Volunteer at EA Finland / professional data scientist / confused about AI safety / interested in communications
Ada-Maaria Hyvärinen
Karma: 1,174
How to set up a career advising system for your local EA group
I obviously don’t have access to Mikkola’s full interview transcripts, but when I think back to EA Helsinki on 2021, it is possible that none of us who were interviewed told her we’d do anything like that, and would only list serious sounding stuff such as donating and career planning as our EA actions :) this, again, shows the limitations of inspecting a whole movement with a limited interview study like this.
Interesting write-up, especially the part about adapting EA materials to French culture! Thanks for writing this :)
Thanks for asking! I meant to write it in negative – my point with this question was to encourage thinking about collaborators outside the EA organization space. This is because I think local groups can have the tendency to just think about (international) EA orgs when thinking about potential collaborators, and sometimes it could be valuable for them to collaborate with (local) organizations (in addition to EA orgs). Or maybe the question would show that no organizations that are interesting collaborators for the local group would even exist in the imaginary case – this would make the priorities of the local group clearer, and maybe encourage members to start new local projects.
Local EA groups: consider becoming more than a satellite group
Exactly, that’s the idea!
Yeah, in Finnish contexts (nude) sauna is a normal option for an afterparty of a professional conference or similar context :) but in these cases, there is a gender separation of sauna turns (or different saunas) for men and women, just like at Finnish public swimming pools. At EA Finland events we have so far followed a quite usual Finnish student and hobby group policy of having a sauna turns for non-men and non-women separately and a mixed turn where everyone is welcome, with the option but not obligation to wear a swimming suit.
We personally also recommend engaging with the writings of Eliezer, Paul, Nate, and John. We do not endorse all of their research, but they all have tackled the problem, and made a fair share of their reasoning public. If we want to get better together, they seem like a good start.
I realize this is a cross post and your original audience might know where to find all these recommendations even without further info, but if you want new people to look into their writings, it would be better to at least use full names of the authors you recommend.
Onni works for Rethink Priorities and is part of the board of EA Finland, but does not actively participate in community building efforts in a hands-on practical basis anymore such as organizing events or so. My impression is that he is relieved that other people are doing it now :)
Good that you asked, since one thing I wanted to highlight with this story was that it is possible to succeed at community building even if it is not your favorite thing or the best personal fit for you considering all abstract possibilities – if you are the only person able to put in effort at a specific time, you are the best person to do it. (And later you can hand it over to others when you discover a new another opportunity that utilizes more of your personal strengths.)
Good observation, I didn’t notice that! Sure makes it harder for non-Swedish speakers to for example become aware of “should I check whether there is a connection to Nationaldemokraterna” if there is no English page that points to that direction.
What comes to Swedish speakers: If the letter of intent would have been signed because of nepotism, the vaccination skepticism part probably would not have come as a surprise since it seems to be a recurring theme in Per Shapiro’s NyD contributions (again, if my Swedish does not fail me). Which to me seems evidence to the direction that nepotism did not influence the decision.
Like Elliot, while I think the FLI team has handled the whole thing just fine, I also find it confusing people think the far-right connections of Nya Dagbladet would have been difficult to identify. I didn’t know anything about Nya Dagbladed in advance so I checked it:
The complete English Wikipedia article on Nya Dagbladet:
”Nya Dagbladet is a Swedish online daily newspaper founded in 2012,[1] which has a historical connection to the National Democrats, a far-right political party in Sweden. It publishes articles promoting conspiracy theories about the Holocaust, COVID-19 vaccines, climate change, mobile phone towers, and others. Other common themes include immigration, GMOs, Israel, the EU,[2] and pro-Kremlin propaganda regarding the Russian invasion of Ukraine.[3][4] Markus Andersson is its editor-in-chief.”
The Swedish summary/beginning of the Wikipedia article on Nya Dagbladed:
”Nya Dagbladet är en svensk nätbaserad dagstidning grundad 2012.[2] Tidningen är nationalistisk, vetenskapsskeptisk och partipolitiskt obunden, med historisk koppling till Nationaldemokraterna. Den betecknar sig som humanistisk och etnopluralistisk med en antiglobalistisk hållning.[3] Den refererar ofta pseudovetenskap och vaccinationsmotstånd.”
I tried to check what the newspapers’ tone regarding Jews is, and I found this letter from the editor kind of strange. (If my Swedish does not fail me it claims that the Holocaust memory day is “real antisemitism” as many horrors of the Holocaust didn’t actually happen.)
Also, Per Shapiro has written a commentary titled “Den extrema högern” (“Far right”) in 2021 about people’s negative reactions to his previous article, saying that people on social media accused him of writing in an far-right paper, while (according to Shapiro) the biggest Swedish newspaper is actually a lot more far-right (because it’s editor in chief supports American war crimes and Israeli occupation). What I understand from this (again with my limited Swedish and Google Translate) is that Shapiro both strongly rejects far-right but is well aware that many people perceive writing in NyD as far-right associated. So I wonder what the recent revelations of extremism are that shocked him are – maybe something happened that I cannot identify just by looking at the newspapers post history.
Just to give you a data point from a non-native speaker who likes literature and languages, this quote wasn’t a joy to read for me since it would have taken me a very long time to understand what this is about if I would not have known the context. So I am not sure what you mean by the best linguistic traditions – I think simple language can be elegant too.
EA Finland: from a philosophy discussion club to a national organization
I think for some of the questions the information the information would take an effort to collect. For example, I don’t think anyone in CEA or EAIF knows the answer of “How old is EA Finland” (and many members of EA Finland would not know this either). Estimating the size of EA Finland is also a little tricky. When we applied for funding, we gave many different numbers, such as the number of active volunteers and number of people on our Telegram channel, so these numbers EAIF would know, in case they would want to start collecting an info list like the suggested one.
I could find some national organization related approved grants here: https://funds.effectivealtruism.org/grants, but there is a warning that some data is still missing, because the tool is in beta. When the data is complete, an interested person could do a search by country and create a list of funding received per country, with some info on details such as how much of it goes to salaries. (At least I could find the grant info of the grant we received for EA Finland by searching by “Finland”.)
I don’t think anyone is publicly listing the rejected grants. Personally, I would be interested to see them – maybe grant applications could ask for approval to list the rejections as well in the application process?
Things I didn’t feel that guilty about before getting involved in effective altruism
Congratulations Eirik!
I agree. Weirdly this is not addressed in the thesis.
Effective altruism as a lifestyle movement (A Master’s Thesis)
I share your feeling about free books! It is not super common for Finnish (student) organizations to give out free stuff unless it is for advertisement, so I would also be suspicious if somebody handed me over a free book and would probably not read it if I was not very interested in the contents in beforehand. As an alternative we’ve been selling books for a token sum, hoping it makes students value them more. We’ve also loaned books so that they can be read by many people.
I’ve heard Dutch people pride themselves about their straightforwardness, so I can definitely imagine it feels weird for to say you are doing well if you aren’t. I also have the same feeling sometimes. In Finland I would try to give an answer with some content other than “good” as a conversation starter even if I would aim to sound positive. For example maybe tell about some good thing in my day so that we can talk about it more if with the person if we can’t come up with some more relevant topic.
I also feel like it’s really important for EA folks in different places to find ways to do EA from their perspective, not just copy from preexisting EA culture. Aside from being welcoming, this is also good for the variety of thoughts and approaches within EA.
A pretty good summary, but to clarify point 3: we had “external” volunteers (who are not deeply involved with EA) taking the role of practice advisees, a method I find more realistic than the volunter advisors in training roleplaying as advisees themselves.