Strong +1 to all of the above - I've observed this a lot especially with ops roles.

+1 I think it's worth trying to push for a 10% pledge and see what kind of traction you get. Also curious if you've spoken to OFTW about their experience with the 1% pledge and churn rates etc.

Thanks Nick that's helpful!

How long do the effects of the vaccine last / how was this incorporated into your estimates?

My naive guess is that this should make vaccines more cost effective on the time scale of years (since you won't need to re-vaccinate people), but maybe it's already incorporated into the efficacy estimate?

I'd love to know more about what the people you've spoken to have said - e.g. what kinds of accountability or transparency are they looking for?

I'm not sure (my active intro cb days were ~2019), but I think it is possibly still in the intro syllabus ? You could add a disclaimer at the top.

I'm not on LW very often, how frequently do you see these emojis being used?

From a UX perspective, I agree with Akash - it seems like there are way too many options and my prior is that people wouldn't use >80% of them.

I think this might be a good top level post - would be keen for you more people to see and discuss this point

Is AWF considering hiring a fundraiser to help fill this funding gap?

Thanks for this! A few questions:

1. Of the 100 strategic pairings you did, how would you break down the impact / what was the outcome of the pairings?

2. how do you think the AI for animals group will benefit animals? E.g. what kind of concrete outcomes do you expect to see?

3. do you have a user survey or feedback on the relative value of the different services you provide? How do you prioritize between different initiatives?

These are all great points. I was planning to add this into the main post, but I don't think it ended up in the final draft - so thanks for raising this! 

Update: It's posted! https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/SWfwmqnCPid8PuTBo/monetary-and-social-incentives-in-longtermist-careers

"Less than half of this round of MATS scholars were funded for independent research."

-> Its not clear to me what exactly the bar for independent research should be. It seems like it's not a great fit for a lot of people, and I expect it to be incredibly hard to do it well as a relatively junior person. So it doesn't have to be a bad thing that some MATS scholars didn't get funding.

Also, I don't necessarily think that orgs being unable to hire is in and of itself a sign of a funding bottleneck. I think you'd first need to make the case that these organisations are crossing a certain impact threshold.

(I do believe AIS lacks diversify of funders and agree with your overall point).

My understanding is that the main reason people wouldn't want to publicize their involvement is to minimize reputation risk(most likely because of FTX). For those doing direct work it could hurt their ability to engage with non-EA actors. I think this is a pretty compelling reason not to publicize your involvement.

I was going to post something for careers week but it was delayed for various reasons (including the mandatory last minute rewrite). I plan to post it in the next couple of weeks.

Ah yes thanks! Meant to delete this.

An easier approach might be to mention on your Swapcard profile that you may not be able to respond to everyone who reaches out before the conference. 

There are people who I would consider "EA" who I wouldn't consider a "community member" (e.g. if they were not engaging much with other people in the community professionally or socially), but I'd be surprised if they label themselves "EA" (maybe they want to keep their identity small, or don't like being associated with the EA community). 

I think there's actually one class of people I've forgotten - which is "EA professionals" - someone who might professionally collaborate or even work at an EA-aligned organization, but doesn't see themselves as part of the community. So they would treat an EAG as a purely professional conference (vs. a community event). 

Thanks for sharing this post, this is a really positive step forward in transparency, I especially appreciated the list of attendees and description of the structure of the Forum. I like that there will be assigned owners of different projects, and I hope that outcomes of the Forum and information on initiatives that came out of it will also be shared with the community. 

TL:DR; 

I think that ultimately, issues pertinent to the community need to have meaningful, two way, sustained engagement with the community. I'd like to see participation from mo... (read more)

Do you have plan to share the results of the community survey? 

I like that you've included some older posts in the sequence - lots of great content that gets lost because the Forum can be a newsfeed.

I'd love to nominate some posts for consideration. Some were very influential at the time and garnered some good discussion, continue to be solid advice or have interesting insights: 

SHOW: A framework for shaping your talent for direct work (I like that it focuses a lot on getting outside of EA to build your career)

High absorbency career paths (helpful at a more career meta level rather than individual decision-making... (read more)

(Pretty confident about the choice, but finding it hard to explain the rationale)

I have started using "member of the EA community" vs "EAs" when I write publicly.

Previously I cared a lot less about using these terms interchangeabley, mainly because referring to myself as an EA didn't seem inaccurate, it's quicker and I don't really see it as tying my identity closely to EA, but over time have changed my mind for a few reasons:

Many people I would consider "EA" in the sense that they work on high impact causes, socially engage with other community members et... (read more)

Thank you! >25% that you'd take the job.

There are alternatives that are dramatically less monetarily and time-intensive, and more likely to lead to productive outcomes. 

Could you say more about the alternatives approaches?

Yeah, I hope we will! Thanks for engaging with me in a productive and open way, this conversation has been helpful. 

That's fair point regarding Kat's comment - I would be curious to know what kind of changes they made.

I hadn't seen the testimony re Ben so thanks for sharing that, would definitely like to see response / engagement on this point from Emerson as well.

Edit on Dec 26 2023: not sure it's worth people freaking this given the new nonlinear updates. I think it makes the below comment outdated. I don't think I would still endorse the specific claims in this comment if i came back to it. 

Re patterns of behaviors - I believe I still disagree here. The way I'd summarize it (poorly) is something like: "Nonlinear have a history of negative behavior towards employees, they have continued to demonstrate some negative behaviors, and have not acknowledged that some of their behavior was harmful to others" (edited... (read more)

Is there a way to snooze the community tab or snooze / hide certain posts? I would use this feature.

Hi Minh, Appreciate you sharing your views publicly here. I think you're acting in good faith, and if others engage with this comment I hope they see that as well. 

I think it's very possible the Nonlinear team handled different employees very differently, especially since you started interning with them after Alice and Chloe had left and from Nonlinear's account, it sounds like they made some changes (e.g. not having employees live and work with them).

Overall, I don't think I've updated my views much as a result of this comment. I won't cite every exa... (read more)

I agree with your high level point but not necessarily the example you give - I agree with Habryka's reasoning.

I have seen a handful of instances of people writing what I believe are useful contributions that might spark a discussion, but are controversial being downvoted.

Thanks for sharing this Lawrence, I find it really helpful to hear views of direct / technical people's views on gaps they see (as opposed to full-time field or community builders views)!

I know that at least at the events themselves, people attending are often grateful to the organizers, because they are often interacting with them before / during the event.

But online, it might be nice to have a space to acknowledge individuals by name somewhere (e.g. in an impact report?)

This is great! I'll post "Monetary and social incentives in longtermist careers" either during the week or before (I was writing this post anyways, but this will be provide a good accountability mechanism!) 

Thanks for sharing this link Charlotte. - I think it's good for the community to be aware of what's happening, even if they are evolving events.

I think this post would have been more useful with some summary in your linkpost of what the OP claims were, since it was a long post that covered a lot. It seems like a few commenters summarized it, but it wasn't immediately relevant what the key concerns were and how one should view the situation.

I found this post by Rob Bensinger of anonymous comments on EA from 2017 , with the question prompt: 

If you could magically change the effective altruism community tomorrow, what things would you change? [...] If possible, please mark your level of involvement/familiarity with EA[.]. 

Many still resonate today. I recommend reading the whole list, but there are a lot - so I've chosen a few highlights and comment exchanges I thought were particularly interesting. I've shortened a few for brevity (indicated by ellipses).

I don't agree with many of the... (read more)

+1 to the the amount of money being really high relative to other clubs (and - importantly - other on campus jobs).

At my college (Haverford College, small liberal arts in the US) the only "club" that was paid (to my knowledge) was the environmental committee, and this was because 1) it was a committee which liaised with the other offices on campus (e.g. president's office, arboretum, faculty) and it existed because 2) it was funded by an independent donor.

Only the org leaders were compensated and this was at the college-wide student rate of between $9-10 (... (read more)

A combination of one and three, but hard to say exactly the boundaries. E.g. I think they thought it was the best cause area for themselves (and maybe people in their country) but not everyone globally or something.

I think they may not have really thought about two in-depth, because of the feeling that they "should" care about one and prioritize it, and appeared somewhat guilty or hesitant to share their actual views because they thought they would be judged. They mentioned having spoken to a bunch of others and feeling like that was what everyone else was saying.

It's possible they did think two though (it was a few years ago, so I'm not sure).

One data point to add in support: I once spoke to a relatively new EA who was part of a uni group who said they "should" believe that longtermism/AI safety is the top cause, but when I asked them what their actual prio was said it was mental health.

This post has now been updated with new numbers. The summary of changes are detailed in this follow-up post. 

This is an interesting idea, I think your post could be stronger & allow people to evaluate whether they want to participate better if it was more clear on the following points: 

Logistics related: 

• Is "we" referring to Overcome? How is your organization involved in this project? You mention you provide fiscal sponsorship but it might be worth first spelling out who you are, your track record and whether someone would want to work / volunteer for your organization. 
  • You say "We've got 3.5 years of experience running EA mental health project

I've heard a new anecdote from someone who's actively working on a AI research project who feels less connected to relevant people in their domain to get feedback on it. 

This looks super exciting, I'm keen to see how it goes! I'd love to know more about you evaluated the need for this program, and where you'd expect the majority of roles for this kind of research to be (e.g. grantmaking organizations, charities themselves, other meta organizations?) in the next few years.
 

Update: I'm reaching out to a few people to add in more individual donor data and will be updating the post once i get those numbers. I expect this would 5-10x the numbers for 2012-2016 for individual donors depending on how I count it, which is a significant increase. 

I'll comment here when I've made updates to the charts. 

It would be useful to be able to have a change log add-on that shows up as a banner on the top of a post (and ideally but this might be a bit spammy, notifies people who have read, or maybe upvoted or commented on the post) so that they know when a correction has been made. 

Many people may not go back to a post after reading, or notice the change-log (if the authors even include one) - and the changes can often be really important. 

Quick solution: Have a box where people can add their change log and make it a pinned comment (but only for the purp... (read more)

+1 I've found this problem a lot. Also the fuzzy search on the search bar is sometimes too fuzzy (e.g. the opposite problem)

Update: The 2012 numbers don't include your donations, but the 2013 ones do - I've corrected the 2012 numbers. Thanks for the flag!

 

Have the answers to these questions changed over the years ? E.g. how might you have answered them in 2017 or 2015?

Yep that's true! I was originally planning to calculate the operating expenses and backfill the chart but it was time consuming, and it was really hard to find data for GWWC / CEA data more generally (I requested CEA for numbers but they declined to provide historical financial figures)

Let me check on your early donations from you and Julia - there may have been an error in my charts!

For catering.

What's the difference between Bay Area spaces and Trajan ? They seemed roughly the same to me?