Let’s advertise infrastructure projects

Arepo23 Sep 2022 14:01 UTC
109 points
24 comments3 min readEA link

There are a number of EA infrastructure projects that provide free or cheap support to other effective altruists, two of which I’m involved with. Something they all seem to have in common is that a major limiting factor is spreading the word about the availability of the service or product and keeping the word spread.

One can justify a handful of posts on here and in Facebook groups about any given project, but after that, unless it has changed in some way, further posts seem increasingly like spam—even when the project is still useful and still limited by EAs’ remembering or ever knowing of it.

So this is a quick post with a few related objectives:

  1. to call for better standardisation of norms for promoting such projects

  2. to open discussion of some kind of such advertising on this forum, since it’s probably the single place where it would be most visible

  3. to discuss the possibility of advertising in other venues. Eg such projects could promote each other—although again a limiter is that not all such projects know about all the others

  4. partly to help with 3, partly for its own sake, to provide a list of such projects. I’ll mention all the ones that occur to me below with the best description I can easily find. Please let me know any I’ve missed in the comments, and I’ll edit them into this post

The last could be quite subjective since anything could qualify as a resource and I don’t want the list to become overwhelming, so I’ll give some initial guidelines—feel free to persuade me they should be changed:

  • The resource should be free to use, or at available at a substantial discount to relatively poor EAs

  • It should be aimed specifically at EAs

  • It should make the people using its lives better, not just ‘enable them to do more good’

  • 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)

At the very least, hopefully this post can then become a useful reference for people looking to see what benefits the community can provide them.

Coworking/​socialising:

  • EA Gather Town—An always-on virtual meeting place for coworking, connecting, and having both casual and impactful conversations

  • EAVR—A community for people interested in Effective Altruism who use VR to connect and collaborate

  • EA Anywhere—An online EA community for everyone

  • EA coworking Discord—A Discord server dedicated to online coworking

Professional services:

  • Altruistic Agency—provides free tech support and development to organisations

  • Tech support from Soof Golan

  • 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.

  • EA mental health navigator—aims to boost people’s well-being by connecting them with mental health resources considered to be effective and to have the greatest likelihood of being helpful

  • 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:

Financial and other material support:

  • CEEALAR/​formerly the EA hotel—Provides free or subsidised serviced accommodation and board, and a moderate stipend for other living expenses.

  • 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

  • FTX Future Fund—Supports ambitious projects to improve humanity’s long-term prospects

  • 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.

Arepo23 Sep 2022 14:01 UTC
109 points
24 comments3 min readEA link