All of rosiecampbell's Comments + Replies

Just wanted to express support for 'Athena Centre' or 'Athena House'. Or if it needs to be more intelligible to the Charity Commission, maybe something like 'The Athena Centre for EA Study'. (Also, congrats - really excited to see this getting registered as a charity!!)

sky
4y17
0
0

I think it's worth noting that the acronym for the Athena Center for EA Study is ACES! :)

6
Sean_o_h
4y
I like Rosie's suggestions (inspired by Jonas's).

Based on the title of this I felt initially skeptical, but after reading the full article I updated towards this being an interesting thing to try.

A few thoughts/concerns:

  • I seem to be unusual in that I don't find email management particularly difficult. I unsubscribe from all marketing emails immediately, and have a strict inbox zero policy which means any emails that require an action or time-consuming response are moved to my task manager, where they can be easily prioritized. I think it's rare that I accidentally miss an email I would have
... (read more)
1
Misha_Yagudin
5y
Great suggestions! Recently, I found it helpful to unsubscribe from the newsletters and put them into my RSS reader with the help of https://kill-the-newsletter.com.
3
jacobjacob
5y
This is super helpful, thanks (and that's a really awesome list of email hygiene tips, I've saved it). I think it would improve things on the margin, and also has a much smaller risk of landing us in a worse equilibrium, so it seems robustly good for people to do. Still, I'm not super excited because if you believe that the initial mess is a coordination problem, the solution is not for individuals to put in lots of effort to be helpful; but for everyone to jointly move to another game where the low-effort/incentivised action is to cooperate rather than defect.
6
Aaron Gertler
5y
I really like these suggestions. One thing I didn't see, which can be really helpful on the recipient side: Be ready to respond with a "pre-response response". For example, when I do editing for EA Forum posts, rather than let something sit until I'm ready to read through it, I might respond to the sender saying something like: "I expect to get to this by Friday. If you don't have an email from me by then, you're welcome to follow up and bother me about it." This lets the other person know I've seen their message and plan to respond. I might also say, if I'm really crunched for time/prioritization: "I don't know whether I'll have time to get to this at all; if you don't hear from me, I'd recommend X", where X might be "emailing someone else", "reading an article", "posting your piece as-is", etc.

(FYI, my understanding is that you only pay if you get a response, so I don't think the example of people feeling entitled to a response from 80,000 Hours applies)

Not strictly EA, but we used this humorous poem as a reading as it touches on transhumanist themes and we wanted something light-hearted:

Scientific Romance by Tim Pratt

If starship travel from our
Earth to some far
star and back again
at velocities approaching the speed
of light made you younger than me
due to the relativistic effects
of time dilation,
I’d show up on your doorstep hoping
you’d developed a thing for older men,
and I’d ask you to show me everything you
learned to pass the time
out there in the endless void
of night.

If we were the sole survivors
of a zombi... (read more)

1
nickfitz
2y
This is so beautiful, thanks Rosie. 

Thanks for nudge! I've just added my bio.