Jacob | Organizer of EA Munich | Economics student
Primarily interested in global priorities research and politics at the moment.
Jacob
Karma: 86
A Case Study: The heavy-tailedness of broad student outreach methods
Announcing the Longtermism Fellowship of EA Munich—Apply!
I think it’s worth applying if you have some interest in philosophy and we expect to accept most applicants. You can also look at EA Virtual Programs https://www.effectivealtruism.org/virtual-programs , but I hope I have convinced you to apply :-)
This depends also on your demand. You can apply now, and it’s OK if you can’t come because the discussion time is terrible for you. After looking at the timetable, I think doing it afternoons is the best option at the moment. Sadly, then it’s pretty late in the Philippines :(also depends
We agree that the Torres piece is annoying and, to some extent irresponsible and unfair. And it’s certainly true that there are more sober, thoughtful, penetrating criticisms of specific aspects of longtermism.
Our reasons for including the piece anyway are: (1) It’s probably the single most well-known attack on longtermism, and it’s helpful to know what kinds of objections have made it out into the world and gotten traction outside the EA bubble. (2) It bundles together many criticisms in one place, so we don’t have to read four or five different essays. (3) We think it’s healthy to hear outside-view criticisms that don’t shy away from denouncing the whole longtermist program. (4) Although Torres focuses too much on (particular interpretations of) Bostrom as a stand-in for longtermism generally, some of his worries about Bostromism do a good job raising tricky and essential questions.
We wish there were a piece that did a similar amount of useful things without so many flaws, but we don’t know of any!
That said, we think Scott Alexander’s recent piece on longtermism is pretty good, and maybe we should read that too.
Thanks for writing this! Great to see this written out finally.
Thanks for the warm words, Kevin! I am looking forward to getting to know you on Tuesday!
Me as well! Thanks a lot!
Maybe https://foodimpacts.org/ ?
Thanks for putting this together! Learned some new things about my local group!
Thanks for the list! I will look at some more opportunities then.
We are in front of track 33 with a blue and a yellow jacket
Here in Munich, we are dealing with many similar issues since we started as a group focused on professionals and are now registered at the two big unis (TUM and LMU), which are the best in Germany. We have some irregular events catering to professionals, but the Intro Program and most of our event are frequented by both universities
I think most of their articles have been repackaged and can be found here: https://emergingtechpolicy.org/
I didnt know that they deleted it on the the EA Forum, but the new website is run by the Horizon Institute. In their newsletter I heard about the website.
We will meet at the Glühweinstand
I was not very aware about this topic until recently when somebody wanted to discuss outreach towards non-academics with me. We are in contact with an adult education center (Volkshochschule) and might offer an Intro Fellowship there. It might be worth considering starting an EA group for high school graduates (no college) , comparable to EA for Christians, but I haven’t thought much about it and this should be founded by people without tertiary education (chicken egg problem).