Co-Director of Equilibria Network: https://eq-network.org/
I try to write as if I were having a conversation with you in person.
I would like to claim that my current safety beliefs are a mix between Paul Christiano’s, Andrew Critch’s and Def/Acc.
Jonas Hallgren 🔸
Karma: 493
Stockholm Student Hackathon: Lessons for next time
What is the moral values of nations?(China, for example)
If you feel like booking a meeting to help me out in some way, here’s my calendly: https://calendly.com/jonas-hallgren
EA Job Testing
PV: Running an EA org day, for example, “Effective Thesis day”
PV: EA infrastructure
PV: Hosting a smaller conference or talk
Accessible EA Projects
Field-specific LE (Longterm Entrepreneurship)
Also, it is more focused on easier projects that university groups and people new to EA can manage to do on their own. For example, the EA hotel is a cool idea but there are very few select people who could do it. More like running a conference in your city or helping with EA resources by creating a website.
Hey Aaron, I missed your message here so sorry for the late response. I should probably relabel this to Community Project Voting or something, the idea was to have a category specifically for individual projects, like a system where the highest rated posts are the most “recommended” ones by the community. The plan of the website was to give pathways to starting community projects such as a smaller conference or some smaller scalable thing that a lot of communities can do under some other organisation. The category would be used for clarity on what individual projects are the best ranked currently.
I find it quite ironic that I might have missed this post because of a high workload in school, dropping a class next term thanks to this post, so very much appreciated!
One of the bigger parts is probably that it would have a public prize attached to it. I get the feeling from people outside EA that altruism is charity and nothing that you can actually do a career within. A person has a certain threshold of motivation before digging into EA. I believe this threshold would be easier to get through if you had a potential explicit reward at the end of it (a carrot on a stick). It might also generate some interesting ideas that could be tried out. Essentially, the idea is that it would turbocharge the fellowships as they would have something to apply the ideas of EA to.
To use EA terms, this was an absolute banger of a post. As someone who’s 2 weeks from the process of starting up a club from scratch I will certainly use the tips and tricks in this post in the future, great fricking job man!
On a side note I’ve had some ideas about running an EA related competition on campus, have you thought about something similar before? I was thinking it would be like an essay competition with the goal of coming up with an idea that saves the most lives. You give the people interested information that they can evaluate their ideas with (EA stuff) and when they’re done you rate the idea on estimated effectiveness. This should increase interest in EA ideas as they get to do something interactive. I am planning on running a small scale experiment of this and some reflections on whether and how to do it would be appreciated!
Great to “see” you Sean! I do remember our meeting during the conference, an interesting chat for sure.
Thank you for the long and deliberate answer, I checked out the stuff you sent and it of course sent me down a rabbit hole of EA motivation which was quite cool. Other than that it makes sense to modify my working process and goals a bit in order to get motivation from other sources than altruism. I think the two main things I take with me from the advice here is to have a more written account of why I do things but most importantly I need to get into the EA loop and I need to actively engage with the community more to get more reminders of why I do things. I’m however lazy and I will only answer you even though I enjoyed the other’s answers too.
[Question] How do other EAs keep themselves motivated?
First and foremost I really liked the engineering pandemics video, I actually saw it independently a month ago and it reminds me a lot of good informational youtube content (which is good). I wanted to state my support for this because I think what you’re trying to do is great! Other than that I’m a person with time on my hands and youtube experience, so I would love to help in whatever way I can, especially with demographics and outreach. (I’ve sent you a dm :) ).
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This is completely unrelated to the great point you made with the comment but I felt I had to share a classic? EA tip that worked well for me. (uncertain how much this counts as a classic.) I got to the nice nihilistic bottom of realising that my moral system is essentially based on evolution but I reversed that within a year by reading a bunch of Buddhist philosophy and by meditating. Now it’s all nirvana over here! (try it out now...)
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Mf2MCkYgSZSJRz5nM/a-non-mystical-explanation-of-insight-meditation-and-the
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WYmmC3W6ZNhEgAmWG/a-mechanistic-model-of-meditation
https://www.lesswrong.com/s/ZbmRyDN8TCpBTZSip