Maybe now is a good time to review that response and figure out what could’ve been done better. For example, maybe some person or organization could’ve made a point of reaching out individually to each and every FTX grantee.
For me, the OP resonates well beyond just the FTX stuff though. There’s an element of making personal sacrifices for the greater good that exists in EA, which doesn’t exist in the same way for an academic discipline. I myself found the lack of supportiveness in EA very alienating, and it’s a major reason why I’m not very involved these days.
One idea is something like a “Basefund for mental health”, to provide free or low-cost therapy for EAs—possibly group therapy. EAs have already made the argument that mental health could be an effective cause area. If that’s true, “mental health for EAs” could be a doubly effective cause area. Beyond the first-order benefit of improving someone’s mental health, you can improve someone’s mental health in a way that enables them to do good.
Oh true! I was only thinking of financial support for struggling projects and project developers, but those kinds of support are also super valuable!
Rethink Wellbeing is definitely on board with mental health for EAs being an important cause area.
I don’t think personal identity makes too much sense, so preventing the extinction of EA-related values (or maybe even some wider set of prosocial, procivilizational values) could be an underexplored cause area. Some sort of EA crisis fund could be a way to achieve that, but also archival of important insights and such.
There was a supportive response, to some degree, in the wake of FTX:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/BesfLENShzSMeb7Xi/community-support-given-ftx-situation
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/7PqmnrBhSX4yCyMCk/effective-peer-support-network-in-ftx-crisis-update
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/gbjxQuEhjAYsgWz8T/a-job-matching-service-for-affected-ftxff-grantees
Maybe now is a good time to review that response and figure out what could’ve been done better. For example, maybe some person or organization could’ve made a point of reaching out individually to each and every FTX grantee.
For me, the OP resonates well beyond just the FTX stuff though. There’s an element of making personal sacrifices for the greater good that exists in EA, which doesn’t exist in the same way for an academic discipline. I myself found the lack of supportiveness in EA very alienating, and it’s a major reason why I’m not very involved these days.
One idea is something like a “Basefund for mental health”, to provide free or low-cost therapy for EAs—possibly group therapy. EAs have already made the argument that mental health could be an effective cause area. If that’s true, “mental health for EAs” could be a doubly effective cause area. Beyond the first-order benefit of improving someone’s mental health, you can improve someone’s mental health in a way that enables them to do good.
Oh true! I was only thinking of financial support for struggling projects and project developers, but those kinds of support are also super valuable!
Rethink Wellbeing is definitely on board with mental health for EAs being an important cause area.
I don’t think personal identity makes too much sense, so preventing the extinction of EA-related values (or maybe even some wider set of prosocial, procivilizational values) could be an underexplored cause area. Some sort of EA crisis fund could be a way to achieve that, but also archival of important insights and such.