work test, it seems fair to make at least 5min time for feedback.

(Sidenote: Fwiw, I think people should also seriously consider actually paying honoraria for work tests, rather than leaving them unpaid. At least for longtermist and meta EA projects, I expect that if funders would fund staff costs they'd also fund the costs for paying applicants for their time spent on applications. At least, I can say for sure that that'd be my default stance as an EAIF guest manager.)

Thanks for writing this up! Agree that we should coordinate more on regional level.

City/national groups are often run by adult, professional people, who don't know enough about what it means to run a uni group.

I'm curious, why do you think so?

Many city / national level group organisers started with organising uni groups, and even those who only learned about EA after university have often done some other form of student engagement as well like running other student groups, so I'd guess that the majority of city / national level group organisers do have exp... (read more)

1
akrivka
3y
I should've put more thought into this section. I now realize I was mainly basing my claim on my experience with Czech EA, where almost no one has experience with university groups, and the fact that there are basically no national groups in the US/UK regions (only city groups).  National groups can definitely play the role of regional groups in many places extremely well, I just don't think it's a requirement to have one to coordinate as uni groups on the regional level. 

Why only US & UK universities?

This looks potentially very helpful to (foreign) students, thanks for setting this up! 

If you have a moment, I would be curious to hear your reasoning on why this is limited to US & UK universities only. I understand that for many students, their best choice is to study in the US or UK, but for many other students other universities might be a better choice, and this limitation would still bias them towards UK & US universities. 

In addition, there might more be cost-effective opportunities elsewhere, give... (read more)

7
Bastian_Stern
3y
The main reason is simply that it so happens that most of the very top universities are based either in the UK or the US. (The fact that ETH Zurich is the only non-UK/US university that is in the top-20 on both the QS and Times Higher Education rankings partly reflects this, although my sense is that these rankings have some pretty serious limitations and should be taken with a major pinch of salt.) I also think there are additional benefits associated with attending university in the UK/US, including in terms of opening up career opportunities in the English-speaking world. I agree that ETH has some things going for it and including it might well have been a reasonable choice, although my impression is that its teaching language at the undergraduate level is German, which means that it’s not really a relevant option for the vast majority of potential applicants. In general, the decisions about which universities to include involved a number of debatable judgement calls, so I think there is a decent amount of room for reasonable disagreement on this topic.
2
Charles He
3y
Do you want to see a write up by me, not the OP, that gives some structure/rationalization/justification about why this set of universities was chosen? This is an awkward subject and I think it’s unlikely that you will get a verbose response.  I am worried that there will be a lack of response, and this might be create a perception  about the objective value of candidates outside this set of universities, despite these beliefs not actually being held strongly by anyone. Instead of this situation, I'd rather produce a balanced write up, that can still be be kicked around (and maybe get explicitly stomped on by the OP).
1
BrianTan
3y
Did you mean to say $12,000/year instead of $1,200/year tuition at ETH Zurich? 
6
Nathan Young
3y
I think that ETH  Zurich is a particularly good example since it's one place below Imperial. Not sure I'd be convinced of this argument if it was #15, say. 
2
Joseph Lemien
3y
Agreed. There are top-ranked universities in other countries. Additionally, $X might allow 5 students to attend a good university, or 1 student to attend a great university. I'd suggest learning toward a more "diversified" model in which more students receive funding (a larger number of "bets" are taken).

Agree that this seems neglected. EA Germany (and I personally) are happy to support EA projects that have potential to grow into impactful EA organisations. If you have ideas on how to better do that (within the limited capacity of national group organisers), feel free to get in touch!

(I also agree on the importance of having founders that are value-aligend and have good epistemics, which I think some entrepreneurs are but many others may not be)

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