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I am not! I applied and didn’t get it, I think the movement is bigger than available tickets in a convention. I’m on a few EA discords if you’d like to chat.
Benjamin Start
Karma: −56
[Question] Are there any EA-based virtual assistant agencies?
In general there are many important topics EA doesn’t focus on, government is just one of many. To answer your question specifically, an EA would probably become easily frustrated with government inefficiency, especially when you are dealing with people who actively try to make it inefficient. I personally have multiple ideas on this topic, but never been able to meaningfully work on them, to some extent directly because of government inefficiency.
The other issue you run into is that to be part of the EA movement you do need some level of privilege, and people with privilege often have a difficult time seeing things that don’t impact them. Government isn’t seen as so much of an issue when the government is benefitting them.
Haha I don’t know what IIDM is but I do know what forecasting is. If I had lots of money one of the things I’d do is create a forecasting news organization. They don’t talk about what happened, they talk about what’s going to happen. The knowlege transfer is important. People are too spread apart to use one platform, but if there was a list of people who were readily available to share information on certain topics and their contact info that would be valuble.
Hi! I personally am interested in EA from the standpoint of government policy as well as social and emotional skills. If anyone has any suggestions on how I can get more involved let me know.
Evil is not contained by good rational people, it’s contained by inefficiently. Systematic murder has to go through a legislative process, not through a cortisol addicts trigger happy political beliefs. If alcoholics had to travel on foot for a week to get to a bar, some would make the trip but most would just switch to a more convenient addiction. Like Twitter.
It doesn’t come from within often, it usually comes from trauma. Politics can prevent that to some extent but it won’t stop death, infertility, natural disasters, disability, accidents, and a whole range of traumas that existed before politics. In a perfect world there would be less evil, but still evil. Trauma + that small percentage of people who are just evil.
This is a really important topic. There are a few problems.
Your article mostly focuses on gay people. They make up a tiny portion amoung a community that includes transgender, nonbinary, intersex, asexual, bisexual, pansexual, polyamourous and more people. In areas where the LGBT+ community is widely accepted, there are extrememly high portions of the populations that identify as LGBT+. Having statistics about 30% of the population is very different than having statistics about 5% of the population. Many older survey have lots of deeply closeted people. You need to intentionally include the entire community.
LGBT+ is a very western concept. You need to intentionally include cultures and cultural identities in the countries you highlighted that don’t have western concepts of gender and sexuality.
Obviously colonization, imperialism, and coersive conversion to Christianity is the cause of these issues. One very important issue to consider today are radical Chrisitans from the US that are actively advocating for violence and pushing for this bad legislation. You can’t solve this issue without finding a way to ban these people from doing that. They mostly do it in person so there’d need to be travel bans for these people.
I resist it myself haha… I was planning on getting a post out sometime about how some things just can’t be quantified, with examples of math problems that are not possible to calculate. I think quantification through labels rather than numbers is really useful. I’ve often heard people say to solve something it must be done strategically, but it doesn’t end up going through because they have a hard time conceptualizing what an effective strategy would look like.
This is definitely important. I think you can go further and promote other causes as well. The only ones I can think of off the top of my head are related to identity stuff like women/race/disability issues as well as internet privacy, but there’s a lot more. If each cause had 3 different things written down that can be easily applied across any project or field of work, that’d be pretty cool.
What I meant to say in my original comment that data as it is collected and used in present and recent times should not be used. While that would remove the use of the majority of data we have now, that doesn’t mean there are not great amounts of relevant uncollected and unused data.
I agree. Data has different meanings and uses- priors are forms of data. Right now I see data primarily as a tool of persuasion. It’s relevance varies across fields- data in psychology is very different from data in physical sciences. Like you mentioned, it’s accuracy depends on the people creating and conducting the study. Modern science is dissatisfying to me, with persuasion being one of the problems I have with it. Even the commenting guidelines in this reply say “aim to explain, not persuade” While I would never write off all of modern science, one of the projects I’m working on is an alternative to academia. One of the goals is to use data in much more progressive ways then it is used now.
Doing research is always a great way to go. Getting feedback is important, because that’s when you’ll hear things you might not see with the internet search algorythm matrix. For some people it can be difficult to unlearn after they’ve already been exposed to too much information.
Facebook is pretty terrible I wish there was an easier way to not use it. So many people post it as a primary method of contact.
I would go on to say data shouldn’t be used. Data is something collected after the fact, and it only measures what is measured, not what’s important to measure. It’s easy to accurately identify information in the present and in the future through priors and other means.
Misinformation is really messing things up in the US.
As a former advocate I had a really difficult time voting and giving public comments to support issues, and still do. The main concern was over the typical EA thought process of “helpful” things actually causing harm. I was particularily concerned about this after finding out some of the things I supported had caused a negative impact, as well as seeing people I trusted accidentally support negative things.
It can take years of research before finding out what information is actually true. It shouldn’t be that way. No one has time for that.
As a short term solution I had the idea to be a content creator educating on and discussing these issues. Even though it’s important to me I’m not going to be able to do it. Some of the things I would have done is teach people about the different levels of government, as well as set up volunteers to research information to post on political sites and volunteer to support campaigns of good local candidates.
There are some long terms solutions I’ve thought of but that’s a post for another day.
Ah… this is something I struggle with. Especially since I’ve had the same goals for years. It would be a hard transition, I’ve done it before. I like to think of it as the next thing I find will be better in ways I didn’t expect, as long as I’m putting effort in.
Couldn’t read the article so I can’t say. EA does have some red flags it needs to deal with (just like literally any movement in existence) so it’s easy to pick on. How red flags are handled is what’s important, and based on the amount of posts I’ve seen saying that the movement struggles to address logitimate criticisms internally, it needs a shift to sincerely move forward. And I say that because some of the first things mentioned were things I personally had concerns about.
I will say, if it’s low-effort then the best response might be no response. It’s an op-ed, it’s someone’s big fat opinion. If EA was somehow perfect beyond the limits of reality someone would still write a low-effort op-ed.
As to why I need liability assistance: Honestly. I don’t know. Which is why it’s important. I don’t want to catch myself in a situation where I don’t know about some ridiculously obscure tax or business law and it screws me over.
It has nothing to do with the project. If I was doing a project for a non-altruistic purpose I’d be asking the exact same thing.
In general I am very uncomfortable with paperwork. I don’t know how to fill something out when every response is not applicable. Usually I just find someone who knows how to interpret paperwork and they figure out what the best response is.
I’m asking the most effective way to start a website-based nonprofit without having CEO-responsibilities meanwhile keeping the project’s integrity.
I’m asking because fiscal sponsorships seem to require almost an equal amount of effort as just starting an organization myself. Which is not realistic for me to complete paperwork and taxes by myself.
This is a really important issue!
A big thing to keep in mind-along with most other issues in the US- are the people and entities that are preventing solutions from happening. There are many bills on important issues that get killed after several attempts. To me based on a recent advocacy effort in my city on this issue there seems to be lots of public support.
I think we need to be asking, “what are tangible ways to get solutions passed that the public already supports?” It’s in part a matter of navigating an oligarchy.