I’m one of the contact people for the effective altruism community. I work at CEA as a community liaison, trying to support the EA community in addressing problems and being a healthy and welcoming community.
Please feel free to contact me at julia.wise@centreforeffectivealtruism.org.
Besides effective altruism, I’m interested in folk dance and trying to keep up with my three children.
My best guess is that EA didn’t really engage much with this, because they never engaged much with starvation relief as an intervention.
The closest thing I can remember is holding up Norman Borlaug as an example of a very impactful career (implicitly in favor of bioengineering food).
A model I think is interesting, though I don’t favor it as a good fit for an international field / movement like all of EA: When talking to EA groups in Nordic countries (EA Norway, etc), I was surprised at the extent of membership and elections as the basic means of operating any group there. If I understand right, members pay a fee to be members, and the expectation is that everyone will travel to an in-person annual meeting to vote for various leadership roles. This helps address the question of who’s involved enough to get a vote.
Coming from a geographically big country, it kind of blew my mind that everyone turns up in person at one location to vote. (“Surely you did it online during covid?” “Not in Sweden!”) It’s one way of making membership a bit costly, but it does favor members in the city where the voting is held.
I also notice that when I talk to people in some roles there, like the elected community contact person, they often don’t have much experience because they were elected less than a year ago.
People with more understanding of this system would probably have more to say about its pros and cons.
Huh, I didn’t realize this. My guess is that this is largely because most animal advocacy projects are based in the West, and most ducks are farmed in Asia. From: https://worldostats.com/animals-wildlife/duck-population-by-country/
I really like it when people write up experiences from areas that are uncommon for EAs to choose! Thanks for a very interesting read.
To be painfully accurate (hey, it’s the Forum), I think my first donation was actually a bit under this. Jeff donated a larger amount that was probably part of the same transaction.
Good writeup!
Pathways is another online treatment program. There are also workbooks like The Pain Management Workbook.
Agree—in general when we want to keep someone warm we wrap them in warm clothes or blankets. I can see why it’s not intuitive to keep the baby undressed (and keep them warm in a different way).
Also of interest on this topic: Ansh, a CE-incubated charity on kangaroo care for newborns.
I made a tag for posts about maternal and newborn health.
Want to share this in the Boston EA Facebook group? https://www.facebook.com/groups/1552072601751317
Nice piece, but I feel like many of the examples were cherry-picked to be alarming.
One project aimed at mid-career people: https://www.successif.org/our-work
I definitely don’t want to frame this as primarily my work — I think projects like Magnify have played more of a role. But thank you for the kind words!
I also think it’s really hard to tell what contributes to change or lack of change in demographics.
Thanks, I’ve changed it to an article about them.
Thanks for the correction! I’ve adjusted the entries, do let me know if there’s anything still not right.
I agree there’s something here, but I think you’re overselling the theory’s level of backup. It really lost me at the ADHD part.
My summary from when I looked at this when trying to figure out orthodontics for my kid:
”Orthodontists evaluated Norwegian skulls from 500 years ago and from now. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17561048/ “Only 36% of the medieval group showed objective assessed needs for orthodontic treatment, compared with 65% of the present-day sample.” Similar study in China, with a 4000-year-old sample because China. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22340477/”
This made me think that in pre-modern environments, tooth/jaw problems were better but not absent.
Getting kids to do things differently (holding their body differently, eating different foods) seems pretty hard. One more tractable intervention could be informing parents as consumers of orthodontics that there are downsides to making the mouth smaller. E.g. when I talked to different orthodontists, one proposed pulling teeth to reduce teeth crowding, while the others wanted to use an expander to make more room.
Minor suggestion: you could link to the calculator earlier in this post. I was curious to see it sooner!
A counter-example of a movement that had a burst of success, then an embarrassing decline, then revived: the early animal welfare movement. From my summary: “Lost steam after an initial burst of fundraising. Office was closed and they met in coffee houses. Main staff member was jailed for the society’s debts, another staff member continued working as a volunteer. Fortune turned when Princess Victoria (later Queen) and her mother decided they liked the organization, became the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.”