I’m the co-founder and operations director of WhiteBox Research. WhiteBox aims to develop more AI interpretability and safety researchers in Southeast Asia. I’m also a co-founder of EA Philippines.
I previously was a Group Support Contractor for the Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA) for two years, where I helped support EA groups around the world.
You can reach out to me at brian@whiteboxresearch.org or find me on LinkedIn.
In case you haven’t seen it, the Resource Centre has advice on doing 1-1′s! It also links some resources on 1-1′s, including the Global Challenges Project’s guide.
I see, yeah you might get better attendance for social events when the group is more established and has more regular members!
No worries, and I’ll keep an eye on it! Sorry, I missed out on your last question. During our first year, I think we viewed EA Philippines as a serious organization trying to market EA via well-run events (i.e. with speakers), rather than as a small, tight-knit community. Moreover, it was only in November that we started to feel we had enough regular attendees (i.e. 15-20) to organize a socials.
Looking back, we could have done one or two more social meetups that year. I only say one or two because I think other types of events (especially discussions of EA readings, like for an intro fellowship) are generally higher value than socials. I see higher value in socials now than in our first year, although Manila traffic can make it hard for people to meet in-person. I think it’s fine for your group to have a monthly social gathering.
In case you (or others) didn’t know, you can find the top Shortform posts every month or every year at https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/allPosts, below the list of top posts. (There doesn’t seem to be a way to see the top ones all time though.)
Hey Mike, thanks for the kind feedback, and thanks for helping EA South Korea! I can answer your questions:
That $2,400 was via CEA’s group support funding. You’re correct though that the link is now different and is now here.
I now work for CEA as a group support contractor, and I process group support funding applications. EA South Korea can apply for group support funding from CEA for any expenses within our common expense guidelines.
Yes, I did speak. I don’t remember it well, but I think I gave an intro to EA and EA Philippines. I may have given reasons on why they should engage with EA Blue too.
Good question—I think we wanted people who were more certain they could go, so we decided to charge for it. We only charged around $12-16 for it. Possibly if we were to organize one again, we could consider not charging for it and using funding from CEA or the EA Infrastructure Fund for it.
We were mostly asking them questions about their interest in EA and their career, and getting to know our members on a personal level. We weren’t giving much career advice back then, or we caveated things more given we were still learning things about EA. For resources on doing 1-1′s, you can check this guide or this.
got it!
Cool to see this is happening—when is the deadline for people to apply?
Cool opportunity! I assume that EA knowledge is not a requirement at all?
Thanks James! Yep, that’s usually the case
Your group can hold a watch party of the movie about Petrov: The Man Who Saved the World. Then maybe discuss it a bit after!
The title should be Rotterdam instead of Rottedam :)
Edited to add: Thanks for fixing!
I’m happy this exists and I like the logo!
Great, thanks!
Thanks for doing this! I think it’s worth specifying though in the post and in the website that the website does not include full-time positions.
Saying “we include a wide range of non-full-time positions” doesn’t convey that you don’t include full-time positions, and people might wonder why full-time positions aren’t here. I think it was clearer that it didn’t include full-time positions when it was called the EA Internships Board.
It’s great that CFAR is running workshops again. I’ve heard great things about them and would like to join one in the future (though I probably will not join these ones in Prague).
I just want to ask why the info above isn’t reflected on the CFAR website yet? When will it be reflected there if ever? I think it would help increase the legitimacy and appeal of these workshops, rather than having people go to a Forum post with no photos.
I agree that student groups should prioritize succession planning, so thanks for writing this! Just want to note for readers of this post that the EA Groups Resource Centre has this resource on Handing Over Leadership. It could use some updating (such as linking to this post), which we’ll probably do over the next few weeks, but I think it has helpful information and resources on how to go about succession planning.
Thanks for sharing the database links Luke! I wasn’t aware FTX had that, but it definitely makes sense that they do.
The link to the Substack page at the top doesn’t work for me for some reason, even if it works on LessWrong. Maybe it’s a bug. Maybe you could get the link to work somehow?