EA should have pre-listed simple tasks for new and uncertain / anxious people.
I have seen a few different posts here that boil down to “but what if I’m not a genius? :( ” and many of the answers are kind of silly (“you might secretly be a genius!”, “have hope, you can find a genius and do things to free up their time!”). The steelman of it is the argument from comparative advantage iirc, but that argument has this problem (which EA seems to have just in general too?) of demanding a lot of initiative on the part of people who are just starting out, have no idea how anything works, may feel overwhelmed by information, etc.
There should be a list, somewhere, of tasks. Simple things like any data entry/tagging for a project that can be reasonably outsourced to internet randos, spell or grammar checking for something, little internal research surveys new members can fill out, source-finding for some claims, cleaning up images, signal-boosting, etc.
There are a lot of relatively small tasks that are relatively easy to crowdsource, that people who are trying to participate but don’t know how could be funneled towards while they get involved, such that they can see themselves clearly helping, very quickly, without having to be geniuses or do six hundred hours of reading.
This can in turn
facilitate identity-building (people care more about a thing when they have participated in it)
enable people who are insecure and anxious (which seems to be a fairly common affliction among EAs) to accumulate fairly easy evidence in their favour
familiarize people with currently-existing projects
lower the barrier of entry for new projects (if you can count on some people helping you, it will seem less daunting to start), which will help speed up iteration
create a clear direction for people who are anxious about their intellect to start with, so they’re not adrift/overwhelmed by information/etc.
actually free up time, for the people whose time is better spent not doing those tasks, which is what the original point about the comparative advantage was.
Seems like a fairly low-hanging fruit.
If this already exists, it should be made more obviously available to people, and “what if I’m not smart?” posts should have redirection towards it as a default response.
You can also submit other opportunities to that board as you come across them: https://airtable.com/shrepquFY2NxymyUy And of course you can link to the website from the “What if I’m not a genius?” posts you mention in the comments.
(I think the best response to the thought “EA should do X” is often “I should do X.” https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Pz7RdMRouZ5N5w5eE/ea-should-taboo-ea-should I don’t mean to say that people should only ever say that something should be done if they’re prepared to do it themselves—sometimes other people with more time/initiative/info will implement a demand once it’s voiced—but I also want more community members to feel empowered to create or contribute to resources they think should exist...especially new and uncertain/anxious ones 🙂)
I don’t think the “Volunteer” section features any of the things that are like what I’m thinking about. And the same is true of anything that would reasonably fit on the board.
Like, here are some things I think people who are just starting out could easily help with:
Spell-checking
Citation-finding
Cross-referencing
Signal-boosting
Data entry
Cleaning up images, text, etc.
Centralizing some bits of information
Off the top of my head. Things a twelve-year-old could do. Things someone can do when they’re a little bit drunk. Things tired people who like the idea but are trying to throw this in between their two jobs or something can do. Low barrier of entry. Easy. Individual tasks you can finish in an hour.
Here are some things when you filter for volunteer:
Write entire articles for this magazine you are not eligible to write for!
Help us design and pursue creative impact litigation for animals and help us RUN A WHOLE NON-PROFIT
“Analysis and communications” but don’t worry, [you don’t NEED to have in-depth knowledge of biosecurity and pandemics! ]<- Intimidating to the insecure anxious person, who seems rather common around here
An internship to the Office of the Secretary of Defense / Washington Headquarters Services.
An accountability buddy system for people who are largely independently pursuing upskilling in the realm of AI safety
Independent AI Safety Distillation, in which you’re basically a science communicator but about AI.
Research, Communications, Operations, or Resilience jobs.
Writer a newsletter.
A fairly vague fellowship that seems like it’s supposed to be prestigious and hard to get but the application is kind of weird so I’m not sure what to think about this one but it’s a 1-year commitment, which is part of my point here.
Help coordinate locally around effective giving projects, work closely with fellow ambassadors, undergo training.
I could go on. The next ten are not radically different from the first ten. All of these things are big commitments. Most of them are basically jobs. Which is, to my understanding, what the board is for, right? So that makes sense. None of these are a thing a person could do to “test the waters” for 20 minutes every night for a week, or every other thursday.
The closest thing to this that I can think of is the wiki, insofar as people can edit it. It seems to be well-maintained, and doesn’t have an easily-available “this article is a stub, you can help by expanding it” shortlist. That would be an obvious low-hanging-fruit here.
Maybe after I’ve spent more time here, I can more reasonably do something like that myself, but it seems like something that requires a much more comprehensive understanding of current ongoing projects than I have, and a much more “inside” view so to speak. A lot of these tasks seem to be getting done by having people whose job it is to do them, given the proliferation of personal assistant / executive assistant stuff going on. But once again, those are jobs, there isn’t exactly a pipeline in which you can get involved by slowly increasing the extent of your participation, beyond maybe making arguments here.
I’m comfortable doing that, because I like arguing and am not very invested in this community yet. But that’s because I got lucky. If I was more anxious and insecure, I probably would not be interacting, and as there is no clear and obvious way of participating on the smaller scale, I would not be able to “build up to” interacting.
I think EAs should all be polyglots (minimum 3 languages).
Long time lurker first time poster here. I want to make this a bigger post, but also am not sure if I will be a good fit in this environment, so instead of sitting down and getting all my citations in a row, I’ll just do this to test the waters.
Health reasons why:
Knowing 3 languages can stave off dementia, if you want to live longer and have a more useful healthspan it’s a relatively easy intervention that is also just generally good for you.
A lot of the things you can do to learn a new language (joining a club, moving to a new country, etc) are probably good for you anyway.
It creates redundancy networks. This one I don’t actually have a lot of evidence for yet, but I suffer from debilitating migraines and at one point I got one so bad that I went literally non-verbal. My ability to communicate in English was shot. My ability to communicate in Spanish and French was not. While I haven’t tracked down the research, I also know that polyglots supposedly have better outcomes when they receive, say, traumatic head injuries.
Learning a new language, and practicing learning new vocabulary generally, is a good way to strengthen your ability to code-switch, which is important both in general social terms and in terms of becoming comfortable with terminology when specializing in an area of study.
Intellectual reasons why:
A lot of philosophy, especially analytic philosophy, focuses on what ends up being linguistic analysis with extra steps. I have a degree in philosophy, and I have found that it is very frequently illuminating, when taking apart an argument, to just translate it into another language.
Similarly, while the sapir-worf hypothesis is certainly true in the weak form and certainly kind of useless in the strong form, language can create modes of thought. I find, for example, due to the way I was raised, that I can “activate” a more conservative set of gut instincts by thinking in Spanish. The answer is not necessarily that Spanish is a “more conservative” language, but that when I learned Spanish and I built up intuitions about the world in Spanish, I was surrounded by more conservative people. I think this is actually a super useful thing, and am trying to do it “on purpose” by learning additional languages specifically to read a certain type of literature / research, in order to shape specific intuitions about that in that language. Being able to turn on and off gut-level intuitions by changing the language you operate in seems to me to be an invaluable skillset, both to be able to properly understand arguments and to be able to communicate with different audiences even when you’re operating on the same language.
Reading things in the original language is very nice, and a lot of translations to English suck the soul out of things.
Being able to read rarer works, works that are untranslated, older works, etc. is a good thing generally for anyone who wants to broaden their intellectual horizons.
Ideological reasons why:
A lot of EA stuff feels very attached to English and english-language modes of thinking. When I see the growing amount of EA things in Spanish, one thing I notice is the visceral disdain and disinterest with which I experience it, in contrast to the English versions where it feels more “normal” and less “annoying” to me. I think that in general, a lot of the way that EAs approach the world is very atomized, structured, etc, and that’s probably a good thing. It’s not, however, super persuasive to most people who don’t already think in that way. Understanding the different gut-level reactions and being better able to communicate ideas inside a non-English-speaking context is important and will be more important in the future.
EAs are very WEIRD in the “Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic” sense.
If
EAs care about the welfare of humanity in general, and care about preference-satisfaction, quality of life, etc.
AND
most of people for most of history have not had the features that EAs have, had different priorities, think in different terms, etc.
THEN
I think it’s kind of obvious that EAs have to have some massive blind spots, perhaps ones I share and am therefore not able to properly articulate, in the same way that if Buddhist monks or Pagans or some other relatively small population that shares a lot of traits within itself but not a lot of traits with the human population at large, would have some pretty massive blind spots.
And since EAs are trying to put themselves in positions to make decisions that could alter the course of humanity and could affect billions of people far into the future, having some sort of check on those blind spots in the form of learning a language and culture that is not WEIRD would be a good thing.
I’ll edit this into a bigger post with citations or something if anyone actually cares / thinks this is worth engaging with.
Re: specific languages, I think there’s a few ways to think about it.
In terms of “best for your brain” re:dementia, traumatic brain injury, etc:
I think the more different the better. So if your first language is synthetic, you should go with an analytic language and vice versa. In that same vein of thought, any language that has another alphabet and/or an entirely alternative writing system would be better too. Honourable mention also for sign languages, which combine additional motor skill practice on top of the linguistic and visual processing brain workout, and also everyone should know a bit of sign language anyway, because sometimes places are really loud or your throat is sore and it’s hard to talk.
So, Hindi, Mandarin, Korean, Japanese, Mongolian, Arabic, Greek, Russian, Javanese, ASL, etc.
-
In terms of trying to intellectually “weaponize” languages:
Any language that can be very easily and comfortably associated with a specific mode of thought. E.g. If you were very interested in reading a lot of communist philosophy in the original Russian, and wanted to create a “communist “mode in your brain, or if you were very interested in learning to think more about theology and metaphysics (I personally think a lot of old metaphysics philosophical takes are going to start becoming much more useful in the near future with the rise of AI and hyperglobalization) and wanted to read a lot of Jewish philosophy in Hebrew, or old Catholic philosophy in Latin, Islamic philosophy in Arabic, etc.
The priority there is a language that has a very rich “backlog” of the thing you want to work with intellectually.
So that would be things like Latin, Arabic, Mandarin, Hebrew, Russian, German, Sanskrit, Spanish, French, etc.
One interesting note about the “mode” thing is that this is the one place where a language being dead might actually be a plus. But studying a dead language has its own drawbacks and is usually more demanding.
-
In terms of trying to avoid being WEIRD / blinded by your own WEIRD-ness:
Native/Indigenous languages. Most languages considered “native”, and most languages that are predominantly spoken by populations that did not have a lot of industrialization 50 years ago generally, will still have a lot of the affectations, vocabulary, and other interesting features of their recent history, and will have a lot of stories, sayings, and associated modes of thought that are non-WEIRD.
So, Navajo, Cherokee, Igbo, Cree, Quechua, Maori, etc.
A lot of them are simply going to be missing the words for a lot of things, which means that in the process of translating something, you’ll have to reverse-engineer what the thing in question is and what you should call it, which I think is generally really good for intellectual rigour.
EA should have pre-listed simple tasks for new and uncertain / anxious people.
I have seen a few different posts here that boil down to “but what if I’m not a genius? :( ” and many of the answers are kind of silly (“you might secretly be a genius!”, “have hope, you can find a genius and do things to free up their time!”). The steelman of it is the argument from comparative advantage iirc, but that argument has this problem (which EA seems to have just in general too?) of demanding a lot of initiative on the part of people who are just starting out, have no idea how anything works, may feel overwhelmed by information, etc.
There should be a list, somewhere, of tasks. Simple things like any data entry/tagging for a project that can be reasonably outsourced to internet randos, spell or grammar checking for something, little internal research surveys new members can fill out, source-finding for some claims, cleaning up images, signal-boosting, etc.
There are a lot of relatively small tasks that are relatively easy to crowdsource, that people who are trying to participate but don’t know how could be funneled towards while they get involved, such that they can see themselves clearly helping, very quickly, without having to be geniuses or do six hundred hours of reading.
This can in turn
facilitate identity-building (people care more about a thing when they have participated in it)
enable people who are insecure and anxious (which seems to be a fairly common affliction among EAs) to accumulate fairly easy evidence in their favour
familiarize people with currently-existing projects
lower the barrier of entry for new projects (if you can count on some people helping you, it will seem less daunting to start), which will help speed up iteration
create a clear direction for people who are anxious about their intellect to start with, so they’re not adrift/overwhelmed by information/etc.
actually free up time, for the people whose time is better spent not doing those tasks, which is what the original point about the comparative advantage was.
Seems like a fairly low-hanging fruit.
If this already exists, it should be made more obviously available to people, and “what if I’m not smart?” posts should have redirection towards it as a default response.
Thanks for posting; I like this idea. I think I’ve made a few such lists over the years, but nothing recent.
But filtering for ‘Volunteer’ here might be a good place to start: https://ea-internships.pory.app/board
You can also submit other opportunities to that board as you come across them: https://airtable.com/shrepquFY2NxymyUy And of course you can link to the website from the “What if I’m not a genius?” posts you mention in the comments.
(I think the best response to the thought “EA should do X” is often “I should do X.” https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Pz7RdMRouZ5N5w5eE/ea-should-taboo-ea-should I don’t mean to say that people should only ever say that something should be done if they’re prepared to do it themselves—sometimes other people with more time/initiative/info will implement a demand once it’s voiced—but I also want more community members to feel empowered to create or contribute to resources they think should exist...especially new and uncertain/anxious ones 🙂)
I don’t think the “Volunteer” section features any of the things that are like what I’m thinking about. And the same is true of anything that would reasonably fit on the board.
Like, here are some things I think people who are just starting out could easily help with:
Spell-checking
Citation-finding
Cross-referencing
Signal-boosting
Data entry
Cleaning up images, text, etc.
Centralizing some bits of information
Off the top of my head. Things a twelve-year-old could do. Things someone can do when they’re a little bit drunk. Things tired people who like the idea but are trying to throw this in between their two jobs or something can do. Low barrier of entry. Easy. Individual tasks you can finish in an hour.
Here are some things when you filter for volunteer:
Write entire articles for this magazine you are not eligible to write for!
Help us design and pursue creative impact litigation for animals and help us RUN A WHOLE NON-PROFIT
“Analysis and communications” but don’t worry, [you don’t NEED to have in-depth knowledge of biosecurity and pandemics! ]<- Intimidating to the insecure anxious person, who seems rather common around here
An internship to the Office of the Secretary of Defense / Washington Headquarters Services.
An accountability buddy system for people who are largely independently pursuing upskilling in the realm of AI safety
Independent AI Safety Distillation, in which you’re basically a science communicator but about AI.
Research, Communications, Operations, or Resilience jobs.
Writer a newsletter.
A fairly vague fellowship that seems like it’s supposed to be prestigious and hard to get but the application is kind of weird so I’m not sure what to think about this one but it’s a 1-year commitment, which is part of my point here.
Help coordinate locally around effective giving projects, work closely with fellow ambassadors, undergo training.
I could go on. The next ten are not radically different from the first ten. All of these things are big commitments. Most of them are basically jobs. Which is, to my understanding, what the board is for, right? So that makes sense. None of these are a thing a person could do to “test the waters” for 20 minutes every night for a week, or every other thursday.
The closest thing to this that I can think of is the wiki, insofar as people can edit it. It seems to be well-maintained, and doesn’t have an easily-available “this article is a stub, you can help by expanding it” shortlist. That would be an obvious low-hanging-fruit here.
Maybe after I’ve spent more time here, I can more reasonably do something like that myself, but it seems like something that requires a much more comprehensive understanding of current ongoing projects than I have, and a much more “inside” view so to speak. A lot of these tasks seem to be getting done by having people whose job it is to do them, given the proliferation of personal assistant / executive assistant stuff going on. But once again, those are jobs, there isn’t exactly a pipeline in which you can get involved by slowly increasing the extent of your participation, beyond maybe making arguments here.
I’m comfortable doing that, because I like arguing and am not very invested in this community yet. But that’s because I got lucky. If I was more anxious and insecure, I probably would not be interacting, and as there is no clear and obvious way of participating on the smaller scale, I would not be able to “build up to” interacting.
I think EAs should all be polyglots (minimum 3 languages).
Long time lurker first time poster here. I want to make this a bigger post, but also am not sure if I will be a good fit in this environment, so instead of sitting down and getting all my citations in a row, I’ll just do this to test the waters.
Health reasons why:
Knowing 3 languages can stave off dementia, if you want to live longer and have a more useful healthspan it’s a relatively easy intervention that is also just generally good for you.
A lot of the things you can do to learn a new language (joining a club, moving to a new country, etc) are probably good for you anyway.
It creates redundancy networks. This one I don’t actually have a lot of evidence for yet, but I suffer from debilitating migraines and at one point I got one so bad that I went literally non-verbal. My ability to communicate in English was shot. My ability to communicate in Spanish and French was not. While I haven’t tracked down the research, I also know that polyglots supposedly have better outcomes when they receive, say, traumatic head injuries.
Learning a new language, and practicing learning new vocabulary generally, is a good way to strengthen your ability to code-switch, which is important both in general social terms and in terms of becoming comfortable with terminology when specializing in an area of study.
Intellectual reasons why:
A lot of philosophy, especially analytic philosophy, focuses on what ends up being linguistic analysis with extra steps. I have a degree in philosophy, and I have found that it is very frequently illuminating, when taking apart an argument, to just translate it into another language.
Similarly, while the sapir-worf hypothesis is certainly true in the weak form and certainly kind of useless in the strong form, language can create modes of thought. I find, for example, due to the way I was raised, that I can “activate” a more conservative set of gut instincts by thinking in Spanish. The answer is not necessarily that Spanish is a “more conservative” language, but that when I learned Spanish and I built up intuitions about the world in Spanish, I was surrounded by more conservative people. I think this is actually a super useful thing, and am trying to do it “on purpose” by learning additional languages specifically to read a certain type of literature / research, in order to shape specific intuitions about that in that language. Being able to turn on and off gut-level intuitions by changing the language you operate in seems to me to be an invaluable skillset, both to be able to properly understand arguments and to be able to communicate with different audiences even when you’re operating on the same language.
Reading things in the original language is very nice, and a lot of translations to English suck the soul out of things.
Being able to read rarer works, works that are untranslated, older works, etc. is a good thing generally for anyone who wants to broaden their intellectual horizons.
Ideological reasons why:
A lot of EA stuff feels very attached to English and english-language modes of thinking. When I see the growing amount of EA things in Spanish, one thing I notice is the visceral disdain and disinterest with which I experience it, in contrast to the English versions where it feels more “normal” and less “annoying” to me. I think that in general, a lot of the way that EAs approach the world is very atomized, structured, etc, and that’s probably a good thing. It’s not, however, super persuasive to most people who don’t already think in that way. Understanding the different gut-level reactions and being better able to communicate ideas inside a non-English-speaking context is important and will be more important in the future.
EAs are very WEIRD in the “Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic” sense.
If
EAs care about the welfare of humanity in general, and care about preference-satisfaction, quality of life, etc.
AND
most of people for most of history have not had the features that EAs have, had different priorities, think in different terms, etc.
THEN
I think it’s kind of obvious that EAs have to have some massive blind spots, perhaps ones I share and am therefore not able to properly articulate, in the same way that if Buddhist monks or Pagans or some other relatively small population that shares a lot of traits within itself but not a lot of traits with the human population at large, would have some pretty massive blind spots.
And since EAs are trying to put themselves in positions to make decisions that could alter the course of humanity and could affect billions of people far into the future, having some sort of check on those blind spots in the form of learning a language and culture that is not WEIRD would be a good thing.
I’ll edit this into a bigger post with citations or something if anyone actually cares / thinks this is worth engaging with.
I really can’t evaluate all of your claims, but I’d personally like to see more native English-speakers grasping how lucky they are
Personally I have no idea if this is a worthy use of the median EA’s time, but this is exactly the kind of interesting thinking I’d like to see.
Without asking for rigor at this particular time, do you think some languages are better than others for one or more of these outcomes?
Thanks!
Re: specific languages, I think there’s a few ways to think about it.
In terms of “best for your brain” re:dementia, traumatic brain injury, etc:
I think the more different the better. So if your first language is synthetic, you should go with an analytic language and vice versa. In that same vein of thought, any language that has another alphabet and/or an entirely alternative writing system would be better too. Honourable mention also for sign languages, which combine additional motor skill practice on top of the linguistic and visual processing brain workout, and also everyone should know a bit of sign language anyway, because sometimes places are really loud or your throat is sore and it’s hard to talk.
So, Hindi, Mandarin, Korean, Japanese, Mongolian, Arabic, Greek, Russian, Javanese, ASL, etc.
-
In terms of trying to intellectually “weaponize” languages:
Any language that can be very easily and comfortably associated with a specific mode of thought. E.g. If you were very interested in reading a lot of communist philosophy in the original Russian, and wanted to create a “communist “mode in your brain, or if you were very interested in learning to think more about theology and metaphysics (I personally think a lot of old metaphysics philosophical takes are going to start becoming much more useful in the near future with the rise of AI and hyperglobalization) and wanted to read a lot of Jewish philosophy in Hebrew, or old Catholic philosophy in Latin, Islamic philosophy in Arabic, etc.
The priority there is a language that has a very rich “backlog” of the thing you want to work with intellectually.
So that would be things like Latin, Arabic, Mandarin, Hebrew, Russian, German, Sanskrit, Spanish, French, etc.
One interesting note about the “mode” thing is that this is the one place where a language being dead might actually be a plus. But studying a dead language has its own drawbacks and is usually more demanding.
-
In terms of trying to avoid being WEIRD / blinded by your own WEIRD-ness:
Native/Indigenous languages. Most languages considered “native”, and most languages that are predominantly spoken by populations that did not have a lot of industrialization 50 years ago generally, will still have a lot of the affectations, vocabulary, and other interesting features of their recent history, and will have a lot of stories, sayings, and associated modes of thought that are non-WEIRD.
So, Navajo, Cherokee, Igbo, Cree, Quechua, Maori, etc.
A lot of them are simply going to be missing the words for a lot of things, which means that in the process of translating something, you’ll have to reverse-engineer what the thing in question is and what you should call it, which I think is generally really good for intellectual rigour.