This is a great point. The good news is your concern is shared by CEA and others. It’s very exciting to see the work that Jessica McCurdy at CEA (and others) are doing to support the growth of EA groups at economically diverse R1 universities and smaller colleges, etc.
EAIF has also funded a small project to try and support groups at so-called “Public Ivies” in the U.S., with a special focus on public honors colleges that can contribute to socioeconomic diversity in EA. Feel free to DM if you’re interested in this broader opportunity area, whether in the context of North America / other OECD member countries—or in the context of other regions of the world!
jared_m
Thank you for the reminder to watch Bending the Arc. There were also some moving tributes to him (with excerpts of his interviews) on Twitter after he passed, such as this one from Ava DuVernay.
Thank you for writing up this series, Finan!
One note regarding the sections excerpted below: those who are worried about the quantity of food they are able to keep on hand might spend a few minutes reviewing credible intermittent fasting resources from Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and elsewhere. For example, Hopkins describes the 5:2 approach this way: “the 5:2 approach… involves eating regularly five days a week. For the other two days, you limit yourself to one 500–600 calorie meal. An example would be if you chose to eat normally on every day of the week except Mondays and Thursdays, which would be your one-meal days.” This CBS interview with Harvard and Yale faculty who practice IF is also informative.
It may be difficult to jump into intermittent fasting in the context of a distressing disaster, but I hope this gives some comfort to some readers: many individuals can average <14,000 calories a week with a 5:2-style plan for extended periods without putting their health at risk, a fact that may be worth keeping in mind in a crisis.
Food is also not as limiting as water. You can survive much longer without food than without water.
Many online sources agree you need about 2,000-2,500 cal per day. Closer to 2,000 if female and closer to 2,500 if male. Need will also vary with exercise.
...How else can I preserve calories?If you’ve run out of food or you know you’re going to run out of food. You can reduce your need for calories by . . .
Exercising less—exercise causes you to burn calories
Staying at a reasonable temperature—if you are too cold or too hot your body has to use energy to thermoregulate.
Didn’t realize Participant had produced Contagion, as well!
Reviewing the list of Participant films , I realize that I saw three of the four 2005 movies they were involved in (the trio that doesn’t include Murderball) in theaters or shortly after they came out. All three had a lasting impact on my thinking re: ethics, society, etc.
An EA version of Jeff Skoll’s Participant film production company seems like a worthwhile investment.
Participant funded An Inconvenient Truth, and other films that seem to have had an outsized impact on policy discussions and (perhaps as importantly) the career decisions of the young and impact-minded.
Thanks for sharing your thinking, @Tyner. Will DM you, but had one thought related to these two bullets:
All of the jobs I’ve seen listed at non-profits pay pretty poorly. Does it really make sense to take a 70% pay cut?
...
A few times I have helped friends or family with work issues and generally done a really good job. Like, my friend spent maybe 40 hours struggling with getting a database to do what she wanted and I solved her issues in less than 2 hours. If I can really be 20x more productive then average then I really am awesome and should be using my skills directly. But that’s probably an outlier.
Rather than committing to a durable pay cut by leaving your full-time job, you could see if there are bite-sized bits of work that well align with your skillset that you can spend a few hundred hours a year on (for pay). You could consider taking a “little bet” by seeing if you could take a 1-3 month leave of absence — or go to 60% or 80% time in your current job for a few months — while supporting an EA project that could benefit from your skills.
There’s a good chance the EA Funds team would fund a well-scoped project where you would invest several hundred hours a year advancing a line of work that currently is under-staffed or missing your technical expertise.
Thank you for strong EAGs in 2020 and 2021, in ultra-challenging circumstances! Re:
The virtual side of the event underperformed, although it still added around 1,500 connections; it was positively received by attendees, but we did not optimize it.
We are reconsidering running hybrid conferences in the future, and might run separate virtual and in-person conferences in order to give more attention to each side.
Sharing across one data point that I found the virtual event and a few subsequent connections very valuable. Conflicting October travel meant I wouldn’t have applied/been able to join in-person in London — so it was both useful and encouraging to participate in the virtual side of the event.
Without endorsing this particular source, this strikes me as a valuable perspective as far as inclusion reasons to keep investing in hybrid options when viable.
1. Hybrid events are more inclusive and accessible than in-person-only events.
There are many barriers people may face to attending an in-person conference, especially if it requires flying or a long drive:
Physical disabilities and mobility issues: blindness, deafness, using a wheelchair or walker, inability to walk quickly, chronic pain, chronic fatigue
Health issues that require equipment or a regimented medication schedule to manage
Caring for children or older relatives at home
Complex dietary restrictions
...Hybrid events are more accessible to these audiences because they allow attendees to participate from home without travel or overnight stays.
It mostly helps when there are rule-bound matching funds available. Let’s say you think CATF is a very effective charity when it comes to issues you care about, and that Good Food Institute is somewhat less effective. Person B has the exact opposite perspective.
If there’s an Every.org style matching opportunity, and you give $200 to CATF, Every.org will only match $100 of that ($300 total for CATF). Likewise for Person B and GFI: her $200 becomes $300 for GFI. If you find each other through the EA Forum and coordinate to split your $200 personal gifts and each give $100 to CATF and $100 to GFI, then EVERY dollar you both give will be matched. So each charity receives $400 instead of $300 from the same level of donations from you and Person B, as your giving is 100% matched — instead of 50% only.
Agree with Lukas: better to book the flight. Not least because a 100 USD donation to Founder’s Pledge or CATF can likely be doubled by various matching 2022 opportunities. Every.org’s promotion is an example.
A slightly similar choice came up for us when we bought a car in 2020. (A new job required one.) We would’ve preferred a used EV/hybrid. During the peak of the pandemic, a dealer was willing to deliver a used non-hybrid vehicle to our door for many thousands of USD less. That allowed us to invest a bit more while asset prices were in the doldrums. In the last two months we’ve steadily donated those appreciated assets to CATF, Carbon180, and dozens of other EA charities. Through trading donations (e.g., we donated to an AI charity in exchange for another EA giving to CATF or Carbon180) we have driven >1,000 USD to EA-embraced climate charities from that car purchase. More if you consider alternative protein charities to have a climate impact, as we do.
There are also likely strong “pandemic externality” reasons to choose the option that puts you in public for fewer hours. You might want to consult microCOVID’s fantastic calculator to see how that math works out.
Agreed. Chiming in that the microCOVID Project’s calculator and work has been invaluable to our family since 2020. I don’t know Rachel, Larissa, or others involved in the project—but they’re in our personal pantheon of pandemic heroes. We lost one family member in NY to COVID. It’s easy to imagine we and others would have experienced more loss, absent their work.
Could not pass up this opportunity to thank them publicly, and note how excited we are to watch any videos they produce as a result of this funding.
Similar to David, I don’t have a definitive answer. I would agree with reviewing the links he shared and add one more.
The Founders Pledge Research Team are engaged in Effective Environmentalism efforts. They have some very recent/timely write-ups of grants they have made in the climate space. These are informed by current global political and technological dynamics. If you find their analysis persuasive, you might consider adjusting your work to align with the opportunities they call out—or (as I’ve been doing) donate to those groups while remaining in your current role.
Thank you for carving out time and attention for this course, Anton. Thanks also to the EA Long-Term Future Fund for investing in the project. The timing is perfect, as many of us curtail December/January travel plans and look for more-productive alternatives to watching Omicron case counts rise.
Signed up, and I’m a few videos in already. Will share with others who have an economics bent!
Agree that honors college students are an attractive organizing opportunity. One could look at U.S. public flagships that reel in a disproportionate share of National Merit Scholars (UF, University of Minnesota, etc.) for their honors programs as starting points. These, and other talent-dense schools like Penn State, are very promising. To your point here:
I think the capability is there (and perhaps less entitlement).
EA might gain more mindshare at public honors colleges. Students at those schools strike me as a bit scrappier/more focused than students at stereotypical private universities where I and many EAs studied. Private university students may have more sirens of influence calling their names, in terms of:
Constant recruiting events by Goldman Sachs, consultancies, and other firms not-so-subtly offering large bonuses and potential channels to OECD country influence
Unusual faculty mentorship opportunities from former heads of state, prominent writers, etc.
Time-consuming groups with a history of producing influential leaders and writers
The current Campus Specialist plan (including the set of first-wave campuses!) makes total sense to me. At the same time I’m rooting for target-rich public honors colleges and universities topping this list to comprise a good share of Wave 2!
Goldman’s own data-driven recruiters have taken this approach. From a 2017 article:
Goldman Sachs is embracing top students from outside the hallowed halls of the Ivy League… Lloyd Blankfein hosted a fireside chat in September for 250 students from Macaulay Honors College, a New York-based public school, during which he outlined the firm’s new outlook on recruiting talent. He told students the firm is no longer “trapping” itself by “recruiting from the same 30 or 40 schools.”
The firm has been deepening its relationship with the college, which is considered a high-caliber public school. On November 3, Goldman hosted a resume and interview workshop for 75 Macaulay students....
[Blankfein]: “It wasn’t an act of kindness on my part, or generosity, or trying to create diversity; it was pure selfish, naked self-interest. We wanted to really extend our net further because everybody’s involved pretty much in a war for talent...”
This strongly aligns with my thinking around high school outreach opportunities:
TL;DR: Specifically targeting STEM, logic, debate, and philosophy competitors with short outreach could increase high school outreach effectiveness.… This would give these individuals more time to think about career choice and enable them to start building flexible career capital early and might make them more open to engaging with EA in the future.
Participating in ISEF, mock trial, and Science Bowl (and following others who did through their careers) makes one realize how a) impact-oriented, and b) career-centric many of these student competitors are. Several friends knew at age 17 they wanted to pursue PhDs or JDs. They went ahead and obtained those degrees, and come 2021 they are vocal faculty members at prominent law schools or U.S. colleges. Expanding this category of student’s “mental menu” of great career options to include:
A tour of duty as a Campus Specialist, as an alternative to the usual suspects such as the Peace Corps/Fulbright Scholarship/teaching programs that many mission-driven students consider
High-impact careers on 80,000 Hours’s radar screen
Including high-impact research agendas: the friends I know who are now teaching law/philosophy are sadly deep into their not-especially-high-impact specialties
Startup and ETG opportunities from an EA perspective, as expressed nicely by Lincoln Quirk, the Alameda Research/FTX case study, etc.
Strikes me as a very exciting opportunity for 2022 and beyond. Thank you for your write-up here!
Thanks for sharing these, Jeff!
Had not seen the air purifier cubes before—and will keep an eye out for them.
Yeah, I was similarly uncertain about how much AFP’s policy serves to “defend the 20th century status quo of nonprofit operations” (which much of EA is challenging, for good reason) versus good-faith efforts to make the field operate well — putting aside fundraisers’ personal economic interests. The balance is a bit murky…
FWIW: in the 2010s I remember being surprised to learn that the Association of Fundraising Professionals opposed percentage-based compensation for full-time nonprofit fundraisers.
I don’t have a refined view on pros/cons of variable compensation structures like this in certain nonprofit contexts, but am sharing this primary document in case valuable as food for thought. Some excerpts are below.
AFP holds that percentage based compensation can encourage abuses, imperils the integrity of the voluntary sector, and undermines the very philanthropic values on which the voluntary sector is based. AFP stands firm with its Standards which prohibits members from working for percentage-based compensation or accepting finder’s fees...
Members shall:
21. not accept compensation or enter into a contract that is based on a percentage of contributions; nor shall members accept finder’s fees or contingent fees.
22. be permitted to accept performance-based compensation, such as bonuses, only if such bonuses are in accord with prevailing practices within the members’ own organizations and are not based on a percentage of contributions.
23. neither offer nor accept payments or special considerations for the purpose of influencing the selection of products or services.
24. not pay finder’s fees, commissions or percentage compensation based on contributions.
The prominent Aussie-American economist Justin Wolfers at the University of Michigan has been promoting Leigh’s book this week.
Given Wolfers’ broad following in the U.S., he may be introducing more economists/others to the idea of existential risks here: https://mobile.twitter.com/JustinWolfers/status/1465074869750702096
Also thanks, Matt, for your write-up!
The “Looking for people who live in the same obscure geographic area as you” use case is a super-promising one. One example is Florida, the third most-populous U.S. state with 21 million people. While the Forum map doesn’t list any Floridians, several dozen have joined this (admittedly sleepy) Facebook group since late 2020.
A number of them live in Gainesville, and a smaller number are in Orlando. Those cities feature two of the four largest universities in the U.S. I’m not in either city so have been unable to support meetups in those areas, but there is likely some low-hanging organizing fruit by getting EAs near large universities to meet.
Done, re: following on Twitter.
My main contact at Pau and Marc Gasol’s Gasol Foundation (focused on “research, holistic, data-driven” work to eradicate childhood obesity) appears to have left. They are a thoughtful group, and may be worth writing in the 10-20% chance they evolve into HIA supporters — or can be helpful in another way.