This could lead to good habits, but it might also make you focus on details rather than the big picture. Thinking EA too much can be exhausting, make you feel more guilty than necessary or you could become estranged from the people you meet in everyday life.
On the thoughts you sum up, you might add:
Is the small mistake I made today really bad?
Is this small thing a good step in the way to a greater goal?
For example, I always forgive myself if I happen to spend a few dollars more in the supermarket than absolutely necessary in order to eat healthy, and I there are a lot of bigger mistakes I should forgive myself as well. It’s more important to spend enough time on my career and donation strategy.
I have to say that after EA Global Melbourne, where on the middle day I spent almost 16 hours straight thinking and talking about EA related topics, I felt tired but so fulfilled. It was actually hard coming back to my day job. As long as you turn the thoughts into energy and motivation to do more good and you don’t despair (easier said than done) you’ll be ok.
For donations, pay without using a credit card or PayPal so the charity won’t have to pay the 2-3% fee. (Sometimes charities can process credit cards for free, though.) And don’t be shy about letting others know how much you like donating to “top” charities, either! Monkey see, monkey do.
For advocacy:
make more friends and acquaintances. The more people you know, the more you can influence.
Enter more social spheres. To spread things by word of mouth, the more different social spheres you are in, the more it will spread. Even if you talk to the same number of people, those people that you talk to will be talking to different people themselves if they are in different groups/locations. If you stick to one group that you deal with, those people will be more likely just to talk to each other.
Letter writing can be very effective, especially if lots of people do it. Ie. I emailed a coffee and donut chain recently and complained that they don’t have soy milk. If more people complained, they’d have to start carrying it.
Improve your appearance: People are influenced by those that look like them, or are good-looking and successful. Also, appearing to be a happy, well adjusted person would make you a far better advocate. If you come across as weird, unhappy, etc, people will think “I wouldn’t want to be part of any club that would have you as a member,” to paraphrase the old Groucho Marx joke.
For volunteering: if you have a trade or profession that is expensive to employ, that can be very high impact/irreplaceable. Ie. volunteering your accountancy services, or electrical work.
My number one advice for small steps, or what to do when you don’t know what to do for EA, however, is ironically to focus on yourself. Read and watch Youtube videos to educate yourself about whatever topics you feel are most important. Meditate to transcend negative emotions. Cultivate better social skills, or technical skills. As you become more educated on various issues, the manner in which to contribute best will reveal itself. Or you can become more effective at something altruistic you are already doing. Not to mention, if people see that you are educated, they will listen to you more so it greatly improves advocacy.
How Important do you think appearing as not-weird and well adjusted is to our advocacy efforts?
EA’s are known to do some crazy stuff to maximise their impact and I wonder, even if that stuff maximizes their personal impact does it reduce their overall impact by undermining their advocacy.
Basically how significant is the “i wouldn’t want to be part of any club that would have you as a member’ effect?
I don’t think the importance of image in advocacy can be overstated. From what I’ve learned about vegetarian promotion and from my own observations in life, people don’t judge things by their merits, they judge them in terms of how cool they are (ie. How much acceptance it has received from others) or how congruent they are with their existing self-image/worldview.
I don’t think that a person can do “too much” to help others, even if others see it as extremist. I just think that people should keep quiet about actions/beliefs of theirs that could have a negative effect if other people found out about it.
Of course nothing is ever cut and dry. There’s always the possibility that others will come around. For instance, people may at first feel threatened by someone who is making too big a sacrifice – let’s say not having a child so as not to contribute to overpopulation, but then later come to think of it as a good thing once they get accustomed to the idea.
I think we can apply common sense to this question. If you want to appear as a mainstream advocate or fundraiser, and you’re staking your reputation on a few unpopular positions, like animal rights or existential risk reduction, then you should be willing to make some compromises in other areas, like your clothes, hairstyle and conversational manner. Also, you might want to remain apolitical. For example, Jaan Tallinn, who founded the file-sharing program Kazaa, doesn’t discuss the politics of file-sharing these days, instead focussing on his core business of mitigating existential risk. In contrast, if you want to be a contrarian academic leader like Robin Hanson, then you can talk about anything in order to get attention. This path seems riskier though, as it’s much easier to detect whether your personal reputation is growing than to detect whether you are having small detrimental reputational effects diffused over hundreds of other effective altruists.
The other thing that I would say is that if you think X is probably very important yet unpopular, and you think that it’s best not to advocate X in order to preserve your popularity, this is usually a rationalisation. Because if you want to preserve your popularity while promoting X, it will probably be best to attempt to do so right away. Promoting Y instead will not help with the very important end goal.
On the birthday fundraiser, we’ve just made a form where you can indicate that you might be interested in having one next time you age: http://www.charityscience.com/birthday-fundraisers.html . People are finding their friends really responsive, so it’s a great, natural opportunity to direct money to some fantastic charities!
I’d only add that providing support to other effective altruists can be a great use of time :) Even just a simple Facebook message to someone asking how their life is going can give them a solid boost. Especially reaching out to each other in terms of emotional and mental health to make sure we all have strong support systems!
Can anyone think of small actions you can take to improve a specific skill? I am mostly looking for something concrete that you can do in one afternoon or less.
Examples:
improve your rationality with module on clearerthinking.org. Is this actually effective? It looks useful.
The Ralphs (aka The Kroger Company) and Vons (aka Albertsons Companies, Inc.) supermarket chains allow you to direct some money to a charity of your choosing. Traditionally, that meant you could donate to a school district.
While the current list of charities isn’t great, I was able to find a review of KIPP at GiveWell so I send the money their way.
One very cost effective thing to do is to pay someone in india or other outsourceable cheap country to spread the main videos related to effective altruism. Services like MyTasker YourManInIndia and others of the same sort.
For Amazon Smile, you can get browser addons that automatically redirect amazon.com to smile.amazon.com.
Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/smile-always/jgpmhnmjbhgkhpbgelalfpplebgfjmbf?hl=en
Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/amazonsmileredirector/
Thanks. I installed that!
Practice thinking about EA related stuff in your daily life.
Even if you don’t always take the action, even just thinking about it can start to build the mental patterns which you will be able to follow later.
What food would I order today if I were vegan?
What job would I take today if I were earning to give?
How would a utilitarian analyze this ethical dilemma?
This could lead to good habits, but it might also make you focus on details rather than the big picture. Thinking EA too much can be exhausting, make you feel more guilty than necessary or you could become estranged from the people you meet in everyday life.
On the thoughts you sum up, you might add:
Is the small mistake I made today really bad?
Is this small thing a good step in the way to a greater goal?
For example, I always forgive myself if I happen to spend a few dollars more in the supermarket than absolutely necessary in order to eat healthy, and I there are a lot of bigger mistakes I should forgive myself as well. It’s more important to spend enough time on my career and donation strategy.
I have to say that after EA Global Melbourne, where on the middle day I spent almost 16 hours straight thinking and talking about EA related topics, I felt tired but so fulfilled. It was actually hard coming back to my day job. As long as you turn the thoughts into energy and motivation to do more good and you don’t despair (easier said than done) you’ll be ok.
In situations like this, it can be good to put one suggestion in each comment so that other users can upvote each suggestion separately.
Nice. Some of mine:
For donations, pay without using a credit card or PayPal so the charity won’t have to pay the 2-3% fee. (Sometimes charities can process credit cards for free, though.) And don’t be shy about letting others know how much you like donating to “top” charities, either! Monkey see, monkey do.
For advocacy:
make more friends and acquaintances. The more people you know, the more you can influence.
Enter more social spheres. To spread things by word of mouth, the more different social spheres you are in, the more it will spread. Even if you talk to the same number of people, those people that you talk to will be talking to different people themselves if they are in different groups/locations. If you stick to one group that you deal with, those people will be more likely just to talk to each other.
Letter writing can be very effective, especially if lots of people do it. Ie. I emailed a coffee and donut chain recently and complained that they don’t have soy milk. If more people complained, they’d have to start carrying it.
Improve your appearance: People are influenced by those that look like them, or are good-looking and successful. Also, appearing to be a happy, well adjusted person would make you a far better advocate. If you come across as weird, unhappy, etc, people will think “I wouldn’t want to be part of any club that would have you as a member,” to paraphrase the old Groucho Marx joke.
For volunteering: if you have a trade or profession that is expensive to employ, that can be very high impact/irreplaceable. Ie. volunteering your accountancy services, or electrical work.
My number one advice for small steps, or what to do when you don’t know what to do for EA, however, is ironically to focus on yourself. Read and watch Youtube videos to educate yourself about whatever topics you feel are most important. Meditate to transcend negative emotions. Cultivate better social skills, or technical skills. As you become more educated on various issues, the manner in which to contribute best will reveal itself. Or you can become more effective at something altruistic you are already doing. Not to mention, if people see that you are educated, they will listen to you more so it greatly improves advocacy.
How Important do you think appearing as not-weird and well adjusted is to our advocacy efforts?
EA’s are known to do some crazy stuff to maximise their impact and I wonder, even if that stuff maximizes their personal impact does it reduce their overall impact by undermining their advocacy.
Basically how significant is the “i wouldn’t want to be part of any club that would have you as a member’ effect?
I don’t think the importance of image in advocacy can be overstated. From what I’ve learned about vegetarian promotion and from my own observations in life, people don’t judge things by their merits, they judge them in terms of how cool they are (ie. How much acceptance it has received from others) or how congruent they are with their existing self-image/worldview.
I don’t think that a person can do “too much” to help others, even if others see it as extremist. I just think that people should keep quiet about actions/beliefs of theirs that could have a negative effect if other people found out about it.
Of course nothing is ever cut and dry. There’s always the possibility that others will come around. For instance, people may at first feel threatened by someone who is making too big a sacrifice – let’s say not having a child so as not to contribute to overpopulation, but then later come to think of it as a good thing once they get accustomed to the idea.
There is no overpopulation. Let’s at least not use such myths to falsely frame decisions as altruistic sacrifice.
I think we can apply common sense to this question. If you want to appear as a mainstream advocate or fundraiser, and you’re staking your reputation on a few unpopular positions, like animal rights or existential risk reduction, then you should be willing to make some compromises in other areas, like your clothes, hairstyle and conversational manner. Also, you might want to remain apolitical. For example, Jaan Tallinn, who founded the file-sharing program Kazaa, doesn’t discuss the politics of file-sharing these days, instead focussing on his core business of mitigating existential risk. In contrast, if you want to be a contrarian academic leader like Robin Hanson, then you can talk about anything in order to get attention. This path seems riskier though, as it’s much easier to detect whether your personal reputation is growing than to detect whether you are having small detrimental reputational effects diffused over hundreds of other effective altruists.
The other thing that I would say is that if you think X is probably very important yet unpopular, and you think that it’s best not to advocate X in order to preserve your popularity, this is usually a rationalisation. Because if you want to preserve your popularity while promoting X, it will probably be best to attempt to do so right away. Promoting Y instead will not help with the very important end goal.
On the birthday fundraiser, we’ve just made a form where you can indicate that you might be interested in having one next time you age: http://www.charityscience.com/birthday-fundraisers.html . People are finding their friends really responsive, so it’s a great, natural opportunity to direct money to some fantastic charities!
I’d only add that providing support to other effective altruists can be a great use of time :) Even just a simple Facebook message to someone asking how their life is going can give them a solid boost. Especially reaching out to each other in terms of emotional and mental health to make sure we all have strong support systems!
I’ve linked to this from our new page on how to make a difference in any career.
https://80000hours.org/research/the-big-picture/how-to-make-a-difference-in-any-career/
I’d recommend trying out/bookmarking http://www1.maths.leeds.ac.uk/~mmjhh/stuff/findmeatask/
Can anyone think of small actions you can take to improve a specific skill? I am mostly looking for something concrete that you can do in one afternoon or less.
Examples:
improve your rationality with module on clearerthinking.org. Is this actually effective? It looks useful.
try out programming on code academy
The Ralphs (aka The Kroger Company) and Vons (aka Albertsons Companies, Inc.) supermarket chains allow you to direct some money to a charity of your choosing. Traditionally, that meant you could donate to a school district.
While the current list of charities isn’t great, I was able to find a review of KIPP at GiveWell so I send the money their way.
One very cost effective thing to do is to pay someone in india or other outsourceable cheap country to spread the main videos related to effective altruism. Services like MyTasker YourManInIndia and others of the same sort.