Woman // Christian // Canadian // Londoner // Married // Donates to Global Development // Works on Energy Policy
Khorton
Karma: 6,427
No, the UK Government does not sponsor visas.
Hi Phil, if they’ve been offered a part-time position that they can do alongside studying in such a way that it matches their visa conditions, I don’t see a problem. If they’ve been offered a full-time position, I doubt it would be possible, but I’m not a lawyer so don’t know for sure and would encourage the candidate to check the guidance for themselves!
I really like that you tried grantmaking, posted about it, and even included good arguments why you might be wrong.
I am not convinced this is cost-effective enough to be competitive with GiveWell charities
I personally know of thousands of extra pounds going to AMF because of this post.
Thanks for this post! I agree that the EA movement has a lot of momentum right now and “steering” is potentially relatively more important than “rowing”.
Funding and praising someone for pointing out a harmful community norm or inadequate institution is only valuable alongside concrete steps to remedy the issues
I think this is the biggest bottleneck I see in the EA community. Within EA, I see some concrete action based on core EA principles established over the last decade; I also see some criticism of EA or suggestions for how to do things differently. I’m most excited about the middle ground—”speeding up” efforts to move EA in a new direction.
For example, I think Phil Trammell did a great job outlining the idea of patient philanthropy [1], and I’m excited that Founder’s Pledge took the next step and created the Patient Philanthropy Fund [2]. WANBAM took concrete steps to address problems with diversity in the EA community. I’m not sure if these counts as steering or rowing.
[1] https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/phil-trammell-patient-philanthropy/
[2] https://founderspledge.com/funds/patient-philanthropy-fund
I would be interested to know what cause your friend hopes to donate to? There are slightly different considerations for established fields like global health compared to newer fields like AI safety
I’d refer your friend to information about “patient philanthropy” that cover some of the arguments for waiting https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/phil-trammell-patient-philanthropy/ https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/tag/patient-altruism
In my comment, however, I am not accusing the medical establishment (X2) of intentional or uncontroversially bad acts (Y).
No one is accusing your dad of bad acts if his Facebook is cloned, AFAICT.
I do accept that there is a difference between a taxpayer-funded profession and a personal/religious/cultural role, but that seems to be the only difference—they really do seem like very similar arguments and I’m a bit surprised to be called uncharitable for bringing it up.
This sounds like a similar argument to “all Muslims are complicit in terrorism unless they loudly and publicly condemn terrorism” or “if your dad’s Facebook account gets cloned, he’s responsible for anyone gets scammed”.
On the one hand, people whose identity is being co-opted to do bad things have a unique ability to fight back. On the other hand, it’s pretty unfair to say that all professional researchers of bioethics need to suddenly pivot into PR because you hold them responsible for the actions of people they’ve never met.
I love this. I think it’s really important to contradict important misunderstandings floating around in the EA community, and I found the conversational style really engaging, although some subheadings might have made it easier to skim
Is the Wiki what you get to if you click through on one of the tags? I like that it provides an overview of the topic and a list of all posts on that topic
I have often noticed people conflating these four qualities (impact, ideological commitment, community involvement, and hard work) and I appreciate you listing them explicitly.
My problem isn’t with the term “hardcore EA” itself. I just think there are a lot of people in the community that feel like the most good a person can do is get a job at an EA organisation, make a bunch of EA friends, and work as much as they can. I think even people who wouldn’t endorse this view on reflection might feel like it subconsciously. I disagree with this pretty strongly and think almost all of the most impactful opportunities for doing good are outside of the EA community.
So I don’t want to ban the term. In my perfect world, instead we’d have a deeper cultural change where people don’t conflate impact with EA involvement because that’s not what they actually believe.
Why “if true”? Why would Joey misrepresent his own experiences?
“Toby Ord shouldn’t seek to influence policy” is not the message I get from that paragraph, fwiw.
It comes across to me as “Toby Ord and other techno-optimists already have policy influence [and so it’s especially important for people who care about the long-term future to fund researchers from other viewpoints as well].”
I’m obviously not the authors; maybe they did mean to say that you and Toby Ord should stop trying to influence policy. But that wasn’t my first impression.
I’m also surprised by how strongly people feel about this term! I’ve always thought techbro was a mildly insulting caricature of a certain type of Silicon Valley guy
Thanks for writing this up! I’m excited about the project and agree with most of what you’ve written.
One point of uncertainty that you’ve touched on but would be good to clarify: do you see The Altruist as news for the EA community where well-founded criticism is published, or do you see it as a place for improving the community’s public reputation?
As an extreme example, would you publicly report if you found out someone was embezzling money from an EA organisation, even if the organisation wanted to handle it quietly to save its reputation?
A lot of this comments are at their heart debating technocracy vs populism in decision-making. A separate conversation on this topic has been started here: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/yrwTnMr8Dz86NW7L4/technocracy-vs-populism-including-thoughts-on-the
Strong upvoted. You took a relevant debate in EA (including what was being debated in the comments of the other post) and clearly defined and explained both sides in a way that shows why there’s members of the community have different intuitions.
Completely agree!
Interesting, I was thinking the opposite! I was thinking, “There’s so many interesting specific suggestions in this paper and people are just caught up on whether or not they like diversity initiatives generally and what they think of the tone on this paper, how annoying.”
The other people who were good fits but weren’t hired might do something less impactful over the next two years, but I think it’s still unclear whether their career will be less impactful in the longer term. There are lots of jobs with quality training and management that could teach you a lot in the two years you would’ve been a campus specialist. I would encourage everyone who’s applying to be a campus specialist to also apply to some of those jobs, and think carefully about which to pick if offered both.
Some things you could try:
-Testing your fit for a policy/politics career
-Learning the skills you’d need to help run a new EA megacharity
-Working or volunteering as a community organizer