Also, you may want to post in the EA Facebook group. I think there are 3 or 4 others from Toronto.
Bitton
Hey Giles, I met you at a LW meetup about a year ago at the Imperial. I mentioned EA to you (and the only other guy that showed up) and I got the impression that neither of you were familiar. Out of curiosity, was that your introduction to EA?
Figuring Good Out—Launch Thread
Good Ventures granted $3M to SCI but only $250k to DtWI. Why such a big difference?
There are some audio recordings of interviews from 2009 here.
Nice post and thanks for the shout out to my blog but for the record, I’m not “a marketer” by any means. I just took an interest in marketing and related fields while researching my thesis paper. I actually do production office work in film.
I think this is a good place to reiterate that I’m interested in beginning an EA blogging carnival where each month, somebody picks a theme and everybody blogs about that theme.
If there’s enough interest, I’ll pick a topic for Jan 1 submissions.
The Roxanne Heston link doesn’t work.
I like this way of thinking about weirdness, Peter. I’ve been saying for a while that EA is associated with a lot of weird ideas that are sure to turn off many ordinary people.
Another thing I’d recommend is remaining sympathetic to mildly and moderately important issues (e.g. fighting police brutality in the USA, supporting gay rights, containing ebola, the ALS ice bucket challenge) even when you see everybody around you overrating their importance relative to other issues that you consider far more important. Raining on everybody else’s warm, fuzzy parade will make you “weird,” and people will be less willing to hear about your alternative causes. I think the general strategy should be to care about EA issues in addition to mainstream issues, rather than supporting them as an alternative to mainstream issues.
Well, the point is that it’s a different person choosing the topic each time so my personal list won’t be a good representation of what an actual blogging carnival would like—but here are some possibilities, some of which have already been done to death:
Donating Now vs Donating Later
EA Outreach
The Importance of the Far Future
Should EAs Be Vegan?
The Role of Self-Improvement in EA
Morality and Altruism
EA Ideas in Art and Popular Culture
Unusual Causes
Advanced Finances for EAs
The Moral Relevance of Wild Animal Suffering
Unknown Unknowns
The Epistemology of Cause Prioritization
The topics should be open-ended enough that different bloggers will take the topic in different directions.
Is there any interest in an EA blogging carnival?
How it works is that each month, a different blogger “hosts” the carnival by selecting a topic. Everyone interested in participating for that month then writes a blog post about that topic. The host then writes up a post linking to all the submissions.
This is a bit tangential but I don’t know if there’s a single EA that smokes cigarettes.
Diego, I don’t weight any of the 4 risks you’ve listed very heavily. I also think you’ve underestimated the benefits.
In regards to Benefit #1, a vote’s relevance doesn’t depend on the election being decided by a single vote. If you think probabilistically, then in any given election, your vote has a certain probability of affecting the outcome. You can weight that against how important you think it is for Party A to win over Party B. I think that given how little it costs to vote, it’s usually clearly worth it to take a small action with a tiny probability of having large-scale consequences.
I think this is somewhat analogous to going vegetarian, in which case you’re contributing to a larger cause even though your individual decision not to buy meat only has a tiny probability of being the non-purchase that causes the grocery store to order one less item next time.
Other benefits:
a) Your vote might cause other people to vote with you. In this case, you are no longer a single vote but a package of votes.
b) There’s also something to be said for signalling an interest in politics and social issues.
c) In some elections, your vote might give the party you voted for more seats, funding, power and/or legitimacy, even if they ultimately lose the election.
d) The attention it takes to learn about politics can also have multiple benefits: being in touch with the people around you, learning about issues in society, learning about solving those issues, etc.
Any time before the end of the month. I was going to take a crack at mine today with the hope of inspiring other people to submit posts.