Arthur has been engaged with EA since before the movement settled on a name, and reoriented from academics/âmedicine toward supporting highly impactful work. He has since developed operations skills by working with EA-affiliated organizations and in the private sector. Alongside EA interests, Arthur finds inspiration in nerdy art about heroes trying to save the universe.
Arthur Maloneđ¸
Karma: 926
AnÂnouncÂing EA SumÂmits, a new CEA-supÂported loÂcal event series
Hi Linda! CEAâs EAGx Coordinator here. This is definitely not a policy, and I also want everyone to know about events at the earliest date so they can make arrangements to attend. Itâs one of my biggest goals to increase the lead-time for events, for both organizers and attendees, and Iâm hoping that weâll be able to publicly announce more 2025 events soon.
Typically, we add an event to the webpage as soon as the event is âofficially confirmed,â which is usually as soon as the contract with the venue is signed. This contract procedure sometimes drags on and we announce before everything is complete, but this risks the possibility that the event date is moved or cancelled (which has happened before, and is obviously disruptive for anyone who has made plans).
For EAGxNordics 2025, I approved the save-the-date announcement in early December before the venue contract was signed. Since then, weâve had delays in adding it to the webpage and applications opening which hopefully will be resolved shortly (in the next day or two). Sorry for any disruptions this may have caused for anyoneâs planning, and I genuinely appreciate this flag (it would have been very valuable information to share if true!) and the acknowledgment that it could be a misunderstanding.
Where CEA staff are donatÂing in 2024
ApÂply to help run EAGxSinÂgaÂpore or EAGxVirÂtual!
Join us at EAGxInÂdia 2024 in BenÂgaluru, on 19â20 OcÂtoÂber, 2024!
Iâm extremely excited that EAGxIndia 2024 is confirmed for October 19â20 in Bengaluru! The team will post a full forum post with more details in the coming days, but I wanted a quick note to get out immediately so people can begin considering travel plans. You can sign up to be notified about admissions opening, or to express interest in presenting, via the forms linked on the event page:
https://ââwww.effectivealtruism.org/ââea-global/ââevents/ââeagxindia-2024
Hope to see many of you there!!
Arthur Maloneâs Quick takes
ApÂply to help run EAGxInÂdia or EAGxBerkeley!
Iâm ambivalent about jargon; strongly pro when it seems sufficiently useful, but opposed to superfluous usage. One benefit I can see for MEARO is that it isnât nominatively restricted to community building like most âlocal EA groups.â
I recently attended a talk at EAGxLatAm by Doebem, a Brazilian based and locally focused equivalent of GiveWell, that made a decent case for the application of EA principles to âthink global, act local.â Their work is very distinct from EA Brazil, but it falls solidly into regional and meta EA, and I think there is strong potential for other similar orgs that would work tightly with local CB groups but have different focus.
Thanks for the kind words!
To address the nit: Before changing it to âimpossible-to-optimize variables,â I had âthings where it is impossible to please everyone.â I think that claim is straightforwardly true, and maybe I should have left it there, but it doesnât seem to communicate everything I was going for. Itâs not just that attendees come in with mutually exclusive preferences, but from the organizers perspective it is practically impossible to chase optimality. We donât have control over everything in presentersâ talks, and donât have intimate knowledge of every attendeesâ preferences, so complaints are, IMHO, inevitable (and thatâs what I wanted to communicate to future organizers).
That said, I think we could have done somewhat better with our content list, mostly via getting feedback from applicants earlier so we could try to match cause-area supply and demand. For content depth, we aimed for some spread but for the majority of talks to be clustered on the medium-to-high side of EA familiarity (i.e. if a â1â was âaccessible to anyone even if theyâve never heard of EAâ and â10â was âonly useful to a handful of professional EA domain experts,â then we aimed for a distribution centered around 7. We only included talks at the low end if we considered them uniquely useful, like a âHow to avoid burnoutâ talk that, while being geared towards EAs, did not require lots of EA context).
I think, given that we selected for attendees with demonstrated EA activity, that this heuristic was pretty solid. Nothing in the feedback data would have me change it for the next go-around or advise other organizers to use a different protocol (unless, of course, they were aiming for a different sort of audience). But Iâm happy for anyone to offer suggestions for improvement!
I really appreciate and agree with âtrying to be thoughtful at allâ and âdirectionally correct,â as the target group to be nudged is those who see a deadline and wait until the end of the window (to look at it charitably, maybe they donât know that thereâs a difference in when they apply. So weâre just bringing it to their attention.)
We appreciate that there are genuine cases where people are unsure. I think in your case, the right move wouldâve been to apply with that annotation; you likely would have been accepted and then been able to register as soon as you were sure.
EAGxNYC 2023: Retrospective
CelÂeÂbratÂing Progress: ReÂcent HighÂlights from the NYC EA Community
I am all for efforts to do AIS movement building distinct from EA movement building by people who are convinced by AIS reasoning and not swayed by EA principles. Thereâs all kinds of discussion about AIS in academic/âprofessional/âmedia circles that never reference EA at all. And while Iâd love for everyone involved to learn about and embrace EA, Iâm not expecting that. So Iâm just glad theyâre doing their thing and hope theyâre doing it well.
I could probably have asked the question better and made it, âwhat should EAs do (if anything), in practice to implement a separate AIS movement?â Because then it sounds like weâre talking about making a choice to divert movement building dollars and hours away from EA movement building to distinct AI safety movement building, under the theoretical guise of trying to bolster the EA movement against getting eaten by AIS? Seems obviously backwards to me. I think EA movement building is already under-resourced, and owning our relationship with AIS is the best strategic choice to achieve broad EA goals and AIS goals.
As someone who is extremely pro investing in big-tent EA, my question is, âwhat does it look like, in practice, to implement âAI safety...should have its own movement, separate from EAâ?â
I do think it is extremely important to maintain EA as a movement centered on the general idea of doing as much good as we can with limited resources. There is serious risk of AIS eating EA, but the answer to that cannot be to carve AIS out of EA. If people come to prioritize AIS from EA principles, as I do, I think it would be anathema to the movement to try to push their actions and movement building outside the EA umbrella. In addition, EA being ahead of the curve on AIS is, in my opinion, a fact to embrace and treat as evidence of the value of EA principles, individuals, and movement building methodology.
To avoid AIS eating EA, we have to keep reinvesting in EA fundamentals. I am so grateful and impressed that Dave published this post, because itâs exactly the kind of effort that I think is necessary to keep EA EA. I think he highlights specific failures in exploiting known methods of inducing epistemic ⌠untetheredness?For example, I worked with CFAR where the workshops deliberately employed the same intensive atmosphere to get people to be receptive to new ways of thinking and being actually open to changing their minds. I recognized that this was inherently risky, and was always impressed that the ideas introduced in this state were always about how to think better rather than convince workshop participants of any conclusion. Despite many of the staff and mentors being extremely convinced of the necessity of x-risk mitigation, I never once encountered discussion of how the rationality techniques should be applied to AIS.
To hear that this type of environment is de facto being used to sway people towards a cause prioritization, rather than how to do cause prio makes me update significantly away from continuing the university pipeline as it currently exists. The comments on the funding situation are also new to me and seem to represent obvious errors. Thanks again Dave for opening my eyes to whatâs currently happening.
GenÂeral supÂport for âGenÂeral EAâ
As the primary author who looked for citations, I want to flag that while I think it is great to cite sources and provide quantitative evidence when possible, I have a general wariness about including the kinds of links and numbers I chose here when trying to write persuasive content.
Even if one tries to find true and balanced sources, the nature of searching for answers to questions like âWhat percentage of US philanthropic capital flows through New York City based institutions?â or âHow many tech workers are based in the NYC-metro area compared to other similar cities?â is likely to return a skewed set of results. Where possible, I tried to find sources and articles that were about a particular topic and just included NYC among all relevant cities over sources that were about NYC.
Unfortunately, in some cases the only place I could find relevant data was in a piece trying to make a story about NYC. I think this is bad because of incentives to massage or selectively choose statistics to sell stories. You can find a preponderance of news stories selling the idea that âX city is taking over the Bay as the new tech hubâ catering to the local audience in X, so the existence of such an article is poor evidence that X is actually the important, up-and-coming, tech hub. That said, if X actually was a place with a reasonable claim to being the important, up-and-coming, tech hub, you would expect to see those same articles, so the weak evidence is still in favor.
I am trying to balance the two conflicting principles of âit is good to include evidenceâ and âit is difficult to tell what is good evidence when searching for support for a claimâ by including this disclaimer. The fundamental case made in the sequence is primarily based on local knowledge and on dozens-to-hundreds of conversations Iâve had after spending many years in both the Bay and NYC EA communities, not on the relatively-quickly sourced links I included here to try to help communicate the case to those without the direct experience.
EffecÂtive AltruÂism in New York City: Introduction
That is true, and the post has been edited in response. Thanks!
I think the examples you give are actually contrary to the useful message of âmore dakka.â
Yours suggest âif something doesnât work, try more of it,â which in general is poor advice. Sometimes itâs true that you need more of something before you hit a threshold that generates results. But most of the time, negative results are informative and should guide you to change your approach.
More dakka is about when something does work, but doesnât solve the problem entirely, or is easy to drop off rather than continue. Itâs a useful concept trying to correct for an observed tendency to ignore only-somewhat-positive results.
Example: âbright lights seemed to help a bit, but my seasonal depression is still lingering.â More dakka: âhave you tried even brighter lights?â
Example: âwe brainstormed ten ideas and got some that seemed workable, but they still have issues.â More dakka: âTry listing a 100 ideas before committing to a so-so one from the first ten.â
@Joseph âdakkaâ is just an onomatopoeic term for the sound of a machine gun (âdakka dakka dakkaâ), and the phrase comes from the TV tropes entry. The fanciful names there are useful for fun, reference-based humor (and I use them a lot in my persona life!), but I do think porting them over to EA-jargon is probably net negative for clarity/âprofessionalism.