I’m the co-founder of EA Philippines and a community building grantee from the Centre for Effective Altruism. I was formerly a Senior Product Designer at First Circle, a FinTech company in Manila. You can reach out to me at brian@effectivealtruism.ph or add me on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/brianctan/.
BrianTan
Karma: 949
What are the 4-10 books you’ve found most helpful to your career as a strategy and research consultant, or about your knowledge on improving institutional decision-making?
What are other resources (aside from books) that you’ve also found most helpful to your career?
I remember finding the data from ahrefs.com about EA sites interesting. You can get a 7-day free trial of it if you haven’t tried it out. I can’t remember if it had data on number of views, but it had data on what links rank high based on certain keywords or topics, such as “effective altruism”, on search engines.
Awesome, I’ve messaged you on the forum!
I agree that social proof through testimonials or having more faces around the site (apart from the advisory board and team page) and other indicators of credibility would probably help! I wonder if it might help too if you more clearly put that this is a project of Effective Altruism Israel (or endorsed by them)?
This might be outside of Giving What We Can’s target audiences, but I’d love to see more tailored effective giving and EA career advice content for people from middle-income countries. It is probably best written by someone from a middle-income country like me, but I’m not sure if I have the time or willingness to do so currently, so I’ll just lay out the idea here. We get questions like this a lot in our discussions/meetups at EA Philippines:
I’m from a middle-income country. Shouldn’t I donate locally than abroad?
The question could also be expanded to low income countries:
“I’m from a low / middle income country. Shouldn’t I donate locally than abroad?”
Hey Lewis, 3 of us in EA Philippines are doing some research/scoping work on how Filipinos can make an impact on local farm animal welfare and/or alternative proteins, so these questions are going to be oddly specific:
1. If you could advise 3 generalists who could spend ~5 hours per week each on one or two of the following issues by doing research/direct work/advocacy on them, how would you rank the 5 issues below, and why?
Local fish welfare
Local layer chicken welfare
Local pig welfare (which is heavily affected by the current outbreak of African Swine Fever)
Local broiler chicken welfare
Local alternative proteins (probably through focusing on growing the number of startups or companies making plant-based food)
The ranking above is currently how I think we should prioritize between the different issues, but they’re still very tentative. We’ve done ~30 hours of desk research to draft an initial problem profile on local land animal welfare, and had 7 expert interviews already with players working on these problems locally, including Animal Kingdom Foundation for layer chickens / cage-free, Humane Society International for plant-based advocacy, Worth the Health Foods (a plant-based startup), Fish Welfare Initiative, the Bureau of Animal Industry (on chicken welfare and the animal welfare act), and PAWS (Philippine Animal Welfare Society). We haven’t done as much research on pig welfare or alternative proteins, which is partly why I’m ranking them lower. (The 2 other people I work with in EA PH may disagree with my ranking above).
2. Also, is your answer above the same as how would you rank the 5 local issues above on which ones you (whether through OpenPhil or the EA Animal Welfare Fund) would be more excited to fund?
We can discuss more about the research we’ve done so far with you via email. We were planning to email you about this and ask even more questions within the next 1-2 weeks, but I thought of trying to ask this question ahead on your AMA, in case you wanted to share rough thoughts on this publicly!
Btw, a way you could get more feedback on which of these posts readers would like you to write is to place each of these topics as a comment on this post, and let people upvote or strong upvote the ones they are interested in reading or would think are more valuable.
You can also have a separate comment that people could downvote, so they could offset the added karma you gain through using comments as a poll. I say this because some forum users think that using comments as a poll is an unfair way to gain karma, which is somewhat true.
Just my two cents, but in my view, these are how valuable these forum posts would be:
Shelters MVP − 9⁄10
I’d be interested to read about this since you say it could be what OpenPhil spends its last longtermist dollar on. It’s also just something personally interesting to me, and I think other longtermist EAs would be interested in it too.
What are Good Humanities Research Ideas for Longtermism? − 8⁄10
I think it’d be good to get people with humanities backgrounds to do more research work on longtermism.
After the Apocalypse − 7⁄10
I think this is quite interrelated with the Shelters MVP post, and so initially I ranked this an 8⁄10 . But I’m a bit more interested though in Shelters MVP as a way to protect people rather than just helping people get better at surviving in the wild or after a catastrophe, which there might be resources already for outside of EA.
How to Get Good at Forecasting − 6⁄10
I think a lot of EAs would be interested in this, myself included, but I think the value of the 3 posts above are higher, and I think they are more neglected/unique. I presume it would be easier for someone to interview forecasters themselves if they were interested in learning from them on how to get good at forecasting, rather than for someone to compile a bunch of research about any of the 3 topics above.
Moral Circle Expansion − 5⁄10
I’m skeptical of how much this would change people’s views on Moral Circle Expansion, so I don’t think this post would have a lot of value, since it might not be concrete/applicable enough.
Glad you liked the list Kathryn! :) I also like the movie World War Z, but I wasn’t sure if it was EA-relevant enough to add it here. It could well be though. I also liked the Netflix show Into the Night, which is about a fictional x-risk event.
Thanks for sharing those! I might try to watch Ex Machina.
No problem!
Ah I had forgotten about that post of yours, but yeah that one is a list of YouTube channels. Anyway, I’ve spent 3 hours making the post and posted it here. Maybe you or others would find it useful!
A ranked list of all EA-relevant documentaries, movies, and TV series I’ve watched
lol good for your friend!
Also, I think someone should make a list like this, but for EA-relevant documentaries, TV shows, and movies. I’ve consumed quite a few, so maybe I’ll make one. But I’d like to see others make them too, so I can get more suggestions. (Feel free to upvote this if you think I should make that list!)
Thanks for this list and linking to all the Audible books Michael!
I’m from the Philippines and some of these Audible links said these titles weren’t available in my region, but I found a way to bypass this through the instructions in this link. (I hope it’s okay for me to share that information here and do this bypassing).
Anyway, are you planning on listing the reasons for why you find these books valuable? I think that would help make this list more useful for other people. 1-3 sentences per book should be enough.
I’m particularly interested about why the books How to Measure Anything, Steve Jobs, Destined for War, The Dictator’s Handbook, Expert Political Judgment, and Algorithms to Live By were useful to you.
I’m 50% done listening to the How to Measure Anything audiobook, and it’s been helpful, but I’m lacking some motivation to finish the audiobook. It’s also quite dense to listen to as an audiobook, so I’m not sure if I should be consuming it that way. Did you listen to that as an audiobook?
The Steve Jobs book is one that seems most not EA-related in the list, so I’m also curious to hear why you found that useful. (I get that he was the driving force behind the most valuable company in the world, so maybe understanding him is relevant to EA too?)
No problem! Posting a few (1-3 ) interviews/issues first should be fine.
Hi Kate, welcome to the forum! Great to see someone with a sociology background in EA—there’s relatively few of you in the movement. I’m glad that you’re doing ethnographic research on people in the movement. I was a UI/UX designer before so I’ve done some user research / qualitative interviews before.
Another EA, Vaidehi Agarwalla, did something similar to you before where she interviewed people in EA, particularly those who were looking to make a career transition or had just made a career transition. Her undergraduate degree was also in sociology. You may be interested to read her sequence on “Towards A Sociological Model of EA Movement Building”, which I think is unfinished yet, but already has 2 articles in it.
I was wondering if you were planning on focusing on a specific topic or demographic within EA for your ethnographic research? That might be good to do, since people in EA and their interests can be quite varied, so it might be worth scoping the research down rather than just asking to interview anyone in the movement. Just my two cents!
Also, if you haven’t seen it yet, 80,000 Hours has a list here of research topics that people with a background in sociology can research on. You could consider researching on one of these topics as a side project or uni project in the future.
Also, if you’re interested in biosecurity, David Manheim had some biosecurity project ideas for people with a sociology/anthropology background. :)
Hi Kottsiek, welcome to the Forum! Have you connected with someone from EA Berlin, such as Manuel Allgaier? Here’s their website: https://ea-berlin.org/. You can also reach out to NEAD, which connects people interested in EA in Germany : https://ealokal.de/. You will likely be able to connect with EAs with a similar background or at least in the same region/country as you through EA Berlin or NEAD.
Regarding struggling with procrastination, I found the Complice’s Goal-Crafting Intensive Workshop useful. It’s a 5-hour event where you listen and work through content with others to help you set and prioritize goals for yourself, and come up with strategies to achieve them, among other topics. It only costs a minimum of $25. The next session is still in April, but you can already book for a class ahead and they can give you content that you can work through ahead.
You might also like to read this EA Forum post about finding an accountability buddy to meet or chat with every week, to help you overcome procrastination: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/2RvpoWWQDiFpptpam/accountability-buddies-a-proposed-system-1. In the Complice event, they invite attendees to find an accountability buddy at the end.
You can also join the EA Life Coaching Exchange facebook group, and try to find an accountability. buddy there. A couple of people in EA Philippines have found an accountability buddy/group through there. Hope this helps!
This is 9 months late but I think this is their website: https://sites.google.com/view/effectivealtruism-vietnam/