U.S. Politics should be a main focus of US EAs right now. In the past year alone, every major EA cause area has been greatly hurt or bottlenecked by Trump. $40 billion in global health and international development funds was lost when USAID shut down, which some researchers project could lead to 14 million more deaths by 2030. Trump has signed an Executive Order that aims to block states from creating their own AI regulations, and has allowed our most powerful chips to be exported to China. Trump has withdrawn funding from, and U.S. support for, international governance bodies like the United Nations and the World Health Organization, thereby removing the world’s most influential country from the collaborative efforts necessary to combat climate change and global pandemics. Most recently, the administration even changed nutritional guidelines, encouraging Americans to eat more animal protein than ever, which could drive more demand for unethically-produced animal products. In addition to all of this, Trump has continuously acted undemocratically, brazenly breaking norms and laws meant to protect us from autocracy and dictatorship. This goes to show just how determinative U.S. politics is to our successes and our failures.
Ashley Star 🔸
I’m so glad my forum post was able to play a role in this experience for you. It sounds like you were also very personally affected by the internship—seeing the uncertainty and suffering up close is far different from reading about it from behind a screen in a developed country; I really hope other EAs can have experiences like ours to better understand the ground-level complexities of making change in a messy world.
If only the team had adopted puppies while I was there…
The mental health EA cause space should explore more experimental, scalable interventions, such as promoting anti-inflammatory diets at school/​college cafeterias to reduce depression in young people, or using lighting design to reduce seasonal depression. What I’ve seen of this cause area so far seems focused on psychotherapy in low-income countries. I feel like we’re missing some more out-of-the-box interventions here. Does anyone know of any relevant work along these lines?
Since you referenced my post, I thought I’d chime in! This was my first ever EA post. I had written a slightly modified version as a guest post for the Fish Welfare Initiative’s blog, and then Haven (ED at FWI) encouraged me to post it on the forum for it to find a more relevant audience. There’s a good chance that without this themed event signaling to me that my internship experience could be relevant and useful for others to read, I would never have posted on the EA Forum. Even after posting, I was surprised by the positive reception my post got, which has made me much more likely to write future forum posts—I’ve already started drafting some ideas. In short, I really liked this event, because it gave me justification to post something that feels more anecdotal/​personal than what I usually see on the forum.
Great point, thank you for adding this. I still think the advice is somewhat relevant if people can find impactful non-profits working in their home countries, but I was definitely writing this from the privileged perspective of someone who can easily access university funding.
One pushback on your comments on the transportation being easy—there were 2-3 students from the University of Michigan who wanted to attend but could not get transportation to the event. The group did not have the budget to cover a vehicle rental, and it would have been about 3.5 hours each way (this is from memory when I attended, so it may be wrong). We are accounting for this in our budget for next year. I wasn’t involved in the planning this year, but from my perspective, you’ve overstated the accessibility of the location.
Hopefully next year we will able to have UMich represented as well!