What are the main advantages of having entrepreneurs start separate organisations vs running the projects inside a larger organisation? You could imagine a world in which entrepreneurs are employees of CE and this would have benefits.
Clifford
Karma: 1,331
Fascinating, thanks for doing this research—excited to see more work in this area.
Is it possible that being E and A correlates with EAs who have been involved and absorbed EA ideas but wouldn’t correlate with EAs if you were able to survey them before they got involved in EA?
I found myself agreeing with the statements that predicted E and A but not sure I would have done before getting into EA.
I could also imagine someone who is very open to reasonable arguments but isn’t particularly E or A but comes to agree with the statements over time.
[sorry if I’ve misrepresented what you’re saying—I read the post a couple of days ago and may be misremembering]
What are some effective giving orgs you’d like to see get started? Any nearby gaps that you don’t expect GWWC to fill?
What are some semi-plausible, but unlikely-to-happen projects you could imagine GWWC pursuing in 5 years time?
Pre-commitent: I will reply on this thread with where I decide to donate by New Years Day.
I’m planning to meet up with a friend and decide where to give my donations on New Years Eve. I often find I put my giving off so I’m using this post as a commitment device.
1. If anyone wants to join me, feel free to comment with the date you plan to donate by.
2. Does anyone have any suggestions about how to structure your thinking on where to donate? I’m planning to spend a couple of hours on this with a friend.
This is awesome—thanks for writing up!
For people working in the UK and keen to do something like this, I’d love to chat: ben@tyve.org
We launched an employee giving tool (Tyve.org) which promotes recommended charities from GiveWell and Founders Pledge’s research.
Hey Jessica, great to hear about this! I was thinking about doing something similar. Would you consider involving non-researchers working at EA-orgs remotely? I’ve spoken to a few interested people with this profile.
What do you use as a guide to “common sense” or “everyday ethics”?
I think people in EA often recommend against using EA to guide your everyday decision-making. I think the standard advice is “don’t sweat the small stuff” and apply EA thinking to big life decisions like your career choice or annual donations. EA doesn’t have much to say and isn’t a great guide to think about how you behave with your friends and family or in your community.
I’m curious, as a group of people who take ethics seriously, are there other frameworks or points of reference that you use to help you make decisions in your personal life?
I feel like “stoicism” is a common one and I’ve enjoyed learning about this. I suspect religion is another common answer for others. Are there others?
What report / data set that OWID has produced do you think has been most impactful in retrospect?
I feel like I have a much better sense of what the current approaches to alignment are, what people are working on and how underdeveloped the field is. In general, it’s been a while since I’ve spent time studying anything so it felt fun just to dedicate time to learning. It also felt empowering to take a field that I’ve heard a lot about at a high level and make it clearer in my mind.
I think doing the Week 0 readings are an easy win for anyone who wants to demystify some of what is going on in ML systems, which I think should be interesting to anyone, even if you’re not interested in alignment.
I became much more motivated to work on making AI go well over the period of the course, I think mainly because it made the problem more concrete but likely just spending more time thinking about it. That said, it’s hard to disentangle this increased motivation from recent events and other factors.
I think I agree with this. Two things that might make starting a startup a better learning opportunity than your alternative, in spite of it being a worse learning environment:
You are undervalued by the job market (so you can get more opportunities to do cool things by starting your own thing)
You work harder in your startup because you care about it more (so you get more productive hours of learning)
This was a great pitch Aaron. I’ve started watching and really enjoying it.
Relatedly, this uptick is kind of wild to me.
Worth noting you don’t have to be a US citizen to do this—the $ made me hesitate…
This is awesome—thanks!
Really cool idea. If this were possible would we expect to see big companies using similar tests to recruit undergraduates early before competitors do?
I’m a big fan of starting new chapters as I’ve discussed with Jon.
Just thought I’d flag that this seemed over optimistic:
“we think it is reasonable to expect a new Giving What We Can Chapter to produce 3-5 new members in their first year”
In my experience of working with GWWC chapters the median chapter produced 0 members a year because it’s hard to get things off the ground. Even the chapters who are putting a lot of effort in do well to get 1 or 2 people to pledge.
I don’t say this to undermine the article—I think the points can still apply if you get one person to pledge. I just want to make clear that if you start a chapter and one person pledges in a year that’s awesome and you’ve probably done a v good job.
It’s now possible to hide the community section on the homepage entirely (so that you don’t see the collapsible version).
You can also turn it off and on by going to your account page --> Site customizations --> Hide community section from the frontpage.
Thanks Dewi!
Yes, if you click “New Post”—you can turn this off in the normal way by unticking the checkbox: “This post may appear on the frontpage”.New Threads will only appear in the subforum.
Thanks Denis. I am a fan of the variety of this list! :)
Toby Ordering is really good.