Coach & AI Safety Field Builder, currently working on aisafety.berlin and exploring a match-making service idea (early stage, not yet public)
Formerly director of EA Germany, EA Berlin and EAGxBerlin 2022
Happy to connect with people with shared interests. Message me with ideas, proposals, feedback, connections or just random thoughts!
I’m sure you had no bad intentions with this, but including a “buy a $100 ticket” offer to a fictional lottery with your actual PayPal link on an April Fools joke seems.. unnecessary maybe? Also, more importantly, a missed opportunity for Rickrolling :)
Btw, Karl Lauterbach, the former German minister of health, has mentioned “effective altruism” in a press conference as a framework to help justify covid measures during the pandemic. If one of Germany’s top ~10 politicians (at the time) can risk that, you can too ;)
Consider that, in addition to doing nothing yourself, you can also discourage others from doing anything.
Write a nit-picky critique, say something vague like “I don’t you should do this” without any further explanation, defer to authority.
We need to ensure that no-one does anything if they’re not at least 98% confident that they’re the world’s most qualified person to do the thing.
I think you made a mistake here, let me correct:
> Doing things is not your comparative advantage. Someone else would could do it better.
It doesn’t matter if none of the better suited people are actually doing it, just the fact that they could do a better job is sufficient to sit back and relax. If you want to do more, you could write a forum post arguing that ‘someone should do this’ and let the universe take care of the rest.
I really appreciate April’s Fools Day!
We’re so focussed on epistemic rigour and all that jeez that I sometimes forget how funny we can be, and I’m really glad we made April Fool’s a tradition to have an outlet for that, at least once a year (wouldn’t mind more often to be honest).
Speficially, I like all the posts, especially @Emma Richter🔸 ’s spicy Centre for Effective Altruism Is No Longer “Effective Altruism”-Related, and the new forum features like new “😁-react” the cheerful lightbulbs that show up when pressing any button:
Can we keep that please?
This is easy to say now, but what if we run out of low-hanging cherries to pick?
I didn’t read your comment either, it just randomly occured to me that I should change my “anonymous feedback form” to “positive feedback form” and maybe add an extra “negative feedback form” that won’t forward submissions to my email.
I like how spicy this is.
I really appreciate everyone working on EA movement building anyway, and I would hope everyone takes a moment to consider how much they’ve benefitted from the EA movement, how much they’ve contributed and how they feel about the balance.
Many movements get worse over time. They grow, at some point the first scandals inevitably happen, some great leaders and communicators decide to reduce their affiliation, the public image gets lower quality, this makes it harder to get new leaders and communicators on board, etc. I’m glad we’re not there yet, I still meet many inspiring people at EAGs or local EA meetups, but the risk is real, and if EA dies I don’t see which other movement could fill that gap.
Many thanks to CEA and other EA community builders for all your hard work, and [edit] to people who don’t hide their EA affiliation and keep publicly advocating for the movement and the ideas.
Great update! To further reduce PR risks, CEA should also stop doing anything controversial and keep doing everything people expect it to.
Be inclusive, welcome everyone, don’t try to ‘control’ the EA brand in any way, and take full responsibility when a few of the ~10,000 active EAs says or does something bad in the name of EA. Grow the movement and keep it as pure as the early days. Prioritize the highest expected value programs and treat all cause areas equally.
(this is obviously exaggerated, but you get the point. Kudos to CEA for navigating all these hard trade-offs so well!)
“Long group hike” sounds fun! I’d vote for New Zealand, the nature there is gorgeous. If flight costs are prohibitive, maybe we can use 80k’s new platform to find birds suitable for transportation.
I appreciate that you actually listed 1042 birds on jobs.80000hours.org. This might be the most searchable bird directory out there? This might revolutionize the bird recruitment industry.
FYI I asked a similar question and here an 80k staff replied in more detail. I also think it might be worth it if any other org (Probably Good maybe?) finds it worth their time.
Thanks for the amount of detail and suggestions!
The trifecta might work if enough people are also aware of the other job boards (maybe worth linking somewhere in your job board?). It might also be relatively easy to scrape jobs from all three boards to combine them in one cause-neutral job board, but that seems only worth it if enough people actually check that job board, e.g. if it was linked on effectivealtruism.org or maybe School for Moral Ambition or other high traffic websites etc.
I won’t look into this further but if anyone else here reading this wants to take this on, I’m happy to support if I can, just email me.
I actually linked this exact article at the bottom of the post, for those more ambitious. Great minds think alike! 🙌 :D
Will this affect the 80k job board?
Will you continue to advertise jobs in all top cause areas equally, or will the bar for jobs not related to AI safety be higher now?
If the latter, is there space for an additional, cause-neutral job board that could feature all 80k-listed jobs and more from other cause areas?
Sorry to hear you found this saddening and confusing :/
Just to share another perspective: To me, the post did not come across as insensitive. I found the tone clear and sober, as I’m used to from 80k content, and I appreciated the explicit mention that there might now be space for another org to cover other cause areas like bio or nuclear.
These trade-offs are always difficult, but as any EA org, 80k should do what they consider highest expected impact overall rather than what’s best for the EA community, and I’m glad they’re doing that.
Curious if you have better suggestions for forecasts to use, especially for communicating to a wider audience that’s new to AI safety.
Thanks for the transparency! This is really helpful for coordination.
For anyone interested in what 80k is deprioritizing, this comment section might be a good space to pitch other EA career support ideas and offer support.
There might be space for an organization specifically focussed in high school graduates to help them decide whether, where and what to study. This might be the most important decision in one’s life, especially for people like me who grew up on the countryside without really any intellectual role models and are open to moving abroad for their studies.
I’m unlikely to prioritize this any time soon, but if anyone else wants to set something up, I might be able to advice and maybe help fundraise, support etc, just message or email me (contact on linktr.ee/manuelallgaier)
PS: If you can share, I’d be curious to hear where this new retreat center will be located and when it will open. I imagine quite a few readers here might be curious about Tantra as well. Is there a way to sign up to be notified when you guys launch?
No worries if you cannot or don’t want to share more yet.
I feel like mainstream people like EA until they understand the implications and are faced with their first trade-off for who to help. To keep them engaged, maybe the new CEA could skip the prioritization part and just focus on making people feel better about their initial cause.