I know this isn’t the central part of the post but I’m not sure the title is really clickbait. It seems like an accurate headline to me? I understand clickbait to be “the intentional act of over-promising or otherwise misrepresenting — in a headline, on social media, in an image, or some combination — what you’re going to find when you read a story on the web.” Source.
A real clickbait title for this would be something like “The one secret fact FTX doesn’t want you to know” or “Grantmakers hate him! One weird trick to make spending transparent”
BenSchifman
EA for Jews—Proposal and Request for Comment
Things I recommend you buy and use.
This post clearly articulates a lot of the related thoughts I’ve been having and discussing with other organizers; well done. I will add my quickly dashed off thoughts, coming in particular from the perspective of a EA group organizer:
1. The time/ money trade off is real, particularly for mostly volunteer-led groups where volunteer capacity is our main bottleneck. Nonetheless, in my view being cognizant of trade offs when allocating resources is core to EA, and it is a real loss when we just vaguely gesture at the time/money trade off and spend money without really thinking deeply about its best use. I advocate taking a rule utilitarian approach to this—even if in any given situation it might be more time that it is “worth” to really think hard about whether spending funds on something is the best use of those funds—even within a more narrow framework like a group’s overall goals—it is still worth doing as a rule. This also reinforces the norms of talking explicitly about trade offs, cause prioritization, and thinking strategically.
2. This is anecdotal of course, but I have directly seen people express discomfort when our group spends money on, e.g., paying for food and drinks or renting a “nice” space for an event. Attendees have directly said in feedback following these events that they are uncomfortable spending this money, and it doesn’t seem to align with our EA values. Is this discomfort enough to have tangible consequences like they stop being engaged? Unclear. Moreover, I think it is quite possible that having a “nicer” event may still be justified by attracting more people, more types of people, and/or having the people there have a better time. I’ve advocated collecting data about, for instance, how many people come to similar events, one that is catered and one that is not. Such data collection of course also takes time and energy. In general I am pretty skeptical that the marginal dollar spent on food and particularly alcohol at an event is doing much good but without any data this view is very loosely held.
3. FWIW, Matt Yglesias has expressed something in this vein on the 80k podcast:Matthew Yglesias: I was interested when I started hearing about people I know going to effective altruism conferences. I thought to myself, that actually doesn’t sound very effective altruism-y. I always associate effective altruism with ideas like, “Maybe don’t do the conference, just give the money — that airfare could do a lot of good in the world.”
Thanks for starting this project! I’m not an audio engineer but I am a musician with a lot of audio editing experience (and relevant software), and I’ve got a few ideas to share about how to make the sound quality better on these. Send me a message if you’re interested in chatting. I could potentially also help out with audio editing directly though my schedule is a bit full at the moment.
EA for Jews—Update and call for volunteers
Using the tax system and stock market to donate more: a few basic strategies
Thanks Cullen! I’ve talked to a few folks that are part of the EA Israel group and they are interested in helping out. I think this proposed project would be complementary in some ways, but largely different from their group.
Hi Yitz! Our long term plan—a very high level—is to (1) do outreach to Jewish communities and spread EA ideas to those communities, and (2) to build a community of Jews involved in EA. We currently have a number of projects in the works including EA fellowships and materials aimed at different Jewish audiences (including different denominations as well as demographics such as for b’nai mitzvah age Jews). I’ll send you a DM with more info and my calendly if you’d like to learn more!
Thanks for sharing! This could be added to this great post compiling EA Syllabi and Teaching Materials; I’ve suggested this in a comment there.
Thanks Eric, glad you found some of this to be useful. And yes, I certainly agree with you that my suggestions on health and diet are not likely to be endorsed by the whole EA community—or likely the entirety of any other community! Diet and health topics tend to be controversial and we have a lot we’re still learning in the area. However, having read a lot on the topic I stand by the recommended books which are the best I’ve found in terms of being strongly scientifically grounded. Same with the supplements, my review of the literature (and Examine.com) lead me to believe they’re very likely net positive for most. But if you’ve got something I should look at on either topic that might change my view I’ll check it out!
Great tips, thank you. Related to #1, I have used Evernote in a similar way—I also use it to store some pics and many articles, especially those I have in paper form which I can scan directly into Evernote and then recycle the physical copy. It is great because it has tagging and text search so I feel like I can find stuff again if I need to and it hasn’t just gone into the void. It also has a great web clipper chrome extension so if I have a million tabs open with things to read I can simply save them for later on Evernote and tag them “to read.” If I have time I might write a separate post about using Evernote in this way; if anyone reading this thinks that would be helpful chime in!
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.
For more on health impacts you might want to take a look at this Slate Star Codex post which has a decent objective overview, also a good discussion in the comments. The circumcision debate is somewhat fraught; maybe that’s an understatement. Regardless I’ll be interested to follow the discussion here.
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!
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 .
Thanks Josh! I completely agree. I’ve been in touch with the founder of Jewish Effective Giving and my plan at this point is to make the EA for Jews (or whatever the name we decide on is) a much broader site, not duplicative of the Jewish Effective Giving site. We would however plan to partner with Jewish Effective Giving in the sense that we would direct folks who are interested in speaking to their (reform) synagogues about effective giving to the Jewish Effective Giving folks.
On mobile but not for some reason on the web version there is a “more platforms” button that gives you an RSS feed that should work on any player: https://anchor.fm/s/62cbeec4/podcast/rss
Wow I wasn’t aware of this, thanks for alerting me to it. It appears the author might have responded somewhat indirectly here (https://sleepdiplomat.wordpress.com/). I will add a note in the post and do some more digging when I have time.
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.