I work at CEA on the Community Health team as deputy head of the team.(Opinions here my own by default though will sometimes speak in a professional capacity).
Personal website: www.chanamessinger.com
I work at CEA on the Community Health team as deputy head of the team.(Opinions here my own by default though will sometimes speak in a professional capacity).
Personal website: www.chanamessinger.com
There’s a new channel that could be added: (doesn’t have much yet, but seems promising)
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNWBVvhjqMiWExTVvhDQEsQ
Don’t know if this fits the bill, but this channel talks about papers in AI and it’s really fun and useful, especially for examples of improvements in the field and examples of gaming specifications: https://www.youtube.com/user/keeroyz
Lovely! This reminds me a lot of Holden talking about the “readiness to switch”, where you’ve built up something you’re good at, and then, when you find out how it’s useful, you have the ability (material, psychological, etc) to switch.
This is great! I’ll be sharing this with anyone in need of ideas of what to work on.
I specifically like the model of “repurpose everything”, like after EAG, follow up on it and keep engagement going. I feel like I can use that in my tweeting directly.
I like the expo idea a lot; as I was reading I was thinking of whether there could be a retreat that doesn’t involve going anywhere, a full Saturday or Sunday of talks, reading, researching, games, watching videos, having 1-1s, that people can drop into and out of.
That said, I’m not sure I’d trust that anyone who just did one if those was really well acquainted with the ideas or way of thinking.
Really like the point of it being good for the to be a lot going on at once. Days of cause-area specific talks and videos and binging, months of weekly discussion groups, small group dinners to talk about the ideas and uncertainties, things going on at different places and rhythms all the time.
The subscription seems like a really exciting point here, since the tabling post made me think that it’s possible to get lots of people on your mailing list. Maybe putting all those people in a Facebook group or discord and seeing if that can be made consistently active, which gives low-cost ways to discuss that can also be scaled up to channels to talk about more in depth stuff, allows people who can’t make it to the meetings to come, is an easy way of disseminating resources, etc.
Agree with value of late night conversations. Can discussions be held later, and over dinner, with an easy way to transition into just talking?
Having a structured set of resources that people could engage with on breaks seems really valuable. It could let highly engaged participants who want to go faster do the “Thanksgiving Break” bingeread, or the “One/two week break” set of readings, or so on, with all of those having activities/interactive elements of that seems valuable. Is this something you’re thinking of writing up?
I had this idea too but worried that you’d need to have gone to previous ones to engage in the later ones. Maybe there’s an optional crash course intro in each one? (Doesn’t make me super excited, but maybe)
I think I strongly agree with the value of learning about at least the core arguments for a bunch of different causes. Taking seriously that some people are devoting their whole lives to making the future go better, or worrying about lie detection, or pandemics that have never happened, or digital people, or animals that seem to most people nonsentient really pushes your mind in a particular way, and in some ways, the weirder the better, at least for the purpose of really expanding what people think of when they think of “doing good”
Based on this post, conversations with students, and the comments, seems like it might be worth community organizers’ time to brainstorm project ideas (as separate from activity ideas within the fellowship) that would be learning opportunities but actually valuable uses of people’s time. If someone thinks this has already been well done, or really tried such that we should update that there aren’t so many, I’d love to be linked to it.
1a. Categories I’ve heard of /thought of /mentioned in this comments section are:
low intensity but valuable, like communication projects (https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/53Wcw73rav4rkQ4WM/ea-communication-project-ideas)
summarizing / explaining / making cross-media versions of readings (Michael Aird has argued for things like this): can create things that if good, are valuable for other people who want to understand those readings, and in doing the summarization will hopefully learn the ideas more deeply
research: there are many lists of open questions and problems, and then the bottlenecks are probably mentors and research skill, but if there’s low hanging fruit, or this and previous category can be combined into a literature review, that seems good
Activities and making things more interactive seems great, I’ll try to put together a short form soon with some ideas
3a. I wonder if letting highly engaged people go faster is actually easily fixable given how much podcast and other content there is. If someone’s excited after the first meeting or two, they can just listen to 80ks intro series or any that look interesting, without going ahead in the fellowship. Is the problem that then they’d be too well informed?
3b. To akash’s point below, anyone especially interested in EA content who would benefit from epistemics reading should maybe just read the sequences/scout mindset (there are now 2⁄6 small, aesthetically nice books of sequence essays, the first one is here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Map-Territory-Rationality-AI-Zombies/dp/1939311233/ref=asc_df_1939311233/?tag=googshopuk-21&linkCode=df0&hvadid=310805555931&hvpos=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=5539477848737037867&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=m&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=1006976&hvtargid=pla-594520181470&psc=1&th=1&psc=1) and push them to incorporate those ideas into the fellowship.
True—I wonder if two things that might address that are
Explicitly inviting people (especially those who may not be as connected) to the social and having organizers be warm and attentive (in general I find that explicit encouragement / invitation is quite powerful!)
Ending the mandatory session with either something fun and social, or deep and personal/reflective (appropriate to context and the conversation that’s just happened), which could both transition it to social and be engineered to help the intellectual notes be integrated into one’s worldview.
I like that idea too! Maybe could start after a few weeks to gauge interest?
Sorry, I meant that if that was the only thing someone had done, it wouldn’t have been enough engagement for me to trust they had a good foundation.
I suspect that for all the but the most gung-ho people, the second should come before the first, or take up the first half of the meeting. I remember doing community building for the Jewish community in college and people started to find some of the overweening helpfulness off-putting. (But organizers may just be better at it than I was)
Will do! First thing has been to write up the workshop I gave at the post EAG student organizer retreat as a Twitter thread. (Link here: https://twitter.com/ChanaMessinger/status/1462420569857560578?t=1EdH2WBZaGO2QxHraD76qg&s=19) Not amazing reach, but something I’ll keep playing with.
Not a big deal, but Howie’s 80k podcast also talks about ADHD, fwiw.
So great of you to put together a compilation! Any chance you would be willing to indicate which you have listened to yourself and found to be good? I’m happy to vouch for the 80k one and the Ezra Klein on anxiety.
Doesn’t look like I’m able to access the diigo doc, not sure if others are having that problem. I recommend Michael Aird’s repository of tons of open research questions, some organized by topic.
Thanks for writing this up! It’s great to formalize intuitions, and this had a bunch of links I’m interested in following up on.
One simplifying assumption that got made was that both interventions cash out in constant amounts of utility for the duration of their relevance. You spoke at the end about the ways in which conclusions would change by changing assumptions; this seems like an important one! If utility increases over time, you have additional juice in that part of the race.
Is this basically addressed by you saying you weren’t assuming the bigness of the universe (since if there’s more people, presumably some good intervention will have more impact) + leaving aside attractor states? I think not quite, since attractor states mostly seem good by limiting the unpredictability rather than by increasing the impact, and I can imagine ways besides there being more people that a good intervention will increase in utility generation over time (snowball effects, allowing other good things to happen on top, etc).
But maybe it just doesn’t add a lot to the central idea? The question is simply one of comparing integrals, and we can construct more complicated integrands and model a bunch of different possibilities / hopefully test them empirically and that will tell us a lot about how to proceed.
Thanks for this, and would love your thoughts!