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.
Gina and several other therapists in EA are listed here: https://eamentalhealth.wixsite.com/navigator/therapists
Done! Thanks for posting this!
It’s a good question. For some people who have already considered their plans pretty carefully and who don’t expect much benefit from meeting others in the community, it might not be worthwhile. Or just people for whom the travel / time costs would be unusually high (personally, I’m in that category this year).
I expect it to be most valuable for people who are considering some kind of change of plan in how they might have impact. Hearing about projects in the community and getting input from other people on your plans could be really valuable, allowing you to have much more impact than by donating the monetary cost of attending the conference.
I realize people who had an unusually good experience are more likely to write posts about a conference, but here are some posts giving a sense of the kinds of value some other people have gotten: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/TzmPTBYFHPYbvFbjd/reflections-on-ea-global-london-2019-mrinank-sharma https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/mMEzk55R33vvHPgyd/reflections-on-ea-global-from-a-first-time-attendee https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/PCQ4i5EK7vZ8pR2tF/why-you-should-consider-going-to-ea-global
A couple of historical predecessors:
The scientific charity movement starting in the 1870s: https://www.jefftk.com/p/scientific-charity-movement
And John Wesley advocating earning to give in the 1700s: https://www.jefftk.com/p/history-of-earning-to-give-iii-john-wesley
Thanks, added to the post!
For me it might be two sides of the same coin (particular to my role on the community health team).
The positive is getting to serve a community I really believe in, and supporting people who feel very much on the same team as me as far as big life goals.
The negative is that there’s less separation between work life and community life than there would be in a lot of jobs. I’m not a normal community member in the way I was before I worked here—there are more things I have to try to be neutral on, etc. Facebook is mostly a work space for me.
I have a similar impression to Amy—when I came on almost 6 years ago and for several years after, things were much looser. There was not a particularly consistent strategy, hiring was sometimes very informal, and we were running a lot of projects without always having adequate staffing to do a good job.
Now things are more settled, more formalized (e.g. annual performance reviews, standard hiring process, clearer communication about who is responsible for what). We’re less likely to take on big new projects, and we’re focused on better performance on our existing projects.
My favorite example of Slate Star Codex translating into Republican is the passage on climate change starting with “In the 1950s”: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/10/16/five-case-studies-on-politicization/
I really appreciate both this piece and your drive to leave this world better than you found it!
This made me think about two of my favorite older pieces about EA, which are both about the tie between one’s own losses and a drive to do something positive:
Derek Thompson on donating after the death of his mother: “Malaria is not merely the greatest killer of children in the world, but also it is the greatest killer of pregnant women. The disease plunders motherhood from both sides of the equation. The loss of a mother must be quantifiable by some measure of creative accounting, but in my experience it is immeasurable. This much I knew: There is the thing that I want, I cannot have it, but I can give it to somebody else.”
Zoe Savitsky on donating in the aftermath of her cancer: “my current restrictions are stark. These twin recognitions – first, that in spite of my health struggles, I remain one of the most privileged people on the planet, and second, that my physical isolation has made me crave engagement with the world – led me to Giving What We Can.”
You probably wouldn’t consider yourself an EA if it didn’t improve your life.
I don’t think EAs should keep doing things that make them miserable (as with the noisy housing example someone gives below), but I don’t think personal benefit is or should be the main reason to do EA. I’m not a fan of the obligation/excitement dichotomy because I feel some of both, but the word that fits best to me is “determination.”
I get benefits from being part of EA, like friendships with smart and caring people. But there are other smart and caring people I could have met in other communities, and I’d probably be personally a bit happier if I made some other community my main focus, one with less emphasis on animal suffering and existential risk.
To paraphrase a Greg Lewis piece, it would be surprising if the community that’s best for improving the world is also best for my personal satisfaction. I’ve chosen to make this community my main focus because I think it lets me make progress on problems in the world, and it also feels sustainable for me to do so (even though not the most enjoyable thing I could focus on). And part of what makes it sustainable is also having family/parenting as the other major focus in my life, so that EA is not the only thing going on for me.
Write roundup posts!
The posts I’ve made that I think yielded the most value for the amount of work I put in were essentially lists of other people’s work.
EA Syllabi and teaching materials
Giving now vs. later: a summary
There are other formats that may make sense, like tags for material on this forum, or wikis. But the general principle is that you can do something really useful by making it easy for people to find existing material on a topic.
Thanks! Added.
The community health team at CEA has been following the situation.
My coworkers got me a mug that said “Sorry, I’m not Julia Galef” to save me from having to say it so much at conferences. Maybe I should have just gone this route instead.
Third time’s the charm!
I think I’d expect US culture to be most ok with self-congratulation, and basically everywhere else (including UK) to be more allergic to it? But most of the people who voted on the name in the first place were British.
I’m so sorry for the pain and fear that many people are experiencing after the Atlanta shootings. And I know this comes on top of subtle disadvantages, misunderstandings, and slights that wear people down even when something like this isn’t in the news.
I can understand the worry about getting sidetracked by current events that are culturally important but not as large-scale/neglected/tractable as other problems EA already focuses on. But I agree with Will’s comment—we can still acknowledge pain that’s happening, especially pain felt by fellow EAs. To me, the reason it’s so important to do the math and focus on impact is a sense that the lives involved are precious and irreplaceable. EAs will still be hit hard personally by specific situations, even while knowing other irreplaceable lives are lost all the time.
(I read a good argument that sex workers are another population targeted by the Atlanta attacks, and because of stigma against that work there’s been little acknowledgement that sex workers face a lot of danger in general as well as in this specific case. I also want to acknowledge the unfairness of the stigma and danger that sex workers experience.)
I’m adding info about some mistakes I’ve made so people can be aware of my track record. While I’ll do my best to keep confidential anything you want to talk to me about privately, I can’t guarantee that I’ll never make a mistake. So far, I know of two situations where I’ve failed to maintain confidentiality.
I tally that in the 6 years I’ve been in this role, I’ve handled about 135 situations where confidentiality was implied or requested by members of the community (not counting more standard situations like internal work emails). Here are the two mistakes I know I’ve made around confidentiality:
Someone sent me a draft of a critique of my colleague’s book, which I agreed to keep confidential. In deciding what to do with the email chain the following week, I forgot that they had asked for confidentiality in the first message, and sent it to my colleague. You can read more detail here.
Someone confidentially told me about a problem in the community they had heard about. We agreed that I would look into the problem and talk to one of the people involved. In investigating the concern, I talked to some other people involved in a way that I thought was probably ok with the person who initially talked to me, but I didn’t check. They actually weren’t ok with it. I should have checked with the person to clarify whether they were ok with me investigating in a way that revealed some of the information they shared with me. It’s possible that my talking to people involved made it harder for the victim to do their own evidence-gathering about what happened.
It’s very important to me that EA is a place where people trust each other, and I really regret both these mistakes.
If you know of other mistakes I’ve made that I should learn from, you can contact me at julia.wise@centreforeffectivealtruism.org, my manager, Nicole Ross, at nicole.ross@centreforeffectivealtruism.org, and/or CEA’s executive director, Max Dalton at max@centreforeffectivealtruism.org. You can also contact CEA anonymously via our contact form (which goes to our operations staff, but they can route to other staff if you request that.)