On CB, my views that are half informed by EA CBs and half personal opinions:
Very casual events—If you are holding no events for a long time and don’t have much capacity, just hold low-stakes casual events and follow-up with high-engaged people afterwards. Highly-engaged people tend to show up/follow up several times after learning about EA anyway. 80-90% of the time, I think having some casual events every few weeks is better than no casual events.
Bigger events—Try to direct highly-engaged people to bigger and/or more specialised events. The EA community is big and diverse, and letting people know other events exist lets them self-select better. When I first explored beyond EA Singapore, I spent 2 months straight learning about every EA org and resource in existence, individually reviewing all the Swapcard profiles at every EAG. That was absolutely worth the effort, IMO.[1]
1-on-1s are probably still important − 1-on-1s with someone of very similar interest areas or career trajectories are the most valuable experiences in EA, in my opinion. Only 10% of 1-on-1s are like this, but they more than make up for the 90% that don’t really go anywhere. As much as I try to optimise, this seems to be a numbers game of just finding and meeting a lot of potentially interesting people.[2]
Online resources—For highly-engaged EAs, important information should be online-first. I’m of the opinion that highly-engaged/agentic new EAs tend to read a lot online, and can gain >80% of the same field-specific knowledge reading on their own. This especially holds true in AI Safety, which is like … code and research that’s all publicly available short of frontier models. I think events should be for casual socials, intentional networking and accountability+complex coordination (basically, coworkers).
If you want the 80⁄20 for AI Safety, check out aisafety.training, aisafety.world, check EA Forum, Lesswrong and Alignment Forum once a week (~1 hour/week), check 80k job board and EA Opportunities Board once a week (~20 minutes/week), review forum tags for things like prizes, job opportunities and research programs to see what programs were run last year that will be run again this year.
It is possible to capture all open opportunities this way. The rest is just researching interesting orgs, seeing which ones you vibe with and engaging with them. This is just for AI Safety, for other cause areas I’d expect the same amount of time spent passively checking.
My personal view is people should slightly prioritise “potentially interesting” over “potentially useful”. The few times I’ve met EAs just because they’re high-ranking, the conversation is usually generic and could have been had by Googling and emailing/texting.
On CB, my views that are half informed by EA CBs and half personal opinions:
Very casual events—If you are holding no events for a long time and don’t have much capacity, just hold low-stakes casual events and follow-up with high-engaged people afterwards. Highly-engaged people tend to show up/follow up several times after learning about EA anyway. 80-90% of the time, I think having some casual events every few weeks is better than no casual events.
Bigger events—Try to direct highly-engaged people to bigger and/or more specialised events. The EA community is big and diverse, and letting people know other events exist lets them self-select better. When I first explored beyond EA Singapore, I spent 2 months straight learning about every EA org and resource in existence, individually reviewing all the Swapcard profiles at every EAG. That was absolutely worth the effort, IMO.[1]
1-on-1s are probably still important − 1-on-1s with someone of very similar interest areas or career trajectories are the most valuable experiences in EA, in my opinion. Only 10% of 1-on-1s are like this, but they more than make up for the 90% that don’t really go anywhere. As much as I try to optimise, this seems to be a numbers game of just finding and meeting a lot of potentially interesting people.[2]
Online resources—For highly-engaged EAs, important information should be online-first. I’m of the opinion that highly-engaged/agentic new EAs tend to read a lot online, and can gain >80% of the same field-specific knowledge reading on their own. This especially holds true in AI Safety, which is like … code and research that’s all publicly available short of frontier models. I think events should be for casual socials, intentional networking and accountability+complex coordination (basically, coworkers).
If you want the 80⁄20 for AI Safety, check out aisafety.training, aisafety.world, check EA Forum, Lesswrong and Alignment Forum once a week (~1 hour/week), check 80k job board and EA Opportunities Board once a week (~20 minutes/week), review forum tags for things like prizes, job opportunities and research programs to see what programs were run last year that will be run again this year.
It is possible to capture all open opportunities this way. The rest is just researching interesting orgs, seeing which ones you vibe with and engaging with them. This is just for AI Safety, for other cause areas I’d expect the same amount of time spent passively checking.
My personal view is people should slightly prioritise “potentially interesting” over “potentially useful”. The few times I’ve met EAs just because they’re high-ranking, the conversation is usually generic and could have been had by Googling and emailing/texting.