Gaurav Yadav
Lead @ Bristol AI Safety Centre—bristolaisafety.org
Prev. @ CEA/EV.
I don’t think using “optics” as a reason to shift away from the Bay is great. Many of the critiques you seem to be gesturing at would still ham away at EA regardless (potentially because it’s an easy narrative to pick on or because it’s easy to associate the movement’s funding with Silicon Valley).
I also think using the association between EA and Oxford Uni seems counterintuitive to me; people seem to often associate Oxford with “elitism”.
This is great. I’m glad stuff like the community health team exists.
I assume the actions you’ve taken can’t be shared? (No pressure if it can’t).
Thanks for writing this! Especially this part:
I strongly recommend you aim to decouple your self-worth from your productivity and impact — to internalise that you have intrinsic worth no matter how productive you are or how much impact you have.
I was lucky to have a therapist who was able to help me internalise this, and I think it has been incredibly valuable in helping me break some of my negative thought patterns and self-deprecating tendencies.
Well done on getting a post out on the forum about your experience Olivia!
If companies like OpenAI and Deepmind have safety teams, it seems to me that they anticipate that speeding up AI capabilities can be very bad, so why don’t they press the brakes on their capabilities research until we come up with more solutions to alignment?
I think EA Grants is different from EA Funds. EA Grants was discontinued a while back—https://www.effectivealtruism.org/grants
Thanks for linking this Matthew!
Hmm I disagree. I’m not a fan of making it a norm for someone to reply to me, feels icky and I don’t think anyone has responsibility to message me back unless we’ve scheduled something beforehand.
I empathise with the awkwardness of trying to reach out again but something like ‘Hey I tried reaching you at EAG: London, but didn’t get a response. No pressure but if you’d have time at this EAGx to have a chat I’d love to. Some things I’d like to get out of our conversation: X, Y, Z….’ could be reasonable way of dealing with this.
Suggestion: Enlarge the font size for pronouns on EA Global/EA retreat name cards
There was a period when I used they/them pronouns and was frequently misgendered at EA events. This likely occurred because I present as male, but regardless, it was a frustrating experience. I often find it difficult to correct people and explicitly mention my preferred pronouns, especially in socially taxing environments like EAGs or retreats. Increasing the size of the pronouns on name cards could be helpful.
This is exciting! Thank you for your and LIC’s hard work!!
(I am mostly articulating feelings here. I am unsure about what I think should change).
I am somewhat disappointed with the way Manifund has turned out. This isn’t to critique the manifund team or that regranting as an idea is bad, but after a few months of excitement and momentum, things have somewhat decelerated. While you get the occasional cool projects, most of the projects on the website don’t seem particularly impressive to me. I also feel like some of the regrantors seem slow to move money, but it could be that the previous problem is feeding into this.
I am going to link post a talk by Rowan Lund (from Family Empowerment Media) here in case people want to learn more.
Good post!
I really liked the idea of a rejection doc when I first came across it. I have one with my brother, and it’s been super helpful in keeping us motivated.
Although I think this is incredible, there is a nagging feeling in the back of my mind that it may be difficult to sustain the kind of success rate that CE is currently achieving. Do you anticipate that, as you run more incubation programs, you will see more incubated charities failing or shutting down?
Do you have a sense of whether you will eventually exhaust cost-effective charity ideas as you continue to run more incubation programs?
Yeah, I concur. I feel like this could have been under a separate tag that we could have hidden instead.
Do you think working in the Civil Service has given you a good skillset that you could transfer over to other EA career paths?
Shame you couldn’t get involved with stuff here in Bristol; I think we could have made more of an effort last year to be more open to folks outside of the University of Bristol—glad you’re liking it in Oxford!
Why might you stop cross posting to the forum?
Curious about what this implies -
Does leadership at FTX change?
What does this mean for the FTX Foundation?
What does this mean for the FTX Future Fund?