I co-founded WhiteBox Research in 2023 and lead its operations and marketing. WhiteBox aims to solve open research problems in AI interpretability and develop more AI safety researchers in Southeast Asia. I’m also a co-founder and board member 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.
Thanks for this! A few thoughts:
On support for local groups
Since CEA can’t constantly give personal support or feedback to all groups, I think CEA can instead help newer groups get connected with older groups to get feedback and advice from them. Or, newer groups can proactively seek out advice from more established groups.
We in EA Philippines were able to get advice from older EA groups, such as the ones in Singapore, Toronto, Quebec, and Norway, at different points in the past year, and we only started in Nov. 2018. Some of this advice was very valuable. Forming these relationships also just increased our motivation to do community building, since we heard of and learned from how others did it.
On the survey questions
Here are questions I’d love to know the answers to—maybe some of these could be included in future surveys:
1. If you added up the average number of hours a week each of the organizers in your local group contributed the past year, what would that number be? (i.e. if you’re 3 organizers averaging 15 hours a week each, then that’s 45 hours)
It would be great to see if there’s a correlation between the EA outcome metrics with the number of hours per week spent community building. And it’d be interesting to see if there are any outlier groups (those that have very few organizers or spend very little time, but have a lot of highly engaged people in their community).
2. What problems did you experience while organizing for your local group over the past year?
Maybe this could be a freetext/open-ended question first, since I’m not sure what could be the dropdown options for this. Then maybe the answers could be manually clustered / grouped after.
If you’d prefer the question to have options though, possible options I can think of are: Personal mental health issues, Organizer/s leaving or not contributing, Getting less than expected number of people at an event, Having to cancel an event, and “Others” (which can be a freetext).
Thanks so much for this! This is really insightful, especially the graph on main problems faced by other groups. Seems like some problems are really common.
If anyone is ever travelling to Manila (Philippines), we in EA Philippines would be happy to meet more EAs!
Thanks to you and the EA Giving Tuesday team for the detailed instructions! I’ll just share my experience in testing to donate just now:
I followed all the instructions and was able to practice making a $5 donation, and the time registered was 9:50:03. I clicked the Donate button when I saw the clock hit 9:50:00. Is 3 seconds good enough, or should I aim for the donation to send within 1 or 2 seconds? The practice document says to “Try to donate fast enough that you see receipts with timestamps ending with :02 or :03 at the latest.”, but your post says to aim to do it within one second.
I followed all the instructions for the practice donation and the suggestions on preparing your computer, including closing all other apps and tabs, using an incognito Google Chrome tab (to switch off Chrome extensions), putting https://time.is/just side by side with the donation page, and clicking donate as soon as I saw the clock reach the next new minute.
The only instructions I didn’t follow were the advice of connecting a mouse and using a wired internet connection. I was fairly confident with my trackpad-clicking skills, and sure enough, I was able to click as the clock hit :00. I don’t know if using a wired connection would have made a difference.
Also, when I made the donation, it took a full 8 seconds before Facebook told me my donation was successful. But when I checked my email, the donation said 9:50:03 and not 9:50:08. I think other people will probably experience the same thing.
My Wifi download speed was around 21 Mbps and my upload speed was around 4 Mbps. If anyone was able to donate within 0:01 or 0:02, let me know! I’m from Manila, so that might affect my donation speed too.
Thanks for the reply! I’ll see if I can try one more test donation.
Regarding donating within the first second, I think that sentence would turn away people who were only able to donate within 2 or more seconds. It also sounds really hard at first to donate within the first second. I think it should be communicated that someone who follows the instructions, which should take only 10-20 minutes of pre-work, should be able to donate within 2-3 seconds. That might encourage more people to try joining in!
Thanks! I don’t seem to see that note in that link or on the gdoc though?
What would be your advice to people who want to do EA career advising in their local community? Would 80,000 Hours be willing to release a guide, or train people on how to do this, so that other EAs can advise a lot more people than 80K can?
Hi Katie, thanks for the feedback and question! We’re definitely thinking about succession planning and finding additions to or replacements for our core team. But we have yet to identify clear candidates who would be willing and are a good fit to be community builders. We do have active members though, and we would like to see one of them expressing interest to be part of the core team.
In the meantime, we can’t really spend much time working on succession planning. We’ll focus on it when we’re more sure that we will move on to other paths instead of leading EA Philippines. We all still plan on being in the EA Philippines core team through the rest of 2020, and some of us are still willing to be in the core team for 2021 if we don’t have successors.
Anyway, our plan for 2020 is to be on the lookout for people willing to join our core team, and to guide or train them once we find one or more of them.
Thanks Ollie!
Also, just for some background on EA Philippines’ core team, we’re composed of 4 people—Kate Lupango, Tanya Quijano, Alec Wang, and myself. Here’s some more information about us:
Kate is a financial accountant working at a local startup, and also has experience working as a volunteer in animal advocacy and social work.
Tanya currently works on freelance projects as a development consultant. She used to work as the head executive assistant for the Philippines’ Department of Social Welfare and Development. As such, she has a lot of contacts with people from the government and the non-profit / development sector in the Philippines.
Alec is currently a 2nd-year student at the Ateneo De Manila University majoring in computer science. He originally was taking a business degree, but he shifted into taking a degree in computer science. He now plans on working in the field of technical AI safety / AI research, and is deeply invested in improving himself in the fields of coding and machine learning.
I work as a product designer at First Circle, a fintech B2B lending startup in the Philippines.
Our other co-founder, Jeffrey, gradually became less involved after the first few events.
You can reach out to me via a Forum message or to us through our Facebook page. I can connect you with anyone from our core team!
For community builders reading this, we’d also like to know what other communities’ funnel metrics look like, to see whether if ours is typical or not. I’m curious to see how other communities measure and track their members’ engagement, and what the levels of engagement look like.
Here’s a Google Doc for collaborative note-taking: https://docs.google.com/document/d/14y8fQlQUOhWnUN17tiuxrmp85jjbTH8ffepXONUQvzE/edit#heading=h.u58p62fyfyvp
Hey Aaron, I think there’s an error on page 5 of the survey. It seems like the first question on that page should be a multi-select question (checkboxes) rather than a multiple choice once?
Please add The Life You Can Save under Global Health and Development! They released this cool video recently: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Y3TTVK8wGQ
Creating an EA podcast is something I’ve been interested in for a while now too! I’m a big fan of long-form interview podcasts, like 80,000 Hours’ and the The Tim Ferriss Show. I like the idea of Everyday EA. I think though that Everyday EA should target interviewing people who are in the most engaged 1-10% of the EA community first though. There’s a lot of accomplished and inspiring people within EA who haven’t been in an 80K podcast or given an EAG talk yet, but can share a lot of great insights. I can suggest certain people.
I’d be interested to attend this, and I’d also be interested to help you develop the strategy for this podcast. I’m quite busy with work and other projects, but I’d like to see if it’s valuable for me to help.
Also, a key consideration here is audio quality. Given that most of the world is in lockdown, and because EAs are geographically spread out, I assume you’ll be conducting most of the interviews virtually. But a lot of EAs might not have access to a good microphone. And even if they did, you may have to ask them to record their audio on their end, and send it over to you after. (Anyone with experience recording virtual podcasts though could correct me on this!)
80K and other podcasts do some virtual interviews, and most of these have poorer audio quality than in-person ones. I and others would be less likely to listen to a podcast episode with poor audio quality.
Anyway, maybe you could make sure to interview EAs with access to a good microphone first, just to keep the quality high for the first few episodes. I actually have a podcast microphone, and I’d be willing to be an interviewee. Let me know any thoughts you have on this here or privately!
I think you can get a good podcast microphone for ~$100. This is the microphone I have which was recommended by Tim Ferriss and others: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004QJOZS4 I haven’t tested it yet for a full podcast episode, but I think it’s pretty decent audio quality.
You can also just use Garageband as free software to start if you have a Mac. Tim Ferriss recommends using Auphonic to clean up the audio, but it doesn’t cost much either. I don’t think you’ll need to apply for the Meta fund for this, given that these costs are quite cheap, and they’re unlikely to give a grant that small.
I’d like users to be able to attach/link a profile picture to their EA Forum profile, and that these pictures would be viewable next to their usernames in posts or comments. I think this would make the forum a bit more human and friendly!
Very specific and small comment, but I’d like to see the “Reply” button for comments be bigger and more noticeable. I would prefer it to be an actual button (with padding and an outline), and with a message icon beside it. It’s happened to me twice where I couldn’t figure out how to reply to a comment until ~30 seconds of searching for the reply button.
Great post Ben! I’m a Product Designer at First Circle, a FinTech startup in the Philippines. I think the work we’re doing generates positive social impact too, but not as much yet as Wave.
I’m happy to see you promote entrepreneurship in developing countries as a viable option for EAs. The co-founders at our startup are both supporters of EA, and they came from Europe to start the business here. A lot of the best (and most impactful) startups in the Philippines were founded by expats actually, so there’s definitely value in this path.
But even if I think this path has an expected value of high social impact for people living in developed countries, it might not be as impactful as other EA paths for them. Here’s my take:
This path should be a good fit for people who
1. Want to work in global health / poverty / development as their cause area (and not in animal welfare or X-risks) (Update, Oct. 6, 2020: Being an entrepreneur in the plant-based space is also promising in emerging markets)
2. Have a passion for startups, and have experience working in a startup or starting one
3. Are very willing (or deeply interested) to start a startup in an emerging market and relocate there for 4+ years
4. Want to spread/popularize the EA movement in the emerging market. I think there’s promise in doing this, since some emerging markets don’t have an EA group yet, or they’re still very small. (I helped co-found EA Philippines last year—before then there was no EA presence here.)
The main cons to this path though are:
1. There’s a high chance of failure, likely more so than if you started a startup in your own country. This is since you lack context about the area, and the language/culture barrier can easily mean your product won’t fit the local context.
2. You might end up making more impact if you started a startup in your own country, and just earned-to-give your earnings to GiveWell / EA organizations. This is because I think there are very few startups that benefit the poorest of the poor, since the poorest people don’t even have access to basic needs. For example in the Philippines, some areas don’t have internet, and some areas don’t even have cell service, so it would be hard to create a startup that caters to them. So even if you do start a successful startup here, the positive outcomes generated might not be as good as through donating to GiveWell charities. Maybe charity entrepreneurship would be a more impactful path.
To counter the 1st con, you just have to execute really well in starting the startup, hiring the right people, getting enough funding, and knowing the customers. To counter the 2nd, you could start the startup in the emerging market, and then earn-to-give your earnings/salary to GiveWell / EA organizations. And hopefully what you earn-to-give is comparable to what you would if you worked for a company in your home country.
Would love to hear what you or others think about my view!