Eric_Bruylant

Karma: 45

Eric_Bruylant 6 Dec 2016 23:01 UTC
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in reply to: Elizabeth’s comment on: Contra the Giving What We Can pledge
I like this! Especially if combined with a Schelling day for doing the thinking (possibly one winter and one summer?).

Eric_Bruylant 5 Dec 2016 14:18 UTC
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on: Contra the Giving What We Can pledge
Why I’m hesitant to take the current pledge, and what I want to commit to instead.

I feel that added separation between people improving the world in ways other than donation from the ones focusing on donating is fairly bad, from the point of view of information exchange and movement dynamics (though I think GWWC is likely net-positive, despite this).

I’d love a version of GWWC which allowed people to customize a pledge (or pick from a selection, or switch between them, or something which lets people who want to do good and have reason to think that working directly / investing in themselves is more high-impact), because I would like to be part of this community dedicated to improving the world.

Eric_Bruylant 5 Dec 2016 14:13 UTC
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in reply to: Kit’s comment on: Contra the Giving What We Can pledge
I have one in mind, though it’s far from finished. I asked about how the GWWC pledge interacted with my current plans, and was told (by PM) by someone from GWWC that it was within the spirit of the pledge. But, I’d rather pledge something I can follow the letter of, so have been thinking about what I actually want to commit to.

I’d like to give myself a north star of something close to: Put all available resources (both time and money), other than those required to maintain myself and those close to me as healthy, productive, and stable, humans, towards things I expect to have a large positive impact on the world.

I expect I will end up doing much more good with this as my focus, rather than some fixed % income. I also expect this is true of many of the most consequentially important people, the ones who may start new projects and open up new cause areas.
What links here?
- Eric_Bruylant's comment on Contra the Giving What We Can pledge by AlyssaVance (5 Dec 2016 14:18 UTC; 2 points)

Eric_Bruylant 3 Jun 2016 13:41 UTC
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in reply to: AngelaC’s comment on: Update on the New EA Hub
I’d imagine there would be effects of this kind, but I expect the local impact to be much smaller than the impact flowing through enabling people trying to improve the world to be more effective and live on a tighter budget, so I’d not want to prioritize optimizing this class of effect over picking a place that works best for EAs. Still, if there are two otherwise similar locations, one of which would likely lead to notably larger effects of this kind, it could be a tiebreaker.

Eric_Bruylant 3 Jun 2016 13:37 UTC
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in reply to: John_Maxwell’s comment on: Update on the New EA Hub
Yes, this class of self-improvement seems like one of the larger potential wins, especially if there’s a supportive community in place to help.

Eric_Bruylant 3 Jun 2016 13:35 UTC
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in reply to: Lila’s comment on: Update on the New EA Hub
nods, a hub in a low-cost part of a developed country is also worth considering, but I think it’d still be significantly higher cost than a low cost country (food, assistance, and building), and has the disadvantage of being significantly less visa friendly (the US in particular puts major hurdles in the way of non-US citizens). The really low cost locations in the US are also likely to be less attractive locations, in terms of access to major cities and environment.

I also think that being in a developed country may be less of an advantage than some people are imagining, because I expect the internal and online interactions to be much more significant than local interactions once we’re outside existing hubs and other high-cost areas.

I think despite these considerations it’s worth exploring and also a potentially high value project, but it’s not something I’m drawn towards.

Eric_Bruylant 13 May 2016 16:07 UTC
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in reply to: Richard_Batty’s comment on: Update on the New EA Hub
hm, depending on how many locations are explored in the next few months we may or may not be confident we’re in one of the top few locations (imagine a world where, three or four places are looked at, one of them stands out but based on other research we suspect that there are other countries which would be significantly better to establish a hub for administrative reasons. In that case I’d be in favor of trying to visit the other countries before moving to stage 2.), but in general that plan makes sense. I like the idea of collecting info on the ground if you’re keen to get started soon, do you know of others who are ready in that timeframe.

I also think that >15 would be the number of people who would be there on average in expectation (so, a significantly higher number expressing strong interest/commitment), rather than people willing to do initial setup work before a co-living location is ready. The founding group could plausibly be somewhat smaller (~4-10?).

If this ends up not hitting critical mass naturally (but there is still strong interest), then we can likely give it a boost by moving a founding group willing to work on setup of the co-living space in one go.

Eric_Bruylant 11 May 2016 20:41 UTC
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in reply to: RyanCarey’s comment on: Update on the New EA Hub
nods, makes sense. My current guess is that at least initially most people would spend 3 months to a year visiting while working on something specific rather than moving as permanent residents.

I’d be aiming less for an activist community in the country, more a tech/startup/research hub for people with an interest in fixing global problems. I don’t foresee a focus on influencing the host country. Good point that perceptions around that are important though. I’m very open to advise and assistance from people with PR skills on how to present this.

Eric_Bruylant 11 May 2016 20:32 UTC
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in reply to: Evan_Gaensbauer’s comment on: Update on the New EA Hub
Have added links to this to the relevant column in the spreadsheet. Thanks for the leads!

Eric_Bruylant 10 May 2016 17:50 UTC
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in reply to: RyanCarey’s comment on: Update on the New EA Hub
Yes, this is definitely something we’d want to do. I’ve added a question to the survey about how large a community people would be happy to move into, and will either work out how to usefully include precommitment in the survey at this stage or do that as a separate commitment once we have contact details for everyone interested and know more about where and how we’d do this.

Eric_Bruylant 9 May 2016 18:03 UTC
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in reply to: Evan_Gaensbauer’s comment on: Update on the New EA Hub
This is very similar to my model of the highly active EA places are expensive problem.

I suspect that creating the culture from the ground up would not be extremely hard, though it would impose a fixed cost/require some dedicated people to push it forward. Primarily because we could bring people in who are already familiar with relevant mindsets/ideas rather than having to spread them to locals where we arrive. I would expect a group on the order of ~15-30 awesome people (+low-cost, +high quality of life) to start to be attractive to many from around the world, even if the wider culture of the country/city was not particularly involved in ‘cutting-edge thinking’. To start with only those okay with a relatively small/tight social circle would join, but as it grew people who wanted a wider circle of interaction would be happier. Most people don’t need a huge social circle, so long as the wider culture is not actively hostile towards us and we were careful to build a healthy internal social environment early on I think it’d be okay.

This is quite a different project to setting up in a place which already has a bunch of EAs, but it seems doable to me. Rough steps: figure out what people want, gather names, and pick a location, then find funding, scout the location, and pick an exact building, then bring a founding team over (~4-10 people?) to do initial setup, then start bringing more people who want to be part of that kind of group over to help and live. Once you have a seed community and a schelling point for interacting with it expansion is relatively straightforward (people rent nearby, similar co-living spaces pop up, etc).

Eric_Bruylant 9 May 2016 16:09 UTC
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in reply to: Richard_Batty’s comment on: Update on the New EA Hub
I think the approach you’re talking about here is sensible and would be a good way to start things if you’re wanting to move relatively soon.

The reasons I’m mostly thinking about this approach instead is partly that I don’t expect to be in a position to move in the near future (minimum six months, probably somewhat more), meaning planning does not delay my direct involvement, partly because I suspect it’s more likely to hit critical mass and start attracting more people rather than staying small/dissipating if an initial group go over together to set things up and provide a seed community/safe&known arrival point, and partly that picking a better location seems high-value and it’s easier to gather the initial info online than send people to different countries.

Eric_Bruylant 9 May 2016 12:23 UTC
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in reply to: Stefan_Schubert’s comment on: Update on the New EA Hub
It’s not sufficient reason to think that low-cost hubs are higher value than additional high-cost hubs, but it is (I think) sufficient reason to think that whether or not EAs are working towards more hubs in higher cost countries, it would still be good to also be moving towards having at least one low-cost hub.

I have greater personal interest in low cost hubs, and I suspect that getting the first low-cost hub will be unusually high value (for reasons in some of the discussions on facebook/in person which I will write up properly at some point), so that’s what I’m focusing on here. I do not intend to crowd out or compete with efforts towards more high-cost locations, I see those as having a quite different set of benefits which I’m not very confident in my ability to evaluate the impact of (since it depends massively on locations I don’t know at all well, unlike the low-cost one which would attract people from across the globe). I would be happy to disambiguate by using a different name if the people working towards high-cost hubs want “New EA Hub”.

Eric_Bruylant 6 May 2016 0:02 UTC
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in reply to: Stefan_Schubert’s comment on: Update on the New EA Hub
Primarily much lower property and living costs, meaning people can live there for less (= more donations, longer runways for startups, lower expenses for researchers, etc) while still retaining high quality of living and being around interesting people. Hubs in higher cost countries would likely be valuable as well, but they cater to a different group of people, would require higher initial investment for a comparable property, and generally have stricter visa requirements.

Eric_Bruylant 21 Oct 2015 16:58 UTC
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in reply to: Evan_Gaensbauer’s comment on: July Open Thread
Sorry for the delay, most of the content creation was being done on the old wikia site (where registrations were open), and now the new wiki is open to registration with your google account http://wiki.effectivealtruismhub.com/

Eric_Bruylant 21 Oct 2015 16:51 UTC
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in reply to: arrowind’s comment on: Announcing the new EA Wiki!
Yup, and they also hold regular workathons and hangout meetings if you feel like joining in with those.

Eric_Bruylant 21 Oct 2015 13:58 UTC
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in reply to: arrowind’s comment on: Announcing the new EA Wiki!
.impact is a volunteer taskforce, and to request an invite to our slack (kind of IRC for the modern web, very handy for communicating and organizing projects) put your email here.

Eric_Bruylant 4 Jul 2015 13:29 UTC
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in reply to: jayd’s comment on: July Open Thread
Preferably CSS as well, but having mockups may be useful to whoever writes it up.

Eric_Bruylant 4 Jul 2015 13:28 UTC
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in reply to: jayd’s comment on: July Open Thread
Testing pluggins for MediaWiki and drupal, likely updating them to be compatible with the latest versions, possibly adjusting a few parameters so they pass each other the right info.

Eric_Bruylant 4 Jul 2015 6:26 UTC
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in reply to: Eric_Bruylant’s comment on: July Open Thread
Additionaly, if anyone is interested in helping with web design for the main page or pre-launch content, let me know and I’ll make you an account (signups are disabled to keep out the spambots which plague unprotected wikis).