Great post. I understand indoor air quality is the focus of the piece but if we’re looking holistically at clean air we should also consider the significant health costs of air pollution outdoors. Patrick Collison has a great overview: https://patrickcollison.com/pollution
BenSchifman
Karma: 421
@JDBauman—this may be of interest to you?
Welcome to the roomba club!
Thanks! I agree there isn’t definitive evidence about water vs other flossing. For me it is so much easier to do water flossing that I also would favor that if it was equal or even slightly less effective than the alternative.
I think my prior is that anything that mechanically moves plaque and food particles from in between your teeth—be it water, “regular” floss, or something else—is going to work. It probably depends as much on your technique as to the underlying mechanism and so I think this would be hard to effectively study.
FWWIW, I do something similar for free using zoom—I start a zoom meeting, share my screen and record the meeting (with just me in it). The resulting video is my face in the corner and my screen. Not as many features as Loom obviously, but free.
I have a fidelity DAF linked to my fidelity brokerage account and my only complaint is that there is a small cost associated with it. I of course understand why that is, and the tax benefits outweigh the cost. But if there was a nonprofit EA aligned DAF that had lower or no cost that would be preferable obviously.
One other thought—and this isn’t a complaint about a DAF exactly—is that it would be great to be able to set rules about when certain appreciated stocks would be donated to the DAF so I could totally “set it and forget it”—I described this idea at the end of this post.
Litigator with 10+ years experience here—completely agree with Tyler and not from knee jerk legal conservativism. I’ve seen talking to the press go very, very wrong personally. There’s a reason keeping quiet is the near universal advice from experts.
Thanks Rachel. If anyone else reading this has any more data on this point I’d be very interested. I’m helping with the first EA for Jews intro fellowship and we’re thinking about how to assess its impact. If 90-98% of people who do an intro fellowship never engage with EA again afterwards that seems quite strong grounds for rethinking whether we (as a community) should invest in intro fellowships as much as we seem to. And/or if we should experiment much more on different types of intros to see if there is greater impact.
But only 2-10% of students who start an intro fellowship end up engaging with EA afterwards;
Do you have a source for this? Thank you!
On Facebook, the Effective Altruism group has 21,800 members, whereas the three main religiously-inclined EA groups that I could find (Christians and Effective Altruism, Buddhists in Effective Altruism, Spirituality and Effective Altruism) only have 1,700 members in total
There’s also EA for Jews. Here’s the facebook group :)
Thought provoking essay, thanks Geoffrey!
A related idea is to incorporate EA ideas into existing religious institutions. I’m involved in such a project. Eaforjews.org
Have you ever used Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP) for speed reading? Depending on the content I can get close to 900 wpm! An example online is: https://accelareader.com/
I use the chrome plugin swift reader.
You could pick the name based on the “what3words” location description. For instance: https://what3words.com/split.bigger.basket
In the portion discussing considerations by career path I would add:
When deciding which schools to apply to and more so when deciding which school to attend, consider the clinics, journals, centers, and other opportunities that are relevant for a topic area of interest to you. Participating in these extracurriculars is a good way to learn about an area, signal to employers to have an interest in an area, and develop mentors and connections in the field. There are significant differences in otherwise similar schools in this regard .
Excellent post!
If anyone reading this is in law school or about to start and you would like my advice about how to succeed there (including my unconventional strategy for law school exams) DM me and I can share a document I have written and shared with other EAs.
I highly recommend the Founder’s Pledge Climate and Lifestyle report.* Take a look specifically at Figure 5 and you will see that donating a small amount to one of their highly effective charities dwarfs the emissions from a single flight like the one you’re proposing here.
Zooming out a bit, in my opinion these kinds of decisions shouldn’t about guilt (see replacing guilt series) but rather about taking the action that on net is best for others. In that framework working and donating to an effective charity that combats climate change—one of the world’s most pressing problems—is likely better than wasting days in a less efficient form of transit and not making such a donation.
*A caveat not relevant here is I think their approach in the report to the impacts of having a child are mistaken but otherwise its a great report.
Weird, the link (https://linktr.ee/ea_dc) works for me. Maybe Link Tree was down for a spell? Anyway this is a link tree for Washington DC but it sounds like you’re in SF. If you are back in DC feel free to DM me and I’ll make sure you get squared away!
In the first sentence I think you mean SF?
I just moved to SF from DC and I did a bunch of google searches to find EA meetups inDCSF, and I found nothing whatsoever.If you are actually looking for meetups in DC there are plenty including one tonight :) More info about this month’s events here :) {edited to add the link is https://linktr.ee/ea_dc]
I don’t know the time it takes or the direct tradeoffs but it seems possible that sharing EA content over an audio medium could be higher impact that other forms of community building, as the reach of a podcast is potentially worldwide. Really depends on the empirics. I am a podcast superuser though so I’m aware that I’m atypical and just because I’d like to listen while i do the dishes rather than read that isn’t universal!
I agree to an extent, especially at the very high level that you’re talking about—if someone hates programing or wet lab research I think it is unlikely to matter what the program or lab is. However, within more social science type research / work I’m familiar with I don’t view testing your fit with different types of research as mutually exclusive with testing your fit for researching within a cause area. In fact I think they’re often linked since the cause area influences the type of research and work generally you’ll be doing. To take an area I know well, law: it seems reasonable to me that someone who is interested in testing their fit in legal research or working as a lawyer generally would also benefit from trying working on different cause areas since the legal issues and types of research will be significantly different. Someone who enjoys trying to draft an international agreement to ban certain types of AI models may not be interested in doing domestic litigation focused on animal welfare. Though at a high level they could be called “legal research” or just lawyering, the day to day is going to be quite different.