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!
Thanks for sharing your story when we met in Berlin and writing this up! I saved it to read later.
This made me think of an EA friend of mine, who spent a year after high school doing voluntary military service in Switzerland before embarking on his altruist (later EA) career. IIRC he found it helpful to learn discipline and grit early on in his career. I feel like focus, discipline and grit might be underrated skills in our current time of abundant distractions, and the military might be one of the best places to learn this. Other jobs in a high stress environment with supportive colleagues might also work, such as top management consulting firms, or multi-day silent meditation retreats like Vipassana. Not sure how well each translates to better focus at (EA) jobs.
Curious if you have any thoughts on this!
I’d love to read high quality critiques of this, especially the suggested timeline and likelihood. If you know any, please share!
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 first choice.
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 say or do 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
Yep, he occasionally shared memes in that group but left it a while ago.