As a student involved with some community building work and some other voluntary EA-aligned work, I’m still a bit reluctant (perhaps irrationally so) to apply for “converting energy to time” funding and thought that I’d share what I think my reservations are.
I think it feels too self-centred to consider things like healthy ready meals and Ubers for me to be worth EA funding when this could theoretically go to AMF instead.
I’m worried that I won’t end up using the time saved for EA work.
I’m worried that getting funding will make me feel a stronger external obligation towards EA work than I’d like (over say, just relaxing).
Having thought about this, I think it could make sense for me to try spending more for a while to convert money into time, then determine how much of this time I’m using for EA work, and then try to work out what a reasonable amount of funding to request would be based on this.
Hi, thank you for your post!
As a student involved with some community building work and some other voluntary EA-aligned work, I’m still a bit reluctant (perhaps irrationally so) to apply for “converting energy to time” funding and thought that I’d share what I think my reservations are.
I think it feels too self-centred to consider things like healthy ready meals and Ubers for me to be worth EA funding when this could theoretically go to AMF instead.
I’m worried that I won’t end up using the time saved for EA work.
I’m worried that getting funding will make me feel a stronger external obligation towards EA work than I’d like (over say, just relaxing).
I’m personally a little paranoid about EA falling into a meta trap (https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/J3gZxFqsCFmzNosNa/ea-risks-falling-into-a-meta-trap-but-we-can-avoid-it) which slightly biases me against funding + asking to be funded for meta work.
Having thought about this, I think it could make sense for me to try spending more for a while to convert money into time, then determine how much of this time I’m using for EA work, and then try to work out what a reasonable amount of funding to request would be based on this.