All of Quinn McHugh (he/him)'s Comments + Replies

Great list, Kyle! Thanks for sharing. :)

I wasn't aware of The Life You Can Save's Helping Women & Girls Fund until I read your post. It's wonderful to know something like this exists.

Hi Rakafet,

Welcome to the EA Forum!

I never knew the Abstinence Violation Effect had a name - I think that's something I'll have to add to my lexicon. :)

While reading through your post, I was having a bit of trouble understanding your arguments and, the evidence behind why you think this intervention is particularly important and neglected.

If I'm understanding correctly, your argument is:

More funding should be directed towards providing vegan food to soldiers, who experience difficulties maintaining a vegan diet. By providing this support, we could reduce t

Hi David,

Memex.garden seems very similar to what you're describing.

I recently came across this great introductory talk from the Center for Humane Technology, discussing the less catastrophic, but still significant risks of generative large language models (LLMs). This might be a valuable resource to share with those unfamiliar with the staggering pace of AI capabilities research.

A key insight for me: Generative LLMs have the capacity to interpret an astonishing variety of languages. Whether those languages are traditional (e.g. written or verbal English) or abstract (e.g. images, electrical signals in the brain, wifi traf... (read more)

@Felix Wolf Thanks for taking the time to explain, Felix. This makes sense now.

This is fantastic! Props to the Type 3 Audio and EA Forum team.

Quick question regarding accessibility:

I'm aware EA Forum posts can both:

• Customize the alt text of an image
• Provide captions to an image

Is this information included in these audio narrations?

Only accounts with at least 100 Karma on forum.effectivealtruism.org or lesswrong.com are allowed to vote.

I'm a little confused by this. What's the motivation for using a karma threshold to decide who does and doesn't get to vote?

Hey David, you might already be aware, but Vaidehi Agarwalla has recently spearheaded a project to migrate numerous EA Slacks, Discords, etc into the EA Anywhere Slack.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1YluxFbKmZipIXbzJDPWBqrTPtFMI_3pzWcidzZHT3OQ/edit?usp=sharing

Edit: I see you're one of the editors! I'll keep this comment up for others to reference.

Hey @Alex Barnes,

As a follow up to this: the open-source community has since released Ferdium, a free desktop app that makes it much easier to view your services all in one place.

Hi EAlly,

It seems like there are numerous questions to unpack here. If I'm understanding you correctly, it seems like you're generally curious about how others have sought to increase their impact through an EA lense, given a background in IT. Is that right?

If so, I think your questions might be better answered by searching for, reaching out to, and scheduling informational interviews with people working at the intersection of EA and IT. I previously came across a helpful framework for doing this sort of thing here: [Webinar] The 2-Hour Job Search - YouTub... (read more)

Based on this realization, am I right to assume you are no longer interested in coordinating this book club?

I came to the same realization after discussing it with a few members of our local group, but given my interests in animal advocacy, I think it'd be personally valuable for me to engage with.

Thank you for pointing this out Lorenzo - I've removed the link from my comment.

Thanks for setting this up @Kaleem! I hadn't heard of this book until a colleague of mine mentioned your post in our local group's (EA Philadelphia's) Discord.

Edit: Link to book PDF removed

This course seems valuable. Thanks for sharing!

I could see this being an inspiring resource for EAs who struggle with imposter syndrome (myself included), especially when paired with posts like seven ways to become unstoppable agentic.

Hi Nico,

You might also want to try the recently released Obsidian Canvas. I've found both Excalidraw and Canvas to be phenomenal (and free) diagramming tools.

I have a list of other diagramming tools on my public Zotero library here.

for me, I sometimes get disillusioned when reading the Forum, but in-person meetings or video calls make me feel SO MUCH better about our community

I can definitely relate to these feelings. Sometimes, I find the dichotomy between my face-to-face interactions and what I read here on the forum to be incredibly stark (and not in a good way). This is probably just due to the online disinhibition effect and thus I can't say for sure whether or not the difference in magnitude between online/in-person experiences is unique to EA community.

Some related posts:

Great thinking, @Alex Long. I think I would be much more likely (say, 5% -> 35%) to reference this Google Sheet if it was migrated to a Notion database (with mapping capabilities). Up to you, @Kat Woods.

You might also be able to convert the Google Sheet directly into a Google Map, but I suspect it'd be a bit more challenging to implement.

Hi Nathan,

I came across your post just now and wanted to say that I tend think this kind of digital infrastructure is highly important but either undervalued or underdiscussed when it comes to movement building. I hope to write about this more in the future.

I'm currently in the process of curating numerous RSS feeds from https://ea.news/ and other sources in my NewsBlur in an effort to be more deliberate about my "information diet" and am a bit disappointed by the availability and quality of the RSS feeds I've found.

I only found one organization, Gain Heal... (read more)

For those who prefer markdown, Docusaurus is another great option.

EA 101 questions

Hi Ben, I'm not clear what this refers to. Could this be clarified in the post?

I'm a little confused on why this post was downvoted. It seems like the author has already done some limited research on this topic and presented a helpful summary of the findings.

I'd also be curious to hear if any non-university groups have done street outreach (e.g. public tablings) before. We at EA Philadelphia have considered this in the past, but given our limited organizer bandwidth, are hesitant to allocate resources towards this kind of outreach.

Hi Emrik,

My apologies. It appears the Zoom link was not copied over from our other events! We'll be sure to double check this for any future online happenings.

Thanks for flagging.

Hey Madhav, you can find the Zoom link here: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZUsc-6urDwsGtDJiUSvqTbJFiM-B7SGEPyw

Is Ferdi what you're looking for?

Thank you for writing this. Learning about people like Farmer is hugely inspiring and the last two quotes you included made me surprisingly emotional. It really gives a sense for how deeply committed Farmer was to his work and makes me want to raise my own aspirations when it comes to improving the world.

I've been starting to use Obsidian.md for knowledge management and am really interested in seeing how knowledge graphs (e.g. graph database platforms like Neo4j)  could be applied towards improving community coordination.

Seems like we may have similar interests! Just DM'd you.

This is the first time I've heard of the Final Version Perfected (FVP). As a person who's struggled with confronting "tasks I really should do, but aren't absolutely necessary to do" in a large list of other seemingly more pressing tasks, this could prove very useful. Thank you for mentioning it!

In the past, I've put my tasks in a spreadsheet and rated them by "urgency" and "importance," which were multiplied to give a "priority score." While this was useful early on, I found that classifying each task in this way resulted in a lot of decision fatigue and was ultimately unsustainable. YMMV.

Sure thing, Alex! We host these discussion groups like this every three weeks. If you have any ideas for a future discussion, feel free to let us know here: https://forms.gle/AcpD58kTbuwih9cYA

Looking forward to some productive conversation! :)

For other ways to stay in the loop, check out our Linktree.

Hey Sarah,

I really love the advice you've given here.

I frequently find myself getting enticed by the latest productivity tool or project management app and your simple  but effective method of managing projects in a Google Doc outline is a nice reminder that the best tool is often the simplest one that works.

Clement Kao, an EA-aligned product manager, has some additional thoughts on effective 1-on-1s here. 

Also, big fan of deliberate check-ins with romantic partners and have found framework outlined here to be especially useful.
 

Hi Hazelfire,

Thanks for taking the time to set this up. As a developer and community organizer, this seems like a great project to help out with.  I'll message you on the EA Public Interest Technologist Slack!

I think it would be cool for someone to create an "engineering agenda" that entrepreneurial software developers could take ideas from and start working on, analogous to e.g. this post from Michael.

As an early career software developer who'd love to take on an EA-related project for skill building purposes, I'd be great to have  a resource like this available.

Hey Kyle,

Great post and glad you found Alex's framework useful! I used Alex's guide as part of my annual review process last year and found many of the ideas helpful for clarifying my values, coming to terms with my shortcomings, and setting my intentions for the upcoming year.

Unfortunately, I often struggled with keeping myself accountable and love the idea of finding an accountability partner to go through the review process with.

Having gone through this exercise, it’s now crazy to me that it isn't more commonly used. As someone looking to optimize my im

Relevant website for those who have specific dietary goals or requirements (formerly DIY Soylent): https://www.completefoods.co/

+1 for ordering groceries online - Tried this for the first time last week. For me, not having to expend the time & mental energy searching for the things I need was well worth the small financial cost. For those in the US and Canada who still like to get out of the house, Instacart offers grocery pickup.

I've thought about this as well and would love to see some more resources allocated to this area. In general, I think that visual marketing/branding is an undervalued area in the EA community, at least when it comes to movement building. That said, I'm an amateur graphic designer and EA group organizer, so I likely assign an unusually high importance to visual aesthetics.

Anyways, looking forward to joining the EA Creatives and Communicators Slack that @evelynciara mentioned.  

While I think there's some merit to the argument you put forth here, I think it discounts how much of a negative impact content that errs on the side of controversial can have on people's inclinations towards an organization/idea/thing. Yes, controversial (i.e. polarizing) content tends to reach farther in certain circles, thereby increasing the likelihood of capturing people who were already inclined to join a given movement, but it can just as easily build opposition to a movement, which can become a serious hindrance to a movement's community health and... (read more)

Hey Luke, great work thus far! Props to you and the rest of the GWWC and EA NYC team for making this data available in a user-friendly format.

I know this is a big ask, but I would love to see this data visualized in something like a sankey diagram (broken down by core cause area, sub-case area, and finally individual charity, for example). One of the things I've always been curious about is how under/overfunded a given charity or philanthropic fund is relative to other entities  in the same core or sub- cause area (i.e. donor coordination problem), an... (read more)

Great message and fun to read. Although I'm skeptical of your grandma's personal fit, it certainly sounds like she has the passion to become an exceptional AI safety researcher. ;)