Is there an official place for real-time chat among virtual attendees? If not, would it be okay for me to create an unofficial Discord or similar? Again, absolutely amazing work putting this together so quickly Amy.
Jemma
Karma: 152
Hey Amy and Barry, thanks so much for pulling this together, and so quickly—incredible work!
I would like to use the Grip agenda website to add items to my agenda (i.e. not just view it) but it won’t let meas I haven’t registered. I fear that this means I also won’t be able to click through to the live streams when they happen. Maybe I’m just missing a registration link somewhere, but this might be a bug where only people who were actually registered for EAG SF are able to interact with the agenda (and, potentially, view the livestreams).
Just thought I’d bring this to your attention! Again, amazing work getting this event up so fast on a new platform.
ETA: I just reread and saw this:
On Saturday morning, you can visit the agenda page to see a link to the broadcast.
It’s already Saturday evening here, but I think it is not yet Saturday morning in SF! So maybe the links will appear in the agenda then. It would still be great, if the feature is simple to activate, for non-attendees to be able to add items to their agenda—but I 100% understand if this is not possible, and will just make my own agenda manually. :)
I wonder whether Development Media International would be a particularly good choice at this time, not only for preventing COVID-19, but also because it is a charity that is likely to be more able to continue its regular operations during a pandemic (versus, say, charities that distribute bednets or medicine).
This is also a fantastic lifehack for searching for information on websites whose own search bar functionality is… subpar.
Australian equivalent: https://www.abmdr.org.au/ (They say on this one that you could be asked to donate to someone anywhere in the world, as it’s part of a worldwide network.)
I signed up for this a couple of months ago. Pretty simple process, probably the same one that’s described above. My main worry was not dropping more than 1⁄4 of the swabs! (They need three, but give you four in case you drop one as it’s invalid if the tip has touched any surface except the inside of your mouth.)
This may be a touch too philosophical, but I enjoyed Derek Parfit’s essay ‘Personal Identity’, as I think that it provides a brief insight into one of the central concerns of this major EA thinker.
My university group is planning to do a reading group around this book next year. While discussing how we’d all get access to a copy without each individually buying one, we discovered to our delight that it’s available through our university library as en e-book. Just putting this out there because if any other student group is planning something similar, check if your uni library has or can get e-book access, too.
Another option would be to buy it for your university library, but ask them (or ask a sympathetic philosophy professor to ask them if students can’t directly request this) to put it into short loans, 2-hour loan, high use, or whatever your university calls the section for books that can only be consulted for short periods. But the e-book is way more convenient and will thus probably increase the number of people who read and attend your group each week/fortnight/month.
Excellent idea, and highly detailed and informative post.
I was reading an article recently which suggested that scholars who speak English as an additional language can struggle with the expectation to write their work in English—especially in fields such as philosophy where prose expression forms the bulk of academic articles (less of an issue in the sciences). The article concluded that there should be more opportunities for translation, so that authors can express their ideas in the language they are most proficient and comfortable in. Perhaps this would be something for EA to think about offering? i.e. could offering to pay for translation of articles/books by non-native English speakers working in high-impact research areas essentially improve their productivity compared to them having to write in their non-native language? I’ve also never seen an EA event in which the speaker spoke through an interpreter, for example, but if someone did prefer to use one, it would be good for this to have been considered/offered as an option.
Also, one thing I’ve both read and personally noticed learning and teaching languages is that even very advanced speakers will usually do maths in their native language, and it can be hard to communicate orally about numbers in your non-native language. If you are doing a presentation at an EA event and mentioning numbers or percentages, it could be helpful (both for English as an Additional Language speakers and general accessibility) to display those figures on your slides also.
Thanks again for the excellent post!
Although I can’t comment on the sense of community felt by the local residents, I observed and to some extent experienced this in Spain. I’d say the key was the combination of high urban density and availability of shared spaces. Another factor could be the low price of eating/drinking outside the home - - I’d say this facilitates socializing since it’s easier to say “Let’s meet at X at 9pm [Spanish people have dinner very late!]” rather than having to prepare your house to host guests. There’s a joke that you only go into a Spanish person’s flat for a wake (which is an exaggeration, but somewhat based on truth).
Someone also mentioned to me that it is culturally more normal in Europe for people to socialize after work, likely due to some of the factors I mentioned. Cal Newport recently implied that this may have been the case in other countries pre-television. It’s also socially acceptable to take children to most events, even late into the evening.
Unfortunately, these aren’t really cultural characteristics, as I’d say it’s fundamentally based in the high urban density.
To what extent, if any, have online sources (such as Less Wrong) influenced your thinking, as compared to “traditional” philosophy?
On a related note, Cal Newport’s ‘How to Win at College’ is great, though the advice might be quite similar to that of the 80k guide. I read Newport’s book prior to transferring universities and I found it to be very useful.
You mean like sortition? https://www.sortitionfoundation.org/what_is_sortition
Thanks, looks interesting—it seems from this report like what reduces maternal mortality rates is likely to be a combination of factors, or a factor that hasn’t been discovered yet. Though maybe now GiveWell has incubation grants, they’re in a position to support more investigation into the final option presented (clean birthing kits and/or associated education), which seemed promising?
Have GiveWell examined many charities addressing maternal and neonatal health? Childbirth is a situation in which the worst-case scenario is the death of two people, one of whom literally has their whole life ahead of them, the other of whom is also relatively young and may have other young children who would suffer extreme emotional hardship from the loss of their mother (as well as the suffering caused to her partner and other relatives and friends, of course). In The Life Equation, a woman receives a caesarian which seems to save her baby (and, if I recall correctly, also herself) from near-certain death. Also, it seems like relatively basic healthcare attendance during delivery can significantly reduce the risk of long-term complications to mother and baby, like obstetric fistula or disabilities arising from hypoxia during birth.
I feel like it would be more appropriate for the organisation to have its own page, while information about the book could be divided as appropriate between that page, and those of effective altruism and Peter Singer.
Also, there are many ways that frugality can boost productivity that aren’t mentioned in this post. A major one would be that living in an apartment, rather than a large(r) house with a garden, substantially reduces the time spent on home cleaning and maintenance.
Point 2 confuses me on an empirical level. I don’t know many people whose social/leisure life largely consists of locked-in regular weekend/evening plans that they can’t change if a work opportunity (or anything else) comes up. More importantly, whether the fun activities are flexible seems to be unrelated to their cost. In fact, the commitment/cost relationship is usually negative—it’s often cheaper to pay for, say, sport and exercise classes if you lock in a series of lessons rather than paying casual entry. Likewise, casual commitment-free leisure like drinking alcohol or going to a restaurant can be much more expensive per hour than a regular commitment like playing on a friendly soccer team.
I’m not disagreeing with the post’s final paragraph—I recently decided against picking up a particular sport largely because it seemed self-indulgently expensive. But I don’t think that point 2, in particular, is factually true, even if you agree that you should reduce your leisure time to work more.
I think that EA is most similar to the climate movement:
1. Trust in data, rather than intuition, to even identify the problem. Although the impacts of climate change are being felt today, without data, we wouldn’t intuitively feel that (e.g.) one specific heatwave, drought or hurricane is a sign that the overall global climate is changing.
2. Focus on a problem whose major impacts won’t be felt until after our lifetimes; valuing of future people.
3. (Often) Also valuing non-human animals and their experiences.
4. (Method-related) Veganism
5. (Totally anecdotal) Similar personality types. This may be surprising to people outside the climate movement (as it was to me when I got more involved) because of the popular image of it as people protesting loudly and doing speeches, but many people in my local climate action groups seem quite introverted and are unusual in their/our focus on this one specific issue.
Where I live, there’s also a surprising amount of overlap between EA and the climate movement—and I mean that both ways; a lot of EAs I know are also involved in climate action, and I’ve been surprised to find out that several people in the climate movement here already know about EA (and have positive views of it) when I happen to mention it.
“if one thing starts to go wrong it can have a ripple effect on the rest of your body”
Absolutely can confirm, especially if the initial injury is lower in your body. For me, a temporary sporting injury to my knee caused a slight gait alteration that then triggered a relapse of a neck injury.
Also, I second any recommendation to switch from a laptop setup to desktop. A laptop should never be your main workspace. At the very least it needs to be elevated with a separate mouse and keyboard, and I’d recommend getting a separate monitor so you can set it up as a desktop. I did the former step during the aforementioned neck pain flare-up, and the latter just recently. It sounds trivial, but I’ve also found that having more screen space facilitates tasks in a way that has given me a sustained improvement in what must have been barely-perceptible frustration. It reduces cognitive load, I guess, not having to (e.g.) constantly relocate that tab/window you were using to research the thing you were writing.
Thanks Aaron! I’d love to join that Discord, but the link says that the invitation has expired.