Back in April 2020, I asked Greg Lewis for his take on the EA community’s response to COVID on the 80k podcast. I can’t remember anything about what we said but folks might find it interesting. https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/greg-lewis-covid-19-global-catastrophic-biological-risks/#the-response-of-the-effective-altruism-community-to-covid-19-021142
Howie_Lempel
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Hey! You might be interested in this forum post on suicide hotlines from a while back. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Xh5oyGkngGjCmNhcP/how-impactful-is-being-a-suicide-hotline-volunteer
Unfortunately, I think the comments in the post (including one from a former volunteer) make a really compelling case that it takes a lot more than 5 hours to prevent a suicide. I think it takes at least hundreds and probably thousands of hours of calls.
“People who don’t like being criticized are often going to be open about that fact”
[Just responding to this narrow point and not the comment as a whole, which contains plenty of things I agree with.]
Fwiw, I don’t think this is true in this community. Disliking criticism is a bad look and seeming responsive to criticism is highly valued. I’ve seen lots of situations up close where it would have been very aversive/costly for someone to say “I totally disagree with this criticism and think it wasn’t useful” and very tempting for someone to express lots of gratitude for criticism and change in response to it whether or not it was right. I think it’s not uncommon for the former to take more bravery than the latter and I personally feel unsure whether I’ve felt more bias towards agreeing with criticism that was wrong or disagreeing with criticism that was right.
Agree with Ben that this makes it harder to find folks for leadership positions.
In addition to excluding shy awkward nerds, you’re also actively selecting for a bunch of personality traits, not all of which are unalloyed positives.
By analogy, I think there’s a very strong argument that very high levels of scrutiny are fair game for politicians but I’m not particularly thrilled with what that does to our candidate pool.
(I don’t know of a great way to resolve this tension.)
Anybody else in addition to Fukuyama, Friedman, and Cummings who you think is good at doing the kind of thinking you’re pointing to here?
Are there alternatives to your two factor model that seem particularly plausible to you?
No worries! It takes a couple clicks to get there.
Announcing Rob Gledhill as the new CEO of EV UK
This is correct. We ended up needing to resolve a couple issues related to the inquiry before we can file. We’ve stayed in touch with the Charity Commission about the delay.
Additional restaurants I’d recommend:
Buddha Bodai (Chinatown) has my favorite vegetarian Chinese food.
The non-vegetarian colleagues I introduced it to ended up ordering lunch there once/week for months.
When I was in college, it was one of two restaurants that helped convince me I could survive as a vegetarian. (RIP Williamsburg’s Foodswings, which had the world’s best vegan buffalo wings).
Red Bamboo (Washington Square Park) has great vegan bbq wings and chicken.
I wanted to make some additional non-EA recommendations but don’t want to blow up the comments section with non-EA stuff, so here’s a thread for people to do that.
Thanks for sharing. I think it was brave and I appreciated getting to read this. I’m sorry you’ve had to go through this and am glad to hear you’re feeling optimistic.
This seems like an improvement to me. Thanks!
Feedback on a minor pain point for me. When I’m looking at quick takes on the front page and want to go to the permalink for the relevant take (e.g. to see all the discussion under it), I often look around for a big title to click on for a while before remembering that I’m supposed to click on the icon on the top right, which is small, doesn’t stand out much, and feels too me like it’s somehow violating an implicit expectation I have for where to find this for this kind of content.
I have no clue whether this is just me, whether this is worth addressing, or what a good solution would be. (It does make sense to me that quick takes don’t have big titles like a normal top level post would.)
Probably the best thing I got out of two years in law school. . .
I’d wondered about this. Doing this survey seems like a really useful contribution. Thanks!
I think this was a cool post and I’m excited to see this kind of discussion here. (I think it misses a bunch of advantages of small orgs but seems fine to have a post that’s mostly about the disadvantages. unfortunately don’t have time to write out my object level thoughts here—just wanted to be clear that this comment is a “like” not a “(fully) agree.” )
what percent of Google SWEs hit $500k?
I wonder if Jack would be equally happy with the weaker claim that giving 10% is not advisable for the median American in their twenties. I’m not sure whether I’d agree even with that but wm it seems more plausible to me than claiming it’s not feasible.
People interested in this might be interested in @Peter McIntyre’s project which lists 52 useful concepts. https://mcntyr.com/blog/52-concepts-cognitive-toolkit