I’m the co-founder of EA Philippines and a community building grantee of 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: 2,107
This is amazing. It’s funny that she actually says “yeah” like EA . I hadn’t listened to this song before this. Please do more of this!
Thanks for the feedback Cristina! Regarding one’s life circumstances changing so much, Giving What We Can allows people to contact them to revoke their pledge, so I could imagine that being done by people who don’t feel aligned with this career-focused pledge anymore, if life circumstances change in the future.
I agree that that’s a specific, actionable, and reasonable pledge. Maybe a shorthand name for that pledge idea could be the “EA Career Planning Pledge”. I’m not sure if that should replace this pledge, but it’s an interesting idea.
I’ve added below each comment that they should downvote the comment with negative karma if they upvoted using the poll. I think this is a sign that the EA Forum should have a poll feature.
Hey Khorton, yeah I think I should have made that clearer with my post. I agree that people can have more than one goal. I was thinking though that one can maximize the impact of their career while generally still having other goals.
Possibly the pledge could be reworded to be about pledging to aim to do a large amount of good with one’s career. I think that could generally have the same effect, without being construed as being too single-minded on impact maximization.
I assume people can click to unhide it and then downvote it?
Downvote this comment if you upvoted any of my comments above used for polling, so that I don’t get inflated karma for running a poll
Upvote this comment if you think this pledge is a bad idea.
(I initially just put one comment that people could upvote or downvote, but I’m making this a separate comment to prevent the comment being hidden if it becomes negative karma. There’s a comment with negative karma below that you can downvote if you used this poll, to offset any karma I gain from using comments as polls.)
Ah good point, let me make a separate comment that people can upvote if they think the pledge is a bad idea
Upvote this comment if you would take this pledge yourself!
(There’s a comment with negative karma below that you can downvote if you used this poll, to offset any karma I gain from using comments as polls.)
Upvote this comment if you think this pledge is a good idea and should be created.
Initially I told people to downvote this comment if this is a bad idea, but it would end up getting hidden, so please upvote the other comment that says “Upvote this comment if you think this pledge is a bad idea instead!
(There’s a comment with negative karma below that you can downvote if you used this poll, to offset any karma I gain from using comments as polls.)
Should EA have a career-focused “Do the most good” pledge?
Thanks for this detailed post! This is interesting. I wanted to highlight this part for people who might not have read it, and I have a question about it:
We are open to and encourage highly ambitious proposals for projects that would require annual budgets of millions of dollars, including proposals to scale existing projects that are still relatively small.
Is OpenPhil willing to say how much they are willing to give in total per year for these kinds of outreach projects? I’m curious to know, and others might be too.
I’m not sure if this question is too advanced for the podcast, but maybe he’s willing to answer it on the Forum: If you could change Open Philanthropy’s grantmaking (i.e. what causes they focus on, or what organizations/interventions they grant to), in what key ways would you change it? Would you like to see them do more of certain types of grants?
How and when did 80,000 Hours decide to focus more on longtermism and create longtermist content and career advice? If Ben is willing to share, whether through the Forum or the podcast, I’d love to know the story behind how this happened. Or if anyone else knows the basic story, feel free to comment it here too.
(I’m not saying it’s a bad thing that 80K focused on longtermism.)
Don’t have the time to read into it but I think that total extinction of the biosphere would very likely not be a good thing.
I don’t directly work on x-risks at the moment, apart from some of my time sharing resources and giving information or career advice relevant to it to people in EA Philippines.
But if I did, the importance and drive of making sure the world doesn’t become extinct or dystopian would be what would motivate me to work. Also, all the work done by other EAs in other causes would be for naught if we end up becoming extinct or lock in a bad future this century.
Here’s a similar question I asked!
But yeah as a broader point, ads could be used to market events or the group itself. Given the amount of karma of this post, I’m pretty sure CEA has already seen it, I just don’t know what their thoughts about it are. But I expect they’re already quite interested in the value of using paid ads. I remembered now that I wrote a part in EA Hub’s resources for group organizers on advertising events before about the potential value of using paid ads. Maybe this post should be linked into that guide. I’ll message Catherine Low from CEA if she would like to include it, or reference it in the July Groups newsletter.
Yeah. I think a lot of EA fellowships though are facilitator-constrained, not participant-constrained. Possibly ads could still be used to increase the quality of the participant pool, but the value of that is less clear.
I know people at CEA, and 2 of our student groups will write a fellowship retrospective soon. We’ll include this bit formally there, and I can link that to CEA or publicize that to other community builders. This is so that groups that are participant-constrained can use ads more.
Thanks for this! Can someone clarify the difference between “EA movement building” and “Meta (Other than EA movement building)”?
I’m not sure why that distinction was made, or what the distinction is. I’m not sure if survey respondents would have understood the distinction either. If this distinction is going to be kept for future surveys, explaining the difference between those two in the survey might be needed.