Let’s advertise EA infrastructure projects, May 2023
Per the discussion in my last advertising post, I’m currently aiming to write a post every 3 months advertising EA infrastructure projects that would otherwise struggle to get and maintain awareness.
Please let me know if there’s a project I should add (see inclusion criteria below the adverts). I’ve added a comment below as a downvote sink to offset karma from this post. If you want to signal boost these projects without throwing karma at me, please upvote this post and then downvote that comment with the same weight.
From now on I’ll italicise organisations added since the previous post was originally submitted and bold those edited in to the current one after posting, to make it easier for people to scan for new entries.
Now on with the adverts:
Coworking/socialising
EA Gather Town—An always-on virtual meeting place for coworking, connecting, and having both casual and impactful conversations
EA Anywhere—An online EA community for everyone
EA coworking Discord—A Discord server dedicated to online coworking
Free or subsidised accommodation
CEEALAR/formerly the EA hotel—Provides free or subsidised serviced accommodation and board, and a moderate stipend for other living expenses.
NonLinear’s EA house database - An experiment by Nonlinear to try to connect EAs with extra space with EAs who could do good work if they didn’t have to pay rent (or could pay less rent).
Professional services
WorkStream Business Systems—a service dedicated to EAs, helping you improve your workflow, boost your bottom line and take control of your business
cFactual—a new, EA-aligned strategy consultancy with the purpose of maximising its counterfactual impact
Good Governance Project—helps EA organizations create strong boards by finding qualified and diverse professionals
Altruistic Agency—provides discounted tech support and development to organisations
Legal advice from Tyrone Barugh—a practice under consideration with the primary aim of providing legal support to EA orgs and individual EAs, with that practice probably being based in the UK.
SEADS—Data Science services to EA organizations
User-Friendly - an EA-aligned marketing agency
Anti Entropy—offers services related operations for EA organizations
Arb—Our consulting work spans forecasting, machine learning, and epidemiology. We do original research, evidence reviews, and large-scale data pipelines.
Pineapple Operations—Maintains a public database of people who are seeking operations or Personal Assistant/Executive Assistant work (part- or full-time) within the next 6 months in the Effective Altruism ecosystem
Coaching
AI Safety Support—free health coaching to people working on AI safety
80,0000 Hours career coaching—Speak with us for free about using your career to help solve one of the world’s most pressing problems
Yonatan Cale—Coaching for software devs
EA-targeted tools
Fatebook for Slack—a Slack bot designed to help high-impact orgs build a culture of forecasting.
Confido—A forecasting tool for during meetings or for within organisation! Potentially makes meetings faster and it is a simple way to get some groups forecasts.
Financial and other material support
Nonlinear productivity fund—A low-barrier fund paying for productivity enhancing tools for top longtermists. Supported services and products include Coaching, Therapy, Sleep coaching, Medication management , Personal Assistants, Research Assistants, Virtual Assistants, Tutors (e.g. ML, CS, language), Asana, FocusMate, Zapier, etc., Productivity apps, A/C, dishwashers, etc, SAD Lamps
Effective Altruism Funds—Whether an individual, organisation or other entity, we’re eager to fund great ideas and great people.
Nonlinear fund—We incubate longtermist nonprofits by connecting founders with ideas, funding, and mentorship
Survival and Flourishing Fund—A “virtual fund”: we organize application submission and evaluation processes to help donors decide where to make donations.
Open Philanthropy Project—a research and grantmaking foundation that aims to share its findings openly
Berkeley Existential Risk Initiative—Supports university research groups working to reduce x-risk, by providing them with free services and support.
Inclusion criteria for other organisations
The guidelines remain as follows (open to discussion, and if there’s something you think is essential to let people know about which doesn’t strictly fit, feel free to suggest it—for eg the house database doesn’t technically qualify, but seemed too valuable to omit):
The resource should be free to use, or at available at a substantial discount to relatively poor EAs
It should be aimed specifically at EA-oriented people
It should be for the direct benefit of the people using it, not just to ‘enable them to do more good’ (though hopefully that will be a side benefit)
It should be available to people across the world (ie. not just a local EA group)
It should be a service or product that someone is putting ongoing work into (ie not just a list of tips, or Facebook/Discord/Slack groups with no purpose other than discussion of some EA subtopic)
Also, let me know if I should remove or edit any of the descriptions. I’ve checked it for broken links but haven’t done any further editing.
Im missing two of my personal top recommendations here:
The EA Focusmate group. I have made some good connections there, somehow I feel it works better if I am matched with someone from this community.
Confido.institute . A forecasting tool for during meetings or for within organisation! Potentially makes meetings faster and it is a simple way to get some groups forecasts.
Hey Sam, I’ve added Confido to the list, thanks :)
Re EA Focusmate, I’ve left it off because afaik it doesn’t meet the ‘putting ongoing work into’ criterion, which is there partly to recognise and acclaim such efforts, partly to stop the list from getting swamped with ‘someone set up something one time, seems like it could be useful idk’ kind of efforts.
Also, I’m biased, but if you want to come and make connections with EAs, I would strongly recommend the Gather Town over it, which is there for exactly that purpose, less hassle to set up and (IMO) a generally warmer place.
The point about ongoing work seems fair enough!
On Gather Town: My problem with it is that to me Gather Town is too much fun, you are right it is a warmer place and more fun place, but I want to spend my time on a service like this working, not having casual chats with EAs, racing on a racetrack or just exploring the space!
How long ago did you use it? I’m not implying the problem is fixed, but we have tried a few things to give it an increased productivity value. Also if you have any thoughts on how to make it more reliably give you what you want I’d love to hear them—this is definitely an ongoing concern!
Thoughts on including EA-oriented tools? I’ve added one at its creator’s suggestion, though I’m not sure if there are so many such tools that a fair inclusion policy would be an enormous list (though if so, maybe tools would deserve their own advertising thread?). Should I add eg Squiggle/Guesstimate/others?
There’s a newer version of this post here. I suggest that this one be linked to at the top of this post so that people don’t spend a bunch of time reading through this only to realize there is a more up-to-date list of resources. thanks!
I’ve put them all in a sequence, whose link is at the very top, but I guess they need something more visible?
Ah, right—there is that element of the interface for a series of posts. I sort of missed it though, and I wonder how many other people miss UI elements like that too, or don’t understand what they do. And I’d say people may not realize that this is somewhat of a special series of posts, where newer posts supersede earlier posts and if someone is looking at an older one, then as I understand it, they almost certainly should be looking at the newest one.
Please downvote this comment if you want to signal boost the OP but cancel out the karma-farming effect.
I appreciate this comment