I’m a contact person for the effective altruism community: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/hYh6jKBsKXH8mWwtc/a-contact-person-for-the-ea-community
Please feel free to contact me at julia.wise@centreforeffectivealtruism.org.
I work at CEA as a community liaison, trying to make the EA community stronger and more welcoming. I also serve on the board of GiveWell.
Besides effective altruism, I’m interested in folk dance and trying to keep up with my three children.
The modal thing that gets reported to community health is something like “This person did a thing that made me / my friend kind of uncomfortable, and I’d like you to notice if other people report more problems from them.”
Thanks for raising this, I think I wasn’t clear enough in the post cited.
To clarify—that line in the table is referring specifically to sharing research, not all kinds of participation in the community. I meant it about things like “should people still be able to post their research on the EA Forum, or receive a grant to do research, if they’ve treated other people badly?” I find that a genuinely hard question. I don’t want to ignore the past or enable more harm. But I also don’t want to suppress content that would be useful to other EAs (and to the world) because of the person who produced it.
I see that as a pretty different question from “Should they attend conferences?” and other things more relevant to their participation in the community side of EA.
I don’t know anything about this area, but it sounds like something that I’d expect people have looked at before if it’s so technically simple. Do you have a sense of whether this has been trialed, or why it isn’t already being done at scale?
I’m happy to see this! Best wishes with your work.
Thanks to people who are leaving ideas here!
A note on the comment that asked why the community health team isn’t visibly “pulling these guys aside and privately warning them that they are making people uncomfortable.” We have definitely done that when someone lets us know about a problem and are ok with us doing something. In other cases, the person reporting the problem doesn’t want us to take action (often because they don’t want the other person to guess that they spoke up.)
If you’ve experienced a problem and want us to talk to someone, we’re very willing to do that. And we certainly do consider these types of complaints for admissions to future events. More here.
Thanks for starting this discussion!
Some previous efforts here:
The community health team has done some more in-depth work, for example interviews about women’s experiences in a couple of workspaces. Unfortunately, the in-depth work didn’t yield that many useful next steps. (I’m sure this varies, and in some cases in-depth study of what’s going on with the culture in a space would yield useful action points.)
And more general thoughts:
EA is multifaceted, made of thousands of people in different online spaces, workplaces, cities, and countries. Even understanding the culture(s), let alone shaping the whole thing, is a huge task.
All of us bring pre-existing expectations from our universities, friend groups, workplaces, etc, so there’s no static EA culture—there’s constant inflow from other cultures.
The work of shaping culture is usually best done by people who understand their space well (their workplace, local group, etc) rather than an outside entity. The staff at CEA can provide advice and support, but we certainly can’t single-handedly change the culture of all these EA spaces.
The community health team at CEA is available to talk about concerns like this. You can reach us here.
Additional thoughts as Catherine’s colleague:
Larger events or groups are more likely to have a code of conduct — for example the code of conduct at CEA events makes clear that unwanted sexual attention does not belong at these events. Our conferences also have at least one community contact person available on site to help with any personal or interpersonal problems that come up. We encourage anyone experiencing uncomfortable treatment at one of these conferences to let us know so we can address it.
Smaller EA events and groups are less likely to have these formal systems. Whether there are formal systems or not, culture is shaped largely through more informal interactions, the vibe set by organizers, etc. For group organizers, we encourage reading these community health resources. And we hope everyone in EA spaces will think about how each of us shapes the culture.
It’s true that in past years I was the main person working on these kinds of cultural things, but at this point the community health team has (thankfully!) grown. The CEA groups team and events team also think about these issues, and want to support events and groups (whether run by CEA or not) as healthy spaces.
As Catherine said, we’re happy to talk more about ideas that community members have about shaping the culture and ideas you have for preventing and addressing problems.
A related post from Damon that I like: For the mental health of those affected by the FTX crisis
Minor formatting thing: you might add some kind of line where your intro stops and Robert’s post begins?
Yes, there’s been a lot of research on this. Here’s an analysis of 40 trials with 11,000 women.
My guess is that epidurals are unlikely to be the most cost-effective intervention to increase access to, since it requires an anesthesiologist. I was guessing that nitrous oxide might be more promising because it’s so easy to administer.
3. I’m not sure they do as much bespoke advising as Longview, but I’d say GiveWell and Farmed Animal Funders. I think you could contact either one with the amount you’re thinking of giving and they could tell you what kind of advising they can provide.
This doesn’t seem obvious enough to me to include—I eventually co-owned a car at age 36 but never had one before that (living in suburbs of Philadelphia and Boston). It does seem worth talking to people in the area you plan to live about whether they find it feasible to not own a car.
When I see a study like this I usually go to Pubmed and see if there are other studies or meta-studies.
In this case there are a couple of recent metastudies:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34375207/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32483598/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36045075/
From one of the abstracts: “Eleven (44%) of the outcomes indicated that vegetarian and vegan diets were associated with higher rates of depression, while seven (28%) outcomes revealed beneficial effects of the diets on depression. Seven (28%) outcomes found no association between vegetarian and vegan diets and depression, although two of these studies found a higher risk of depression in some groups. . . . The evidence on the effect of vegetarian and vegan diets on depression is contradictory, possibly due to the heterogeneity of the studies analysed.”
Thanks, adding to the post!
(writing personally here, not for any organization)
Some good questions raised here!
I know that EA organizations have thought about this, for example when Giving What We Can was working on the dashboard that would show projected lifetime earnings and donations. I think it’s really hard to provide a broad overview of differences that doesn’t sound insulting or over-generalizing.
So much of the wage gap by gender reflects time away from work after having children, and individuals have significant choice over that. For example, I took a lot more leave (from a non-EA job I disliked) with my first child than I did with my second two from my EA job. In the US it’s common to take more like 10 weeks of leave, so the post’s use of a year of maternity leave as the default is pretty different from my experience.
(But I recognize that a lot of choices about how much time to take depends on income, childcare options, the children’s needs, and how flexible the parents’ work is. I don’t want to frame it all as completely up to personal preference. For example, my partner and I found ourselves unexpectedly without childcare when our eight-month-old refused to eat at daycare.)
On the informal side, there are groups for women and nonbinary people in EA and parents (and people considering parenting) in EA.
Some non-EA resources that I’ve found at least somewhat helpful:
I Know How She Does It by Laura Vanderkam—based on working mothers’ time logs, showing how they actually use their time. Both the book and her podcast are definitely aimed at high earners / high spenders, which I found frustrating at times. But they’re useful for taking your time seriously. I often find time management advice by non-parents irrelevant, but Vanderkam is a parent of five.
ParentData blog and books by Emily Oster—less about career, but an economist-y take on a bunch of parenting questions.
Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids—maybe will help you worry less about things you can’t change, but I find there’s still plenty to worry about.
Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In is in this genre, but honestly I don’t remember any takeaways.
And some pieces by EAs about parenting:
Parenting: things I wish I could tell my past self, Michelle Hutchinson
How to be productive before your baby turns one, Ruth Grace
My experience returning to work after having a baby, Rose Hadshar
Equal parenting advice for dads, Jeff Kaufman (plus lots of his other parenting posts)
Parenting and effective altruism, Bernadette Young
How much will pregnancy affect your health and work? me
What startup founders should think about before having kids me
The community health team does have an anonymous form. Thanks for the observation that it wasn’t that easy to find—we’ll be working on this.