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I appreciate the AMA style post!
Are you interested in projects that do outreach and community building to mid-career professionals, especially in tech, where some of the projects help these professionals hear about and/or transition into longtermism roles?
(If some of these parts sound like a good fit and some don’t—could you tell me which are which? If any of this sounds like a good fit then I’ll share some projects I’m working on or considering working on)
The answer is yes, I can think of some projects in this general area that sound good to me. I’d encourage you to email me or sign up to talk to me about your ideas and we can go from there. As is always the case, a lot rides on further specifics about the project — i.e. just the bare fact that something is focused on mid-career professionals in tech doesn’t give me a lot of info about whether it’s something we’d want to fund or not.
Thanks, I only meant to ask if focusing on mid-career tech is already a deal breaker for things you’d be interested in, and I understand that isn’t.
Here are some ideas:
EA tech newsletter
Aim to keep people somewhat engaged in EA and hear about opportunities that fit them when these people are looking for work.
Draft
Running local groups that publicly transparently look for impactful tech companies together
This is good because:
If a tech person goes to a local EA group and asks how to have impact without working remotely, the group will have some answer beyond “read these 100 articles” and “we have lots of ways to analyze but no answers” (I think this is a negative first experience for senior tech people approaching EA groups)
It will hopefully spread the word to the tech community about “yeah, some companies are more impactful than others, and it’s possible to do the analysis”
Longer pitch here (linkpost to the EA tech FB group)
Hiring
EA hiring agency
Maybe specifically for tech, maybe for other important-and-hard-to-hire jobs (Open Phil researchers?)
Supporting EA orgs hiring: I think there are many low hanging fruit problems to solve with EA hiring (1, 2, and many more), but this is unrelated to community building.
Does improving 80k’s job board’s conversation count as “outreach”, since they have so much traffic?
Create a conversation in EA longtermism about “very senior people: working directly is probably more impactful than donating”
I can send my draft privately.
EAG for tech? (I’m not sold on this yet, but maybe)
Also ,here’s a thread of EA tech community building ideas, unrelated to outreach or longtermism (join the group here).
P.S
If you’d fund a CFAR or similar workshop in Israel, we have many people from EA+Lesswrong Israel who’d be interested, including me. (I estimate this would be less than $10k)
I’ll schedule with you anyway, we can use this as an agenda, but I encourage you to brutally filter out the ideas that seem bad, or at least to voice your actual opinion. Helping me prioritize is welcome, and most of these projects are getting very little attention from me.
Cool, looking forward to talking about these.
1) Are you interested in increasing diversity of the longtermist community? If so, alongside what lines?
One possibility is to increase shares of minorities according to US Census Bureau topics: race, sex, age, education, income, etc. Ways of thinking about EA, one’s (static or dynamic) comparative advantages, or roles naturally/nurturally taken in a team would be irrelevant. The advantage of this diversification is its (type 1 thinking) acceptance/endorsement among some decisionmaking environments in EA, such as the Bay Area or London. The disadvantage is that diversity of perspectives may not necessarily be gained (for example, students of different race, sex, and parents’ income studying at the same school may think alike).
Another possibility is to focus on the ways of thinking about EA, one’s current comparative advantage and that which they can uniquely develop, and roles that they currently or prospectively enjoy. In this case, Census-type demographics would be disregarded. The disadvantage is that diversity might not be apparent (for example, affluent white people, predominantly males, who think in very different ways about the long-term future and work well together could constitute the majority of community members). The advantage is that things would get done and different perspectives considered.
These two options can be combined in a narrative-actual or actual-narrative ways: Census-type diversity could be an instrument for thinking/action/roles diversity, while only the former is narrated publicly. Or, vice versa, people of various thinking/comparative advantages/preferred roles would be attracted to increase Census-type fractions. Is either necessary or a great way to mitigate reputational loss risk? Do you have an available strategy on the longtermist community growth?
2) Is it possible to apply for a grant without collaborators but with a relevant experience or strategy of finding them?
For example, can one apply if they had previously advertised and interviewed others for a similar EA-related opportunity but have not initiated an advertisement process for the application?
Do you award grants or vary their amount conditional on others’ interest? For example, is it possible to apply for a range depending on a collaborator’s compensation preference or experience? Is it possible to forgo a grant if no qualified candidate is interested?
We’re interested in increasing the diversity of the longtermist community along many different axes. It’s hard to give a unified ‘strategy’ at this abstract level, but one thing we’ve been particularly excited about recently is outreach in non-Western and non-English-speaking countries.
Yes, you can apply for a grant under these circumstances. It’s possible that we’ll ask you to come back once more aspects of the plan are figured out, but we have no hard rules about that. And yes, it’s possible to apply for funding conditional on some event and later return the money/adjust the amount you want downwards if the event doesn’t happen.