I’m one of the Community Liaisons for the EA community (alongside Julia Wise and Charlotte Darnell).
I’m 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 CEA’s Groups Team in early 2020 to support EA groups worldwide. I started working for the Community Health team mid 2021.
Catherine Low
I have had a busy EA month, and I feel really good about it.
I ran three giving games in one week—with three very different audiences—which was pretty epic. They went from awesome, to pretty good, to really awesome. The really awesome was with a group of altruistic 15-17 year olds at my school, they didn’t find the ideas particularly controversial, but they said they found it fascinating, and later several of them told me that they talked to their family and friends all about it, and asked me to teach a short course on EA.… so that is hopefully happening starting in May.
I also started helping a couple of other people who are going to be running their first giving game in the next wee while.
Really cool Michael. Totally worth making this a webpage. 1) Is it a pig or a dog? The type of animal would elicit different answers for many people. 2) I think it would be good to have an explanation spelling out how the final numbers are calculated 3) Is there a reason for “if you were the only one who could do so?” I take it is because only we can save the animals we eat? If so, I get the idea. But I think that the statement makes it more emotional. Perhaps that is the idea. I felt that the statement compelled me to put a larger number in than I would have otherwise.
(I’m assuming this open thread is for random EA questions. Yes?)
A non-EA friend said to me today, that she believes/fears that EA is a small echo chambery group, and so its conclusions are not to be trusted? (And was also concerned that the conclusions of GiveWell are not peer reviewed).
My response was that while you can’t eliminate echo chamber possibilities, EAs are very self-reflective and consider critiques carefully, and that GiveWell is very transparent, and makes recommendations based on scientific evidence from universities and other organisations. I also said that the goals and methodology of EA make a lot of sense to me.
I don’t think I did justice to EA there, and I can’t say that my response was very convincing to her. The conversation made me very uneasy—partially because I always feel a bit upset by friends criticising what I hold dear. Perhaps she thinks I have joined a cult. Perhaps I have joined a cult!
I would welcome any comments on how you feel about the smallness and reliability of EA, and whether anyone has some different ways of thinking about it.
Thanks Evan, that was a very thorough and helpful reply. I am now better equipped to answer that question, and feel less uneasy too.
Thanks Evan, that is a really useful summary.
You guys are doing great jobs!
I’m getting crazy good-busy with outreach at the moment.
I am working a lot on Students for High Impact Charity (SHIC) http://www.shicschools.org/, working on a high school level Effective Altruismish programme, which is really exciting. I am a teacher so I think that is where my comparative advantage is. After ranting about EA to some of my senior students (when we should have been doing physics) they asked if I could give a course, so they asked management, and now I have a no-credit elective 20 hour course on EA for my seniors (17-18 yo), which I repeat later in the year, and another 10 hour elective course with a 15-16 yo crowd. I’ve only had one lesson so far, but it went great.
I’ve also been doing some adult outreach, with a Giving Game for a choir group I know (very receptive and some significant giving changes!) and one to Skeptics (some receptive and some very argumentative, as you would expect). I was also interviewed for the NZ Skeptics podcast—but they have yet to edit out all my mumblings so it is not out yet… I am pretty nervous about hearing it.
That’s an amazing amount for a student! You rule Kieren.
That is great. I read somewhere on this forum that starting a meetup is supposed to be super impactful! Facebook is very useful… but I have found meetup really good too. My facebook feed also makes me a better EA too—I have joined so many groups and friended loads of lovely EAs so I now get no Latte Art, and only get inspiring stories of people doing wonderful things and thinking interesting ideas, and that keeps me inspired and active.
Thanks Chris, I just read through the survey. Very interesting stats and inferences. It is certainly making me think about striking a balance between making sure people don’t have the “I don’t feel EA enough” feeling, but also developing a culture where people are normalising high impact giving.
I’ve had a really exciting EA month too.
I finished running through the pilot of the Students For High-Impact Charity program with a group of students in my school. Some students found some aspects of the program confronting, but they all found it interesting, and raised a bunch of money for CoolEarth (the charity they chose for the main fundraiser), and ran an “Animal Friendly Lunch”—with vegan sausages and bake sale, to spread awareness and raise money for Animal Equality International.
I also helped out planning and running the EAGxAustralia conference, which was really well received (and I had a fantastic time). So I am feeling really positive about being a useful part of the EA movement right now.
I was really pleased to see that Research Fund! I am really looking forward to the results in time—I feel that there are a bunch of people waiting for more research in the animal advocacy field before taking action.
One part was when talking about whether or not we have a moral obligation to help people when we can—and how far we have to go to “be a good person” in the utilitarian framework—some students were understandably exasperated by the demandingness of that framework.
Another part was when looking at the harms the student are causing through greenhouse gas emissions and animal consumption. I did a lot of “this is what thinks might be correct”, rather than saying it was my belief—although they asked me about my beliefs and actions, which I answered honestly, so I think I failed to appear non-judgemental because of that. We try to finish the discussion of each problem, with a potential solution they could contribute to, in order to make these discussions more constructive, which helped a bit.
Sounds great Linch. My only thought is… if this is supposed to inform the usual rank-and-file GWWC members about whether and how to approach talking to others, you should try to get a fairly normal distribution of GWWC members to be the experimentees. My guess is that Peter Hurford may well be more convincing to his friends than the average GWWC member.
I guess we’ll find out :)
Hi Amy, any progress on the dates? I live a long way from the EA Global events and have a not-so-flexible work schedule to work around so having early dates makes a huge difference to my likelihood of attending. I’d really appreciate the dates to be published as soon as they are known. Thanks, Catherine.
Hi Amy, just checking—the disappearance of the word “tentatively” means that the SF dates are confirmed right? I’m anxious to book my flights while they are still cheap from NZ. Thanks.
Thanks Lauren, it look us about 8 months to give away that many books actually! EA NZ is pretty small group so far, so once we had exhausted our own networks like our FB pages and groups it was a bit slower—many we gave away at conferences we attended. We tried to make it clear that there is an expectation that they would read it and fill in the survey when it arrived to avoid people just taking a copy for their book shelf. But at the conferences there was a decent percentage (maybe 30-50% depending on the event) of people who accepted a book.
Thanks for this! Your link to “a template for how this could be done with several causes” doesn’t seem to work. (But I found the right article anyway).
The increased concern about downside risk has also made it much harder to ‘use up’ your dedication.
Thanks for articulating that—it was a undefined sense of ill-ease, that I now have words for. When I joined EA initially I naively thought everything I did (donating, outreach) was certainly net positive, and I could boldly dedicate away! The uncertainty I now feel about everything makes motivation harder and deprives me of the satisfaction I used to get (especially as my brain prefers to fixate on the possible negatives, rather than the expected value).
Thanks for that post Michael. I have been musing on that when considering my own effectiveness. I ended up deciding that I don’t actually have a problem with the donor and the influencer claiming they caused $100 to be donated. (But I reckon part of this is because it makes feel more effective).
I was amused by Peter Singer suggesting that the vegetarian he sat next to in a university dining hall once upon a time might be able to claim all the good from all the people Singer influenced to be vegetarian, and all the people those people influenced to be vegetarian.… so where might it stop!