I was just looking at the EA funds dashboard. To what extent do you think the money coming into EA funds is EA money that was already going to be allocated to similarly effective charities?
I saw the EA funds post on hacker news, are you planning to continue promoting EA funds outside the existing EA community?
Whilst I could respond in detail, instead I think it would be better to take action. I'm going to put together an 'open projects in EA' spreadsheet and publish it on the EA forum by March 25th or I owe you £100.
I think we have a real problem in EA of turning ideas into work. There have been great ideas sitting around for ages (e.g. Charity Entrepreneurship's list of potential new international development charities, OpenPhil's desire to see a new science policy think tank, Paul Christiano's impact certificate idea) but they just don't get worked on.
Yes! The conversations and shallow reviews are the first place I start when researching a new area for EA purposes. They've saved me lots of time and blind alleys.
OpenPhil might not see these benefits directly themselves, but without information sharing individual EAs and EA orgs would keep re-researching the same topics over and over again and not be able to build on each other's findings.
It may be possible to have information sharing through people's networks but this becomes increasingly difficult as the EA network grows, and excludes competent people who might not know the right people to get information from.
Even simpler than fact posts and shallow investigations would be skyping experts in different fields and writing up the conversation. Total time per expert is about 2 hours - 1 hour for the conversation, 1 hour for writing up.
Not sure, it's really hard to make volunteer-run projects work and often a small core team do all the work anyway.
This half-written post of mine contains some small project ideas: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1zFeSTVXqEr3qSrHdZV0oCxe8rnRD8w912lLw_tX1eoM/edit
A lot of these would be good for a small founding team, rather than individuals. What do you mean by 'good for an EA group?'
No tasty money for you: http://effective-altruism.com/ea/18p/concrete_project_lists/
I was just looking at the EA funds dashboard. To what extent do you think the money coming into EA funds is EA money that was already going to be allocated to similarly effective charities?
I saw the EA funds post on hacker news, are you planning to continue promoting EA funds outside the existing EA community?
You can understand some of what people are downvoting you for by looking at which of your comments are most downvoted - ones where you're very critical without much explanation and where you suggest that people in the community have bad motives: http://effective-altruism.com/ea/181/introducing_ceas_guiding_principles/ah7 http://effective-altruism.com/ea/181/introducing_ceas_guiding_principles/ah6 http://effective-altruism.com/ea/12z/concerns_with_intentional_insights/8p9
Well-explained criticisms won't get downvoted this much.
See http://effective-altruism.com/ea/174/introducing_the_ea_funds/a2m?context=1#a2m
This is really helpful, thanks.
Whilst I could respond in detail, instead I think it would be better to take action. I'm going to put together an 'open projects in EA' spreadsheet and publish it on the EA forum by March 25th or I owe you £100.
I think we have a real problem in EA of turning ideas into work. There have been great ideas sitting around for ages (e.g. Charity Entrepreneurship's list of potential new international development charities, OpenPhil's desire to see a new science policy think tank, Paul Christiano's impact certificate idea) but they just don't get worked on.
Yes! The conversations and shallow reviews are the first place I start when researching a new area for EA purposes. They've saved me lots of time and blind alleys.
OpenPhil might not see these benefits directly themselves, but without information sharing individual EAs and EA orgs would keep re-researching the same topics over and over again and not be able to build on each other's findings.
It may be possible to have information sharing through people's networks but this becomes increasingly difficult as the EA network grows, and excludes competent people who might not know the right people to get information from.
Even simpler than fact posts and shallow investigations would be skyping experts in different fields and writing up the conversation. Total time per expert is about 2 hours - 1 hour for the conversation, 1 hour for writing up.