This is a great post, thanks so much for sharing it!
I’m curating it.The specific takeaways listed are backed by experience running a very successful project and are usefully not obvious. Moreover, it seems that people interested in working on effective altruism should learn from projects like VaccinateCA.
And I really appreciate the spirit of the post — if anyone reading this comment didn’t get to the last section of the post, I encourage you to skim it. [1]
A very rough summary of the post’s takeaways —please feel free to ask me to correct or change this:
Enabling trade as a mechanism for impact is a leveraged opportunty
Engaging with the system
501c3 status helped with getting funding and appearing legitimate
positive press was surprisingly helpful for opening doors and appearing legitimate — this was part of a coordinated comms strategy
Professional backgrounds / career advice — what was useful?
Having financial runway “to commit early and boldly to the project even if it exposed me to temporary career risk”
sufficient social capital to call in favors with various actors within the tech community and get commitments to resources or other things we needed
And “placement in a social graph with a sufficiently high density of high agency people”
good understanding of the “general factor of infrastructure”
capability to write good software quickly continues to be a superpower
What would have been useful
skilled, experienced people managers
For those interested in learning more, the “oral history” of VaccinateCA that was mentioned is fascinating (but I haven’t read much of it and it is very long — if someone finds a summary, I’ll be grateful).
Specific highlights: (1) the post’s author doesn’t identify as an EA but is engaging on the Forum anyway — which is awesome, (2) and the entirety of this part:
I consider myself fairly well-educated and well-raised in a moral tradition that has spent a lot of brainsweat on questions like “What is one’s duty to society and to one’s fellow man?” In that moral tradition, presented with the narrow question of “Given that one is in a position of authority and has a course of action available to save hundreds of lives, what is one’s duty?”, the answer is so straightforward as to be uninteresting.
But nobody, not once in my life, drew out the implication regarding expected value math until you all did.
For this you have my eternal gratitude.
And, should circumstances ever find you or yours looking at an expected value calculation that rhymes with the above, know that you’d have my instant attention and (pending thinking through it, in the words of a well-known articulator of my moral tradition) you have my sword.
This is a great post, thanks so much for sharing it!
I’m curating it.The specific takeaways listed are backed by experience running a very successful project and are usefully not obvious. Moreover, it seems that people interested in working on effective altruism should learn from projects like VaccinateCA.
And I really appreciate the spirit of the post — if anyone reading this comment didn’t get to the last section of the post, I encourage you to skim it. [1]
A very rough summary of the post’s takeaways —please feel free to ask me to correct or change this:
Enabling trade as a mechanism for impact is a leveraged opportunty
Engaging with the system
501c3 status helped with getting funding and appearing legitimate
positive press was surprisingly helpful for opening doors and appearing legitimate — this was part of a coordinated comms strategy
Professional backgrounds / career advice — what was useful?
Having financial runway “to commit early and boldly to the project even if it exposed me to temporary career risk”
sufficient social capital to call in favors with various actors within the tech community and get commitments to resources or other things we needed
And “placement in a social graph with a sufficiently high density of high agency people”
good understanding of the “general factor of infrastructure”
capability to write good software quickly continues to be a superpower
What would have been useful
skilled, experienced people managers
For those interested in learning more, the “oral history” of VaccinateCA that was mentioned is fascinating (but I haven’t read much of it and it is very long — if someone finds a summary, I’ll be grateful).
Specific highlights: (1) the post’s author doesn’t identify as an EA but is engaging on the Forum anyway — which is awesome, (2) and the entirety of this part:
In case people are interested, Zvi shared a summary of the history (on LessWrong): Key Mostly Outward-Facing Facts From the Story of VaccinateCA.