+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...
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...
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?
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...
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,...
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.
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...
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).
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.
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...
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.
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':
- 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.
...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
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).
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!
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.
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.
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...
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.
*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...
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...
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.
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 ...
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.
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).
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.
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...
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.
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...
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.
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?
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...
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...
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...
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)
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.
"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.