Thanks Michel! I think it should be fixed now :)
AmAristizabal
Karma: 1,023
I like this too!
Gracias por escribir esto Simón y espero que nos mantengas al tanto de los avances de la iniciativa en UPB.
Mi experiencia ha sido que hay bastante demanda de creación de contenido en español y que aun creando artículos cortos y sencillos se puede llenar un vacío importante. Creería que un posible paso concreto a seguir puede ser crear espacios o talleres de creación de contenido original (y universidades como UPB pueden ser un buen experimento) para que los creadores de contenido hispanohablantes ganen experiencia y practiquen. Creo que hay muchas normas de comunicación en la comunidad angloparlante de AE que pueden nutrir el contenido en español y animaría a los escritores nuevos a que consuman mucho contenido de AE, interioricen esas normas, sepan usarlas, criticarlas, y a su vez nutrir a la comunidad angloparlante con nuevas maneras de comunicación.
Creo que un modo fallido de promover creación de contenido sin interacción suficiente con el mundo angloparlante puede resultar en dos comunidades aisladas (y una con muchos más recursos y capacidad de tomar decisiones) así que definir bien los espacios para ambos idiomas (como las sugerencias de opciones multilingues para el EA forum) parece ser importante.
Gracias de nuevo :)
Thank you Eyad!! I’m very happy to hear that this was useful :)
Thanks! It would be great to see more research about this
Hi!
Thanks for your message. Sadly we don’t have very good answers to this question yet but I can send some resources that can be useful:
-You can contact Andres Gomez who is starting a charity evaluator in Colombia: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andresfelipegomez/?originalSubdomain=co
-Open Philanthropy has recommended Sinergia Animal in the past as a potential impactful cause in many south american countries, including Colombia: https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/us-policy/farm-animal-welfare/sinergia-animal-corporate-cage-free-campaigns
-If you’re not committed to Colombia in particular, Brazil has its version of Givewell: https://doebem.org.br/
-If you want to be more involved in EA in Colombia and start new projects feel free to send me a message :) Also you’re welcome to join the Spanish Speaking EA group on Slack where there are lots of new initiatives to find impactful causes in South America: https://join.slack.com/t/altruismo-eficaz/shared_invite/zt-9dcv7eki-jrN6GerS0NAI~97RH4dB2A
I’m looking forward to know more about your interests :)
This makes me wonder if current hair removal/depilation methods for women could fit the definition (or curious why they would not). We could think of them as minor inconveniences, but maybe women perceived foot binding as a minor inconvenience too (I can think of examples in which we don’t categorize things as major inconveniences even when they have huge levels of pain).
Thanks Fer!
Good points, I will add info hazards.
Thanks for the TED talk! ugh yes… violence sucks haha :( I also haven’t seen too much about that in EA circles but I have seen it more present in development circles, like JPAL and IPA with their crime and violence initiatives. I’m curious why on the longtermist side of interventions violence and crime play such an important role in EA (like preventing great power conflict or nuclear weapons) but on the shorttermist side it’s more focused on health interventions (is it because it’s harder to measure than health interventions so they will never beat a GW recommended charity, which is not a problem for the longtermist side when expected value can make violence prevention a great deal?)
Thanks again for your comments!
Thanks Ramiro!
Yes, the efforts private and public companies make in order to be or at least appear to be “aligned” with SDGs is one of the things I find most interesting and worth making use of. They have been widely adopted across different sectors perhaps because they included private & non-profit sector in their elaboration (and great outreach and communication strategies as well I’m guessing). Also worth studying how they became such a big deal (and also explore until what extent they are a big deal or more a symbolic statement).
The concern for animal welfare is a very interesting case study, thanks for pointing that out! I’ve had it in the back of my head but haven’t thought too much about it. I will point this out to Ana Diez from Argentina, she was interested in finding case studies of overlaps (or significant differences) between SDGs and EA’s cause prioritization.
Thanks for this initiative, I will answer the survey. Regarding the questions here are some comments:
-Has your participation in online social events changed over the course of the pandemic? If yes, how has it changed, and why?
I would say that the pandemic was the reason why I started being more involved in EA in the first place thanks to EAGx (before this I only read stuff or listened to podcasts but never got really involved). EAGx exceeded all my expectations about online events. The platform with the “matchmakings” , the 1 on 1s and the icebreakers were awesome.
However, after that I felt more reluctant to join any other online event… perhaps they feel less “official” and I get the impression that only really involved in EA people attend. Perhaps it’s easier to come up with excuses about lack of time with those ones… Or perhaps you start considering the time it takes to meet new people and you prefer to talk to people you already know before building new relationships (in my case I just message directly the people that I know instead of attending events).
-Do you prefer small group (3-5 people) to 1-1 discussions for socializing online?
I have never been in a 3-5 people meetup (just 1-1) but I think I would love it, both sound important and different. For career advice or networking 1-1 sound better to me but for discussion/having a good time/commenting stuff 3-5 could be great. But I´m not sure…
Thanks for the post! I agree with the importance of peer accountability and I have been trying to apply it myself. Some comments about helpful and unhelpful butt-kicking:
You say the butt-kicking is called for when the person has a better understanding of the opportunities to be considered, but I don’t think this is necessarily the case. I think hardly someone else will have a better idea of how opportunities fit within our own plans but the value can come precisely from the butt kicker´s ignorance about all of the uncertainties involved (the factors paralyzing our own decisions). The butt kicker is able to “zoom out” of the actual situation and “remove the noise” from the decision...maybe? That’s how I feel it sometimes haha.
You also mentioned that butt-kicking is not ideal when the bottleneck is related to financial or psychological issues. I think this one could go both ways; I can imagine a situation in which the person is stuck with a harmful decision (such as a terrible boss, burnout, etc) but justifies not taking the next step due to psychological issues that come as a result of those harmful environments. In that case an external person kicking your butt can be particularly useful, perhaps even more than in other situations. I think this butt kicking thing can be a way of acknowledging and avoiding your own biases and motivated reasoning to stay in harmful situations that stall your career.
So in general thanks for the post and for sharing your ideas. Hope to see more butt-kicking tools inside EA community.
Thanks Linch, these are very good points (I´m particularly interested in number 3, I never thought of it that way, but I agree).
Thanks a lot!
Definitely. It is a puzzle that I constantly have in mind. I would say that the line could be drawn only when it is used kind of as a “last resource”? Haha so it makes sense to “use parochialism to promote EA-like goals” (and in your example I suppose that not having the 100+ option wouldn´t have meant more funds for Covid-19 Africa) but it makes sense only if there is no possible way to fight parochialism (or if it is excessively costly, which I think is in many contexts and with certain individuals). But as you say, it would be interesting to find where that threshold is (when is it unnecessarily hard to fight parochialism and should we aim for more cost-effectiveness within that restricted scope?). Thanks for the comment!
Thanks for your comment, this is insightful. I like the distinction between as a means to create additional impact and as means to help locals. Also thanks for pointing out other ways in which this latter option informs long-term priorities, there are many I did not consider before such as the further funds that are left for outer moral circles when people care for inner moral circles more cost-effectively, although I wonder if that is always the case or if the time/effort invested finding cost-effective local causes to care for inner moral circles could be better used otherwise, like finding ways to expand moral circles for example haha but so far I share your views and I think that it is valuable to spot these areas acknowledging the limits. Thanks again!
Hi Devon, thanks for watching. Here is the Google doc: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wsAivVBb2yj3tXjG6_3dBMK5BSJy0SoOUT1P2ek0Ddk/edit
But some of the best and more informative replies are on the comments of this forum post, I´ll organize them on the document one of these days(still thinking how haha). Thanks!
Due to this post I addressed this topic during the EA Unconference, here is the link to the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=byWYr2oH1y8
Thanks a lot Brian! I´m impressed by EA Philippines haha your achievements are great and I love to see how this is being done in different countries. I wonder if global priorities would be different (and how) if many countries did something like this. Good luck with that research but so far it looks very interesting and replicable in other countries haha thanks a lot.
Hi Vaidehi, your reply got me thinking and I have a couple of questions (I´ll put it here in case somebody else has an answer). So… for people in middle or low income countries that want to pick a career to do the most good, should we focus on global problems or is it a good idea to find country-level or regional-level focus areas in terms of their importance, neglectedness and tractability? I suspect that there are some considerations such as our opportunity to reach higher-level positions in our countries vs somewhere else. For example, I imagine that if someone from Brazil wants to improve institutional decision making it would be easier for him/her to improve Brazil’s executive branch than finding a path where he/she could improve US institutions (even if US politics could affect more people due to its higher influence).
Do you think that 1. zooming in to country-level or region-level cause areas could help EA identify more accurately priority paths worldwide? and 2.do you think more impact could be achieved if people from different countries find their comparative advantage to focus on their own regions?
Thanks David!
Hey Sandra, thanks for your questions. Hopefully the following clarifications will help give useful context as to why we’re excited about this space.
The scope of our program
The office space and our broader project is a university program focused exclusively on AI. It is not an EA space, and it’s not meant to do EA community building in Mexico. Many of our fellows and visitors are not part of the EA community. We would be happy to see other initiatives aimed at EA community building in Mexico and Mexico City.
We would like to point out that the program is part of a Mexican university. Jaime and I (the two primary staff members) are from Colombia, and the vast majority of our colleagues at ITAM who have worked closely with us on various aspects of the fellowship are Mexicans. We’re really grateful for their work and want to make sure their work is acknowledged.
Some benefits of this space
We have carefully considered the upsides and downsides of the current coworking space, and are now pretty confident about choosing it. This is both for logistical reasons and because we’ve had overwhelmingly positive feedback from fellows and visitors (several of them Latin Americans).
We’ve found the space is worth the cost and in practice cheaper than many alternatives because it offers all the operational facilities that the fellowship needs. If we had picked a different coworking space, we would have had to compensate by hiring an additional staff member to figure out things like catering, hosting talks, furniture, etc. It is worth noting that the staff curates a weekly menu for us to accommodate vegans. From our experiences with other event spaces in CDMX and LMICs, this is quite hard to find. Given this is a university program, there are additional constraints and requirements for the space(s) we use.
We also have considered locals, and people from latam and LMICs more generally
We have thought a lot about the effects of programs like these on locals, and much of our work is aimed at diversifying the pool of people working on important problems within AI.
The current set up of the coworking space has meant we have been able to accept visitors from LMICs and subsidize spots for those who wouldn’t be able to attend otherwise.
Condesa is a more gentrified and international area of Mexico City. In our experience, that has come with some benefits for a global program like ours. For example amenities as you mention, but also allowing fellows and visitors from other low and middle income countries and underrepresented backgrounds to move comfortably around the area (e.g. non-spanish speakers from other LMICs).
We were surprised to hear your concerns, as we haven’t received any similar feedback so far (just for quick context to readers: the writer of these comments has never been to our office space). We aren’t aware of any incidents of discrimination experienced during our fellowship or the co-working space more generally - we’ve found the staff (most are Mexican) of the broader co-working space (imagine a WeWork) to be very kind and welcoming. If there are specific incidents you’re aware of, we’d encourage you to let us, or the Community Health team know.
While we are part of a Mexican university, and are mindful and respectful of local norms, we are also proud of having kickstarted a programme with a truly global focus in which members from various cultural backgrounds feel welcome.