I’ve seen a few folks talk about psychedelics research as a potential “cause X”; given the decades of work already done and the many millions of dollars spent on research, is it likely to be a neglected cause area?
(Really enjoyed the article though. Also, Tim Ferriss has an interesting discussion on psychedelics with Peter Atilla in this podcast episode)
Great idea. When getting a new tech job, Haseem’s article was really the only useful resource out there for salary negotiations.
For me, the very first ‘EA’ thing I came across was from before EA was a thing: Eliezer Yudkowsky’s post on money as the unit of caring. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZpDnRCeef2CLEFeKM/money-the-unit-of-caring
It genuinely was a lightbulb moment—the idea that doing the most good might mean making a bunch of money and giving it to someone who can do the good thing better than you can.
And, maybe most importantly, it turned me on to ‘doing good’ in general. If I’m honest, I hadn’t really considered it as a priority before then. A couple years later I took an 80K career consultation, went into software engineering, pledged to give away 10%+ and am now in the early stages of starting an EA org!
I’m also interested in any slightly unorthodox resources—like, someone coming to the movement for the first time might also want to see criticisms, unusual points of view within the movement (e.g. negative utilitarianism), etc.
Thanks, have added ’em.
Thanks, that’s been added.
I like this a lot.
Random plug: I know a lot of EAs (including myself) use goal-and-task-tracking tool Complice; you can assign an accountability partner who sees your progress (and you see theirs). You can also share a link like this that lets anyone get updates on your public goals, which could potentially be quite motivating.
I do want to share a cautionary tale about such investing: in the UK, there are tax-efficient investment vehicles called EISes and VCTs, which are designed to encourage investors to put money into somewhat risky early-stage UK businesses (and give big tax breaks as a result).
At one point, there were renewable energy EIS/VCT funds which seemed to give excellent returns – but only because the companies involved were claiming substantial, risk-free government subsidies for renewables schemes (“feed-in tariffs”). Eventually these schemes were scrapped, as were feed-in tariffs.
So an unwise impact investor might have put money into such a scheme, made a nice profit, and thought they were doing social good. In reality, the profits were just money taken from taxpayers (FITs were funded by making energy more expensive for all households), and impact (building inefficient, small-scale solar in a country where solar energy doesn’t make much sense[1]) probably pretty minimal.
[1] - Peak energy demand in the UK is in the winter when it’s coldest and darkest, so solar is basically useless here. Compare that to California, where peak demand is when people switch on their A/C during the sunniest part of the day.
Just a note on the EA Wiki (and on project abandonment in general): lots of projects seem to be really badly run. The EA Wiki was offline for months because of server issues, and until recently you couldn’t even register as a new user.
I’m not sure EAs have a shorter attention span than anyone else – I imagine most would maybe try a couple of times to get onto the wiki and then just give up. That’s part of the reason I’m not worried about project duplication: so many efforts are half-baked that we shouldn’t allow one party to have a monopoly on a particular idea.
EA Hotel (writing this comment from the hotel dining room)
Exciting stuff!
Would be good to know who these people are to better co-ordinate the community’s efforts (and indeed to see if they’re serious endeavours—I get the feeling a lot of EA projects end up being started and then abandoned, so the fact that someone is already working on it shouldn’t necessarily stop others from doing so).
That’s strange; what are you using to view the page?
You’d make a repository on e.g. GitHub and upload the code there. Then other people can see it and suggest changes, or can fork (make a copy of) the repository and start their own thing based off it.
Probably too late to change it, but for the question “how did you hear about this survey?”, the EA Forum isn’t mentioned :P
You want to be going here: https://wiki.eahub.org/wiki/Effective_Altruism_Wiki
The wiki is now at https://wiki.eahub.org/wiki/Effective_Altruism_Wiki.
Done. Can we get Markdown support for bios please?