Iâm one of the Community Liaisons for the EA community (alongside Julia Wise and Charlotte Darnell).
Iâm a contact for community health support for EA groups, and I also works on assessing and mitigating risks to the EA community.
I initially studied a lot of physics, then was a high school teacher for 11 years before moving full time into EA community building. I ran local and national EA groups and worked on EA outreach projects, before joining CEAâs Groups Team in early 2020 to support EA groups worldwide. I started working for the Community Health team mid 2021.
Catherine Lowđ¸
Karma: 4,514
What a great spreadsheet. It gives me wonderful old-school EA vibes.
Do you have a fav seitan recipe?
Iâve made seitan 3 times. 1x failure, 1x fairly good, 1x amazing but really time consuming.
Correct! It is a great book!
When the world feels unÂstaÂble...
I look back fondly to 10 years ago at EA Global: Melbourne. It was small, simple, the catering was (literally) carrot sticks, corn chips and hummus, and it hugely influential to me. I knew no one before I arrived, but the conference photo shows many people Iâve gone on to work with and become close friends with.This talk was a highlightâI remember it bending my mind in ways it hadnât been bent before, and it hammered home just how hard our mission to improve the world actually is:
The counterfactual attendances at EA conferences is a pretty interesting metric (at least for us at CEA) - Iâm glad youâre tracking that.
Great to hear of all your progress over 2024 GergĹ and MilĂĄn!
(And thanks for the thanks! In retrospect I think those initial meetings with EA Hungary might have been among my most useful meetings with group organisers!)
Iâm thrilled to have an EA conference in my home town (thanks @Gavin Bishop đš and @Ruben Castaing for leading this event)!
For those of you who are considering comingâa little (biased) plug from me:
The EA Christchurch and the EA Aotearoa New Zealand communities have been active for 10 years now, with a handful of very engaged EAs who have dedicated their careers to EA-aligned work of various types (community building, donation funnelling, civilisational resilience, AI safety, animal advocacy, probably other things too that Iâve forgotten), and many other engaged EAs have been involved in the past and have flown the coop for their high-impact careers. While our community is small in global standards I think we are pretty impressive by per-capita and by per-unit of resources invested. And weâre very friendly and supportive too! So it would be lovely to see people join us!
While the conference is just a single day, a few of us are planning to also have some more relaxed social activities on Friday night and Sunday, so try to come for the whole weekend if you can.
Nau mai, haere mai!
This is a great story of someone taking a selfless and high expected value bet, that sadly didnât work out.
Iâm grateful and impressed that you tried so hard to make the donation happen Santeri!
I hope Mikko gets a new kidney ASAP, and that you both experience excellent health in the future.
Depopulation is Bad
I think humans are good. And larger groups of people can do a lot more (more innovation, more cultural activities, more variety of human experiences).
Right now, in 2025, I would not advocate for more people due to animal welfare and environmental costs of having more people.
But looking at the many countries that have gone through a very demographic transition to less-than-replacement fertility (and all the other countries that seem to be following a very similar trajectory), Iâm worried that the population will plummet shortly after it hits peak.
Iâm not sure what to do about it. And Iâm worried about governments/âother people in influence increasingly trying to increase fertility in ways that reduce individual freedom.
Thanks for those analyses Lorenzo! I was aware of the claims that people donât tend to be good at knowing what makes them happy or unhappy (thanks to an old 80K article!), but it didnât occur to me that this could have influenced this data.
With this in mind it seems fairly possible that the real distribution should be more negative. Despite that, I still feel that the data feels like a positive update for me.
a) There are just quite a few people reporting that being in EA is good for their mental healthâand I donât want to doubt that too much (but maybe that is hopeful thinking on my part)
b) Also, before the survey results came out I expected that a larger number would report negative impacts as I had heard many people in the community reporting to me that EA had negatively affected their mental health (which is expected given my role), and Iâd also heard some community builders tell me that they felt that EA was often bad for members mental health (which worried me a lot more).It would be interesting to ask people in comparable groups, the same question of how involvement changed their mental healthâif the distributions were a lot more positive or negative than EAs then that would be interesting. Maybe environmentalism or animal advocacy would be a reasonable comparison group as involvement might also give a similarly increased sense of awareness and obligation.
Turns out Rethink Priorities have been funded by EA Funds to work on something that could shed some light on this question. Iâm looking forward to hearing how they get on at gathering survey respondents and seeing the results they get.
Iâm really not sure.
I do think it is likely that many people get exposed to EA and realise it isnât a great space for them personally, and choose not to engage as a result. These people wonât have filled in the EA Sometimes those people might not be a good fit for EA anywayâthey have different priorities or values in their lives. But I expect some would have been very value aligned and gotten a lot out of being involved, so that is the group Iâm worried about.
The Rethink Priorities data makes me (tentatively) a little less worried that a large number of people spend a couple of years engaging EA (and so fill in the survey) and find it too rough for them and then leave (and donât fill in subsequent surveys). I DO think this happens to some people. But if this was a very large pattern I would expect community member who had been around longer to say it is more positive for their mental health, whereas the data points gently in the opposite direction.
I donât know whether active community members are more or less likely to fill in the survey if theyâre having a rough time in EA. I think it could go either way.
This sounds plausible. Unfortunately I donât think we or Rethink Priorities have this data to do this breakdown at the moment.
PosÂiÂtive effects of EA on menÂtal health
Donât upÂdate too much from EA comÂmuÂnity involvement
Our World In Data has amazing daily data insights. This one from a couple of days ago is astonishing to me. https://ââourworldindata.org/ââdata-insights/ââin-the-last-30-years-almost-everybody-in-bangladesh-gained-access-to-electricity
Where CEA staff are donatÂing in 2024
Iâm a bit of a Benthamite âThe question is not, âCan they reason?â nor, âCan they talk?â but rather, âCan they suffer?ââ
For any plausible (to me) guess about which non-human animals are capable of suffering, there are far far more non-human animals living in terrible conditions than humans in similarly bad conditions, and there just seems to be so many underfunded and underexplored ways we could help reduce that suffering. Iâve also seen some cost-effectiveness estimations that indicate you can help thousands of animals a lot for the same cost as helping one person a lot. (âa lotâ being very vague!)
The only reason why Iâm not at 100% agree is because helping humans become healthier might cause larger positive flow on effects, and this might add up to more impact in the long run. Thatâs super tentative and could go either wayâe.g. it seems possible that helping animals now could lead to our species being more ethical towards sentient beings in the long run too.
Thanks for your questions James
> This should therefore be easily transferable into feedback to the grantee.I think this is where we disagreeâthis written information often isnât in a good shape to be shared with applicants and would need significant work before sharing.
> The post you linked by Linch and the concern he raises that by being transparent about the reasons for not making a grant may risk applicants overupdating on the feedback seems unfounded/âunevidenced. I also question how relevant given they werenât funded anyway, so why would you be concerned theyâd over update?
The concern here is that people can alter their plan based on the feedback with the hope it would mean that theyâd have a better chance of getting the opportunity in the future. As Linch says in his post
> Often, to change someoneâs plans enough, it requires careful attention and understanding, multiple followup calls, etc.Iâve personally seen cases where it seems that feedback sends a project off in a direction that isnât especially good. This can happen when people have different ideas of what would be reasonable steps to take in response to the feedback.
But youâre right, Linch and I donât provide evidence for the rate of problems caused by overupdating. This is a good nudge for me to think about how problematic this is overall, and whether Iâm overreacting due to a few cases.
> If you donât tell them they were a near miss and what changes may change your mind, then instead the risk is they either update randomly or the project is just completely cannedâwhich feels worse for edge cases.
I think it is most useful for decision makers to share feedback when a) it is a near miss, and b) the decision maker believes they can clearly describe something that the applicant can do that would make the person/âproject better and would likely lead to an approval.
Hi Yarrow, thanks for looping back on this.
Yes, we did do this project, which involved looking at existing data and doing some new interviews with community members, and looked at existing literature on women and non-binary peopleâs experiences in different communities, and what seems to improve things. Based on all this, we wrote an extended internal document, and shared some recommendations with a variety of EA organisations and EA groups. We think this information could be of use to more community members, but for some bureaucratic reasons a writeup hasnât made it on to the Forumâsorry about that.