Thanks Scott! And for your work on the ai safety map—was a great surprise to find out you had helped with that!
Agree with you on your points, especially around theories of change and the post you shared. I feel like the highest amount of value for least amount of work an org can produce is ensuring that the work they’re doing is valuable/impactful in the first place. Without an explicit theory of change, or seeing how their org/ToC fits into the “larger picture”, well-intentioned people can be stuck spinning their wheels. Without a centralized plan (the larger picture made explicit), I think your proposal of compiling organization’s ToCs could be a great place to start.
I’ve booked in a call with Kabir and will definitely loop you in depending on how that goes!
Brandon Riggs
Karma: 24
They actually make some appearances in this post! Do you know who runs it? Don’t see any team info on their about page
Love this!
I’m a big proponent using love of humanity as a motivator. It’s true that guilt and/or rationalism can be motivating, but I’ve found that helping people because people are what make your life worth living seems like a much healthier way, and is even more motivating (more effective).
You nail the sentiment in your post on Life in a Day. Of course it would be nice if our biological evolution led us to being highly motivated by numbers on a spreadsheet, but operating on the hardware we have, the feeling Life in a Day gives is massively more motivating—at least to me—and I would love to see this fact leveraged more throughout the EA community.
I was happy to see Zach’s speech at EAG London this year tapping a bit more into this humanity and believe it was a great step in this direction.
I think there may be an overcorrection in the EA movement away from using emotion as a motivator as we often encounter people working on less impactful things via this guidance (the classic example of guide dogs in California vs. donating to The Against Malaria foundation). It seems possible to decouple choosing based on emotion and using emotion to motivate action.