Let’s advertise EA infrastructure projects, Feb 2023
A few months ago I posted an advertisement for various EA infrastructure projects on the grounds that there are now many such free or discounted services, and there’s very little ongoing way to bring them to the attention of newcomers or remind people who’ve been around longer and may have forgotten about them.
The trouble is, that post had the same issues all attempts to broadcast ideas in this space do: it sat on the front page for a few hours and then fell away—with the organisations I edited in later getting almost no exposure. So this post is essentially a repost of it, albeit with the suggestions that were edited in later from the start. Ideally I would hope a post like this could be pinned to the top of the forum, but in lieu of that, I’m wondering about posting something like this every N months. My reservations are a) the hassle and b) it being too spammy (or, conversely, that it ends up being a cheap way of karma farming—to counteract this I’ve left a comment below for counterbalancing downvotes if you upvote this post). Please let me know your thoughts in the comments: assuming nothing better is implemented, should I continue to do this? If so, for what value of N/under what conditions?
Meanwhile, without further ado, here are the projects that you should check out (edit: bolded entries are new since originally posting):
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
Training for Good—Our goal is to help you clarify your aims, reduce self-imposed friction, and improve your leadership.
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.
As before, please let me know if I missed any in the comments. The guidelines remain as follows (though 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 EAs
It should be for the direct benefit of the people using it, not just to ‘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)
Also, let me know if I should remove or edit any of the descriptions. I’ve lightly curated it and removed some broken links (FTX Foundation has disappeared for some reason) but haven’t done any substantial checking.
- Mindmap with overview of EA organisations via tinyurl.com/eamindmap (and many other lists of orgs) by (15 Jun 2023 6:38 UTC; 115 points)
- Let’s advertise EA infrastructure projects, May 2023 by (23 May 2023 17:00 UTC; 32 points)
- EA & LW Forum Weekly Summary (30th Jan − 5th Feb 2023) by (7 Feb 2023 2:13 UTC; 21 points)
- EA & LW Forum Weekly Summary (30th Jan − 5th Feb 2023) by (LessWrong; 7 Feb 2023 2:13 UTC; 3 points)
Some low effort thoughts:
If this is meant as a living resource, maybe move the first 2-3 paragraphs to the bottom of the post, and leave just a one line explainer at the top, to make it easier to skim (“There are now more free or discounted services available to EAs and EA orgs. Here is an updated list, which is mostly a repost of [this].”)
Maybe worth linking to your anti karma farming comment in the post so ppl can find it easier?
Other things that might belong here:
EA mental health navigator (and other resources listed here, like the peer support group, off road—unsure if still ongoing?). There are a bunch of coaches and therapists specialized in working with EAs who are there.
cFactual (more for orgs, is my impression?)
The Events andCommunity resources on the Forum
My impression is AISS does a bunch of things outside from the health consulting thing fwiw, like maintaining this and this.
I think it would be confusing to do that at this stage, but if I do periodically make new versions of this post I’ll try harder not to bury the lede :)
Good idea! Done.
I’ll have a look through the other resources you mention when I have a bit more time.
I have an organization, WorkStream, focused on helping orgs be more effective. See my post about it here. We are currently running both management and operations fellowship programs (see more details here), designed to build community and provide access to relevant education to our org leaders. We start the programs on a quarterly basis, so it’s an open application for anyone who wants to apply. It’s not a free resource, but we do try to give scholarships when possible.
Could be worth adding these to the Community Infrastructure wiki description as well.
I like the idea! Upvoted!
What is the reasoning for having “The resource should be free to use, or at available at a substantial discount to relatively poor EAs” as a guideline (and limiting factor)?
It might be a bad guideline! But the thought was that there are thousands of useful services that aren’t preferentially available to EAs, most of which can advertise themselves in the normal way. So this a) keeps the list much smaller and b) helps out organisations who are too targeted and/or not profit-seeking enough to advertise themselves.
Gotcha. I agree (like 60%) with this in the sense that I do want to see the “subsidized” services more heavily promoted. However, if I were the person seeing the list I’d also like to see (for-profit or “not subsidized”) services that already work with EA projects or can in some way accommodate needs of EA projects really well and then I’d use my own judgement to decide what service is better suited for me given my own constraints (budget, time, etc.). Hope that makes sense.
(karma upvoted, agreement downvoted)
Can you think of any specific examples of such services? I really want this list not to get too long, both for the sake of my own time and because I think it becomes less useful the less focused it is, but could be persuaded that some company is just so amazingly useful that it should be on here against the guidelines (hence me wanting them to be guidelines rather than strict criteria).
I definitely wouldn’t mind being reminded of this list once a quarter!
I don’t necessarily disagree but from an organizational perspective: Is this not the sort of thing we have a wiki for?
For me the difference is simply visibility. The forum has a lot of corners, especially for a newcomer (and come to that, for me, and I’ve been posting since it launched!), so having a bit of information tucked away is very different from having it appear in people’s frontpage feed.
Let’s promote the wiki and make it more visible!
Yeah I say keep doing this, once a month tops/once a quarter minimum :)
I found this incredibly helpful. Along these lines, I’ve been searching for existing Earn to Give coaches. I know you can join the GWWC and One For the World communities and attend their events. The Life You Can Save also has a feature where you can reach out to an advisor. But i’m more so curious to know if this is a formal coaching program for making a pledge, similar to what 80,000 hours has with their career coaching program.
This isn’t necessarily an infrastruture project, but seems relevant to the audience of this post: a compilation of resources for dealing with mental health issues around the alignment problem.
Thanks for collating and sharing this.
I’m not sure if this is the right place to brainstorm possible things missing from this list but one thing that comes to mind is tax or investment advice[1] , particularly for those who are earning to give. At least in the US[2], earning to give presents some unusual risks and opportunities, and it’s safe to say most accounting and investment professionals have not worked with clients donating 30% or more of their income. Even if there weren’t a discount, just maintaining a list of professionals with experience with specific jurisdictions could be helpful.
Note that tax advice is different from tax preparation; the former is about arranging affairs so as to minimize taxes.
The situation is sadly even more complex in certain parts of the US, particularly New York.
It sounds like a reasonable idea, though I’m worried that the post will stop functioning as advertising if the criteria are too broad—it feels like it’s already a lot to go through. Maybe we could split it into multiple subjects? That does feel like it would be a step in the spammy direction though (not to mention an increasing headache to curate)
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.
Please downvote this comment if you want to signal boost the OP but cancel out the karma-farming effect.
This is the most EA thing ever and it makes me so happy.
I’m wondering what to understand from the signal of it getting −12 agreement karma :P