I just looked at the application for the role of content specialist for CEA, which seems to involve a lot of working on this forum.
I noticed that if one indicates they have been personally referred by someone âinvolved in effective altruismâ, one is given the option to skip âthe rest of the applicationâ - which seems like the majority of the substantive information one is asked to give.
This seems overtly nepotistic, and I canât think of a good reason for itâcan anyone give one?
Should be fixed now, thanks for highlighting.
Thereâs EA VRâtheyâre listed as inactive but I think thereâs some activity in their discord. Look forward to seeing you around and feel free to ping anyone with âEAGather Stewardâ in their name for a tour :)
Iâm not sure about this particular case, but I donât think the value of the property increasing over time is a generally good argument for why investments need not be publicly discussed. A lot of potential altruistic spending has benefits that accrue over time, where the benefits of money spent earlier outweighs the benefits of money spent laterâas has been discussed extensively when comparing giving now vs. giving later.
The whole premise of EA is that resources should be spent in effective ways, and potential altruistic benefits is no excuse for an ineffective spending of money.
It seems like setting ourselves up for selection bias if we take listen only to people with experience with âhow bad journalism getsâ. We also want to get advice from people with good experiences with journalism, because they might be doing things that make them more likely to get good experiences, and presumably know about how to continue to go about having good experiences, having gotten them.
There may be some parts of EA where the media donât start out nicely inclined to the area at hand, but I think on many topics we might care to engage with the media on, they likely would start out neutral or positive on anything.
We might take the points here with more weight if they are from someone with extensive experience, but a lack of experience doesnât invalidate the reasoning here.
I think it would be better if agree/âdisagree voting didnât follow the typical karma rules where different users have different amounts of karma. As it stands I often donât know how many people expressed agreement vs. disagreement, which feels like the information I actually want, and it doesnât make intuitive sense that one forum user might be able to âagree twice as muchâ as another with a comment.
Perhaps youâve seen these things already if youâre thinking about having kids, but Julia Wise and Jeff Kaufman have written about their decision to be parents and their experiences parenting extensively. The stuff I could find that addresses the question of making the decision:
Thanks for writing this post! I think promoting diversity in EA is incredibly important and I appreciate your contribution to it.
However, I get a feeling here that youâve started with an underlying assumption that âEA should cater to womenâ, which I donât see the argument for. Certainly, if thereâs a stark lack of women throughout EA, Iâd feel that thereâs a problem that needs to be specifically addressedâbut I donât think this is the case.
You present information about the academic fields that correlate with participation in EA, and note that thereâs a gender disparity that matches the one we seem to observe in EA. To me, this seems like evidence that there isnât a problem within EA, but a result of broader, more complicated dynamics elsewhere. On the other hand, the other demographic data you present on other minorities seems like a more significant issue.
For instance, the rest of the 80k article you cite is clear about the fact that the framework isnât applicable to everyone, and I think the choice of whether to have children is just one of many possible reasons the framework might not strictly apply to a person. And while demographic data shows that the work of having children affects women disproportionately, non-women who intend to parent would also need to consider the same unanswered questions.
Because of these dynamics, I donât think that the claim youâve made here, that more resources should be directed in a way that addresses the gender disparity, is substantiated.
Iâm curious to hear from where youâve gotten the sense that the EA community uses a âmale-default positionâ - Iâve never felt this.
(As a side note, if you havenât heard of them, thereâs magnifymentoringâpreviously WANBAM)
Thanks for this! It wouldnât have occurred to me to consider the decline of footbinding as a case study of moral progress,
I think youâve probably noted this and perhaps didnât mention it because itâs not directly relevant to the main questions youâre investigating, but I think itâs important to note for someone who only reads this post that having bound feet was a status symbolâit began among the social elite and spread over time to lower social classes, remained a status symbol because families who needed girls to conduct agricultural labor could not partake in the practice, and in practice an incentive to do it was to increase marriage prospects.
A suggestion that might preserve the value of giving higher karma users more voting power, while addressing some of the concerns: give users with karma the option to +1 a post instead of +2/â+3, if they wish.
Oh I see, thanks! - I didnât realise this because the statement that appears after indicating youâve been personally referred is: âSince you were referred to this position, the rest of the application is optionalâ which makes it sound like it wouldnât be optional if you werenât referred.