Hey. I’m Jordan (jojo) Pieters. I’m currently the EA Global Content Coordinator at CEA, meaning I arrange all the talks, workshop and meetups at EAG conferences.
Previously, I was involved in a variety of EA community-building projects, including running EA Oxford for the 23⁄24 academic year. I also have some experience in operations management.
Feel free to reach out if you want to share feedback on EAG, or have ideas for content!
It’s all about the Caleb points man
Low and middle income countries or LMICs
This would be for EA work being done in LMICs. I anticipate some more posts in this area soon.
This could apply to posts like:
Thanks for following up. This is very interesting. I’d like to think more about what lessons from the startup world might be applicable in our case.
I don’t think the dichotomy being presented here is true. We can plausibly have both of these things.
The claim that “Cape Town is not Africa” also doesn’t seem very obvious to me. I can see the possible assumptions here maybe being something like “Africa must necessarily be a harsh environment to live in” or “some degree of material suffering is necessary to understand African perspectives.” I don’t think either of these are true.
I’m really interested in your perspective on this though. I’ll reach out to discuss this further
Location: Currently living in Cape Town, but have a preference for moving to the UK
Remote: Yes
Willing to relocate: Yes (mostly)
Experience: I’ve done a fair bit of EA community building and am leaning towards roles in the meta-EA space. I have also done research for an EA org and communications/marketing in the for-profit and non-profit sectors.
Skills: Very people-oriented. I love leading groups and engaging in difficult conversation. I also think I write pretty well (I’ll hopefully have more public evidence of this soon). I’m an unapologetic generalist with the confidence to try almost anything.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jordan-pieters/
Email: jordanpieters@gmail.com
Availability: preference for full-time
Notes: I can provide references if needed
One thing this post doesn’t really touch on, which I would like more discussion about, is why we should establish new hubs in the first place. I think creating an EA hub that’s as good as Berkeley or Oxford is actually really difficult, so we should plausibly spend a lot of time deciding whether it’s worth the cost. We should weigh up the cost of new hubs with the cost of just trying to get people to move to an existing one. Sure, maybe not everyone can move to Oxford or Berkeley if they want to, but not everyone needs to live in a ‘hub’.
Maybe the flip side of this is that we should just have a bunch of people trying to start hubs, and we see who succeeds and who fails. That might be a good indicator of hub ‘attractiveness’. But I’m not sure we have the time or resources to try that
I think that what we currently call retreats seem diverse enough that the events might deserve entirely different names. Organisers could put more care into choosing a term, on a case-by-case basis, that accurately sets expectations. Some retreats I’ve heard of do appear to entail spending a few days in the countryside forming better bonds within a group. In that case, calling it a “retreat” would be reasonable.
I’m not sure what your background is, but I agree that getting in touch with local EA groups is a great place to start. We (University of Cape Town) would certainly be happy to have somebody offer help
I’ll just add all mine in one comment, since I’m assuming you won’t base your decision off the number of upvotes. Most of these are about movement-building, since that’s probably what I spend most of my time thinking about
The EA community should not be trying to grow.
This research would advocate for something like stronger gatekeeping/less outreach.
Giving pledges (GWWC, OFTW) are no longer relevant for engaged EAs
Perhaps linked to ETG becoming less of a priority
Despite many community builders pushing for them, fellowships are not the best way to get new people involved in EA
AGI will never be developed, so we don’t need to worry about AI safety
There are many possible arguments for this. Here is one.
The video appears to now be private. Any chance I could get access to watch it?
As someone who has studied religion at university, I’ve been patiently waiting for more conversations about this. I’m not religious myself, but I’m looking forward to reading about these perspectives.
Unfortunately that is true. I would say that statistic might be misleading though as it largely depends on the area you’re living in. Lower income areas account for most of the total murder in Cape Town the metropolitan area. Higher income areas (in which any expat would inevitably be living) are relatively safe. Overall though, you’d be correct in assuming that safety is more of a concern than in many European or US cities. But as far as anecdotal evidence goes, I have’t been murdered yet.
This an absolutely shameless plug for my own city but I really think Cape Town (South Africa) would be an ideal location.
It’s probably the safest and most accessible city on the African continent
great infrastructure (the local government is reasonably competent compared to the national level)
quite big tech and creative industries
cost of living seems to be about a third of that in San Francisco
lifestyle wise, I honestly don’t know of any city with more natural beauty
I’m also hoping to build up an EA community here (group housing etc. might happen some time in the future)
I attended and thoroughly enjoyed your workshop! Thanks for posting these notes
I’m not aware of anything like this existing. Somebody make one please! I’d be happy to help out
I think this platform is absolutely fantastic and much needed. I haven’t made a donation yet, but it seems like the user experience is very smooth.
Just one note: the link on the notification “Donations to Effective Crypto may not be tax deductible where you live. We think that you shouldn’t worry too much about this, but just so you know.” is broken.
I’m also eager to read it. This would affect the activities of quite a few groups (mine included). I can’t currently think of any good reasons why the pledge should be controversial.
I think people are always going to seek status or validation and people in EA are no different. Status in EA has a lot of massive upsides as well (you might have greater chances of getting funding/job offers). It’s highly unlikely this will change. What we should be actively monitoring is how closely we’re matching status with impact.
Also, I’m not sure if the title is good or bad. I think this post points to some important things about status in EA and I wonder if the misleading title makes people less likely to read it. On the other hand, I thought it looked funny and that made me click on it.