Thanks! Would students have learned the meta skills and developed better models of how finance works anyway even without the Student Investment Fund?
Alex Barnes
Karma: 327
Thank you for posting this! Incremental improvement in collaboration with “non-EA” individuals, groups and organizations could be more effective than working with EA-only individuals, groups and organizations.
Thank you! It’s great to hear you are putting an emphasis on doing this safely.
Great idea! Museums and Science Centres seem promising.
Universities sometimes have specialized centres (examples: BioZone and Greater Good Science Center) and Student Investment FundsTourist Bureaus might be good resources to find listings of GLAMs
Thank you for writing this! Would you be open to helping small EA groups (such as a few in Africa) grow and expand?
I realize this will sound crazy, but:
Maybe bad mentors are even more important than good mentors
A good mentor will tell you smart things, you’ll follow them, see good results and maybe think, “Wow! I’m so lucky to have a good mentor. I’ll ask them about X, Y and Z.” This reinforces the mentor-mentee dependency cycle
A bad mentor will tell you stupid things, you’ll follow them, see terrible results and hopefully think, “Wow! That mentor was terrible. I’ll ask someone else about X, Y and Z.” This frees up the bad mentor to “help” others.
A bad mentor who believes in you, but provides terrible advice is perhaps a Mysterious Old Wizard. A more common situation is a loving, kind parent or wonderful friend who believes in you more than you believe in yourself!
I realize I’m super late to this discussion, but I strongly agree with the “Network Constrained” aspect. I’ve started running some experiments with EA Networking events:
Adhoc events
The basic idea is most people do networking wrong. They focus on themselves, talk about how amazing they are and then wonder why no one wants to hear about their cool project. My idea: let’s put the Altruism back into Effective Altruism and help each other out. Questions to ask other participants:
- what can I do to help you succeed?
- who can I connect you with?Admittedly, my idea might be total rubbish! I’d love to explore other EA Networking ideas that work to alleviate the “Network Constrained” aspect of EA.
Thank you Jonas for linking to this article on the EA Entrepreneurs Slack Group and thank you Paal, for tagging me in Slack to draw my attention to it.
Also, thank you for linking to What we learned from a year incubating longtermist entrepreneurship. I wasn’t previously aware of this article. I would have been if I’d searched the EA Forum using The Entrepreneurshiptag which:
covers posts that discuss entrepreneurial ventures, including nonprofit startups and for-profit startups founded with social impact in mind.
Simon Haberfellner and I talked yesterday about a post-Covid plan to foster more meaningful connections between EA Entrepreneurs, EA communities and non-EA Customers, Angels and VCs. One super-nerdy metaphor we’ve adopted is a Fourier Transform of EAG/EAGx/EA Retreats into an extended EA Vacation a small group of EA participants spends in an EA Host City. We are still working the creativity alchemy on the idea!
Another idea which might lead to Longtermist Entrepreneurship would be to scout the landscape for EAs interested in investing in the startup scene. For example, for students:
Front Row Ventures (FRV) is a Canadian student-run, university-focused venture capital fund
Black Gen Capital (BGC) is a 100% minority-owned student investment fund in the US
Student Investment Funds exist at: University of Waterloo, University of New Brunswick, Mount Royal University and many more Canadian Universities (honestly, I didn’t even know these last two places had universities—aside: maybe this is why anti-Toronto sentiment runs high in small town Canada!)
Someone wrote How to Start and Run a Student-Managed SRI Fund (I only skimmed it, but it has 37 footnotes, so they probably did way more research than I’m capable of)
Questions you could explore:
Do such student-run funds also exist in Europe, Africa, Asia-Pacific and Latin America?
How would an EA who is a student join such a fund? Are they only for finance students?
Are there any EAs already involved in these funds? If not, would outreach in this direction be cost-effective?
What would be required to start a Longtermist Student-Managed Fund at University X? Which universities would be good candidates? A ranking table might reveal UNB and MRU to be contenders after all…
Thank you for writing this! Two questions:
When you factor in cost (money/time), does diaphragmatic breathing demonstrate the highest cost effectiveness?
Recent meetings I’ve attended from groups such as Global Regenerative Colab and Zebras Unite have included breathing activities, possibly diaphragmatic breathing, is this something to consider including at the start of EA-related meetings?
On that second point, I’m thinking that if you spend 6 minutes (10%) of a 1-hour meeting on breathing, it could be a good use of time if the remaining 54 minutes are 11+% more effective. I have no idea how to measure meeting effectiveness and simpler actions such as having a clear purpose to the meeting or welcoming new folks might be even more effective than breathing exercises...
Thank you for posting this!
This answer in the FAQ is really helpful for those of us with kids/other dependents:Absolutely! If you have dependents you need to care for, you can definitely still attend the program and start an effective charity. We’ve had participants in the past who are new parents or who have had other family commitments. CE will provide financial assistance in the form of stipends for the duration of the program where required. We are all about supporting you to make it work.
Thank you for running an inclusive program that aims to meet participants where they are and offer to support them to make it work for all!!
Thanks Ozzie! Glad to see I’m still welcome here!!
I’m sold on the idea of red-teaming (especially for EA and for red-teaming the idea of red-teaming itself). A few concerns:
I have no idea where to begin to start working at red-teaming
I have no idea if I’d even be any good at red-teaming
Sorry, maybe these concerns have already been covered really well and I missed it. Thanks!
Great article!
At risk of losing my “EA Card” and being permanently cast out of this community with no recourse, could we perhaps maybe “red team” EA itself? [ducks]
Thank you for looking into this and posting about it. I’ve talked to a couple of EAs about a similar concept in the past. I’m really excited to see what what you find when you start prototyping and piloting this!
Does High Impact Medicine also include folks working as Nurses, Pharmacists, Psychologists, Psychiatrists, OT/PT, Medical Engineering, IT and Hospital Logistics?
Thank you for posting this!
I’m interested in learning more and seeing how the framework applies in practice:
Angel Investing - both the process and specific startups
Technology Deployment—for example, UV-C LED Clean Water in East Africa
We will steal this for EA Toronto. Thank you!
Dear Aaron,
I don’t think we share the same definition for the word “Retirement”.
Sincerely,
-average humans everywhere
P.S. Thank you for all your help with the one serious EA Forum article I wrote. Despite you and Hauke’s heroic efforts, it was still terrible. Related: did you pay 26 people to vote for it out of sympathy?
Thank you for arranging this! It looks like an excellent event. I heard about it from Yi-Yang Chua on the EA Virtual Programs Slack