I am a sophomore at the University of Chicago (co-president of UChicago EA and founder of Rationality Group). I am mostly interested in philosophy (particularly metaethics, formal epistemology, and decision theory), economics, and entrepreneurship.
I also have a Substack where I post about philosophy (ethics, epistemology, EA, and other stuff). Find it here: https://substack.com/@irrationalitycommunity?utm_source=user-menu.
If anyone has any opportunities to do effective research in the philosophy space (or taking philosophy to real life/ related field) or if anyone has any more entrepreneurial opportunities, I would love to hear about them. Feel free to DM me!
I can help with philosophy stuff (maybe?) and organizing school clubs (maybe?)
From a philosophy standpoint, I find incommensurability pretty implausible (at least to act upon) for a couple reasons:
Happy to chat more about this, if you think that you'd find that helpful.
We've talked about this, but I wanted to include my two counterarguments as a comment to this post:
Side note: this argument seems to rely on some ideas about astronomical waste that I won't discuss here (I also haven't done so much thinking on the topic), but it seems maybe worth it to frame around that debate.
I think this is going to be hard for university organizers (as an organizer at UChicago EA).
At the end of our fellowship, we always ask the participants to take some time to sign up for 1-1 career advice with 80k, and this past quarter myself and other organizers agreed that we felt somewhat uncomfortable doing this given that we knew that 80k was leaning a lot on AI -- as we presented it as merely being very good for getting advice on all types of EA careers. This shift will probably make it so that we stop sending intro fellows to 80k for advice, and we will have to start outsourcing professional career advising to somewhere else (not sure where this will be yet).
Given this, I wanted to know if 80k (or anyone else) has any recommendations on what EA University Organizers in a similar position should do (aside from the linked resources like Probably Good).
Note: I'm really unsure what I believe about the following comment, but I'm interested in hearing what others have to say about it.
Whenever we add an additional condition of the type of thing we want (say, diversity), we sacrifice some amount of the terminal aim (getting the best people). While there are good reasons to care about diversity (optics, founder effects, making people feel more comfortable), there are also ones that are more controversial (for instance -- in some cases like grant-making, diversity of sex or race as a proxy for getting a "more diverse outlook" on a particular subject). Let's call optics/ founder effects instrumental diversity and more diverse outlook diversity. Given this framing, I think two points are important:
Note: I understand that this framing is weird because the kind of diversity of knowledge/ experience is said to be good instrumentally -- i still wanted to make a different conceptual category for it because 1) it's more controversial and 2) some conditions might apply to it that may not apply to other constraints.
I'm interested in hearing what others have to say about this - especially if you think this comment overrates the amount that EAs care about diversity (vs instrumental diversity). I'm also interested in hearing if you think I'm underestimating the reasons for why diversity might be important that I might be missing.
Thank you for doing this — this is super helpful from a university organizer perspective.
One question: Will you be able to handle the capacity of all the participants (UChicago, for example, is around 13 per quarter, excluding summer) after a university intro fellowship?