Co-founded EA Sao Paulo in 2015, and also helped the local rationality community.
Previously Co-director of EA Brazil, worked at Condor Initiative (AIS career camps), Doebem (Brazilian charity evaluator).
Leo Arruda
Karma: 207
Hi Brian, thanks for noticing it, in our case the reason is that Juana and I are currently funded as national coordinators, I’ve now added it to the reasons for having a low cost.
Hello guys. I believe I can shine a light about the state of things in Brazil.
First, about Brazil in general, it is a big tropical country (200m) with sunlight the whole year, very hot at north, cold at south (but not to the point of snowing). We are in a politically unstable moment due to enormous corruption scandals and political dissatisfaction involving both the government and the opposing parties (check the news, it is a mess), but in IMHO this won’t lead to any sort of dictatorship nor utterly compromise the economy although we are facing a depression that might last for a decade. Exchange rates are very favorable to foreign money (1 US dollar = 3.5 Brazilian real). We speak Portuguese, though I believe most upper-class and upper middle class are able to speak English. Brazil is a developing country with poverty issues (specially at the north and north-east), bad public education and tens of thousands NGOs (most of them probably not very effective though). I can’t give you a picture of the IT sector but I think it is probably growing well. We have reasonably advanced academic research in many areas including biotech but the political climate is unfavorable at the moment (some scientists are even moving to other countries). I live in São Paulo, a huge city (12m) with mild climate (10-30°C )and Brazil’s main commercial center, we have a small but growing EA community (I’d say about 8 core members plus 15 others) and meet up monthly. We are currently studying charity evaluation to check how effective are social projects in Brazil. There are also EAs in Belo Horizonte (talk to Celso Vieira about it) but I don’t think there are regular meetups there or anywhere else.
From my limited observation I think US work culture is much more result, efficiency, accountability oriented than ours. I believe this translates also in less support for EA, since people are much more prone to an emotional approach to charity. Also we are more to the left in the political spectrum on average, and people are much more prone to appeal to state intervention and social programs to alleviate poverty, they are also more open to marxist ideas and have a weaker culture of philanthropy.
About IERFH.org (Instituto Ética, Racionalidade e Futuro da Humanidade, Institute for Ethics, Rationality and Future of Humanity—Evan please correct it), I’m currently a director and we are not currently officially registered (mainly for bureaucratic reasons, although we could easily do it if it was important). We are mainly focusing on promoting rationality and transhumanism for the moment since the Brazilian EA movement is growing by itself. But of course we would be willing to help and to promote support for any EA projects.
I’m not sure how plausible and feasible it is, but I believe using AI to automate data collection, integration, and analysis could potentially streamline processes like diagnosing problems, testing hypotheses, and prioritizing interventions in GHW, at least in some domains.