Master in Public Policy student at Georgetown University. Previously worked in operations at Rethink Charity et. al. and co-founded EA Anywhere.
Marisa
Karma: 856
Very valid! I guess I’m thinking of this as “approaches EA values” [verb] rather than “values” [noun]. I think most if not all of the most abstract values EA holds are still in place, but the distinction between core and secondary values is important.
Good catch, thank you!
I made this so I could easily link all the posts on this but then I realized they’re almost all here: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/4mWxEixs5RZ8DfCKe/annotated-list-of-project-ideas-and-volunteering-resources Feel free to delete!
99% Invisible had a podcast on this that I found really interesting. The scale of the problem must have gone completely over my head. Great write-up!
That makes sense though I feel like this still applies. It’s still not great optics to pay lots of money to people working on global poverty, but it’s far from unheard of and, if there’s concrete evidence that those people are having an impact then I think a lot of people would consider it justified.
I think the reason it’s acceptable for AI researchers to bring in large sums of money is more because of the market rate for their skillset and less because of the cause directly. I think if someone were paid a high salary to build complex software that solved poverty (if such a thing existed) I would guess that that would be viewed roughly equally. On the other hand if you pay longtermist and/or global poverty community-builders lots of money, this looks much worse.
Maybe I’m misunderstanding this but I disagree. I think the average person thinks spending tons of money on global health poverty is good, particularly because it has concrete, visible outcomes that show whether or not the work is worthwhile (and these quick feedback loops mean the money can usually be spent on projects we have stronger confidence in).
But I think that spending lots of money on people who might have a .000001% chance of saving the world (in ways that are often seen as absurd to the average person) is pretty bad optics. A lot non-EAs don’t think we can realistically make traction on existential risk because they haven’t seen any evidence of traction. Plus, longtermists/x-risk people can come across as having an unfounded sense of grandiosity—because there are a whole bunch of people out there who think their various projects will drastically transform the world, and most people won’t assume that the longtermist approach is the only one that’ll actually work.
Is the source of this graphic public? This affected my perspective a lot and it’d be great to have a clean copy. :)
This is fantastic, thanks for writing this up! I’ve been hearing a lot about federal consulting (it seems to be one of the most common careers people pursue after an MPP) so it’s helpful to see an analysis from an EA perspective. :)
Very cool! A few companies have taken the Giving What We Can pledge.
Just found this now, thank you for putting it together! I’d never thought about this before.
In case anyone else is curious I dug into Polish citizenship by descent. It looks like the main requirements are (a) someone in your family had citizenship after 1920, (b) the chain of citizenship isn’t broken, i.e. you can’t become a citizen if neither of your parents are, and they can’t become a citizen if neither of their parents are, etc. and (c) no one in that chain was adopted, involved in the military (including signing up for the draft), in a publicly funded job (including teaching), plus maybe a few more exceptions.
This is great! I’ll add a personal endorsement for GregMat. I actually found it quite enjoyable and it bumped my verbal score up 8 points.
I totally understand your concerns. FWIW as a former group organizer, as the Torres pieces were coming out, I had a lot of members express serious concerns about longtermism as a result of the articles and ask for my thoughts about them, so I appreciate having something to point them to that (in my opinion) summarizes the counterpoints well.
There is! Linked it in the last point now too, thanks!
Actually in the very early days of EA Anywhere, I toyed with the idea of having a separate student sub-group in part for this purpose (and for university students without EA groups). I dropped it partially for capacity reasons and partially because there didn’t seem like much demand for it, but I’d be excited about this being part of our expansion with our new organizer.
I see EA Anywhere as a good supplement to small groups. While we advertise as “a local group for people without local groups”, I think it makes a lot of sense to also work with group organizers and members from groups that are too small to warrant larger events, or with organizers that are too time-poor to run events often.
I also think this could fit well into the local group incubation pipeline we’ve considered. There’s a cycle that’s hard to break out of with small groups—if an event is so small that it’s not valuable, then less people come, then it gets smaller, then it’s even less valuable, etc. (Of course small events can be valuable if the chemistry is right with the group, but that can take a long time to facilitate.) A virtual group like EA Anywhere could potentially break groups out of that cycle by bringing in more people and ideally creating more interesting discussions from that.
Having graduated from university just before the pandemic I don’t have a sense of how interested students will be in Zoom meetings and the like in future years, which is one uncertainty I have, but I think it’s unlikely that this will be a major issue.
Agree with Sami’s comment below. Virtual events are certainly a good way to get people from more isolated parts of the region engaged, but if 90% of the attendees already know each other from in-person events, that may be even more isolating. I suspect this is fairly easy to mitigate though if the organiser is conscientious about it.
It might be worth connecting them with other virtual communities too. Besides us, there are lots of virtual groups popping up (Giving What We Can, EA for Christians, EA for Jews, the EA Hispanic group, EA Consulting, Effective Animal Advocacy, etc.) which might be good for getting people engaged if your group doesn’t run virtual events very often. (FWIW they are also very welcome to get involved with EA Anywhere—we have some members in metro areas of local groups but who are just too far away to come to most in-person events.)
I think a lot of this will also be case-by-case depending on where the person is in their EA involvement, and a lot of those rules won’t be that much different from engaging someone who’s not in an isolated area. It’s mostly a matter of making sure the usual pathways through “the funnel” are accessible to them, even if they aren’t able to attend in-person events.
I started to write a more thorough response to this but realized I was essentially copying Rethink Priorities’ post on Ballot Initiatives, which covers a lot of EA causes with high leverage at the local/state level.
Two popular EA causes that I think are missing:
Climate change interventions
UBI (difficult, but not impossible to enact at the state level in the US because states can’t deficit spend. See Alaska as an example)
I had similar concerns about our Operations AMA recently. It wasn’t wildly popular, but we got 7 questions and I still felt like it was a good use of my time. Several people in the group said they really enjoyed it and would be interested in doing another one, and I liked it enough that I’m planning to do another AMA for one of my other projects as well.
I’ll also mention that it’s a (relatively) low-effort way to create content (and get karma, if you care). I often feel like I should post to the Forum more but either don’t feel like I have anything worth posting, or don’t have the time to write anything out, but the nice thing about AMAs is that you don’t have to come up with a novel topic that fits neatly into a typical EA Forum post, and the standard for quality as far as formatting/organization/etc. is lower.
The only downsides of posting that I see is time spent on creating the post (I estimate we collectively spent about an hour on this, though I think you could do a less detailed one in 15 minutes), and I suppose the possible embarrassment of not getting asked any questions, but I think this is unlikely (I don’t think it’s ever happened on the Forum), and you can always delete the post if you’re really concerned about that.
FWIW I think you’d be well-suited to do an AMA :)
How can experienced EA groups best provide organizational support for new/small ones?
I consider myself a new organizer so I don’t have much to add here other than a) one-on-ones, and b) sharing systems etc. that work for you (e.g. for tracking attendance, advertising, workshops). I think every new group is going to have different questions and different needs so I suspect there’s not a one-size-fits-all formula, which is why I think one-on-ones with organizers can be especially helpful, since you can gauge their bottlenecks and help brainstorm solutions.
What relatively low-cost things can leadership do, if any, that go far in improving new team members’ (especially volunteers’) morale/engagement/commitment/initiative?
A few things come to mind:
1) Be an understanding, compassionate human. It sounds easy but I (and I think many others) actually suck at this once you bring important projects with deadlines into the mix. If someone doesn’t do things on time, it’s easy for me to get frustrated with them, but as a student leader I wish I would have reached out to people who were dropping balls and actually tried to work with them to see where they were at and how I could help rather than assuming they were lazy or disorganized. This sounds higher-cost but I think it actually saves time in the long-run if you can set up your team members to run things themselves without management having to pick up all the dropped balls.
2) Provide channels for feedback (and actually act on it). Whether that’s a time during your meetings, a channel in Slack, or an anonymous suggestion box (physical or virtual), I think one of the biggest morale killers is built up resentment about a thing being done less-than-optimally when no one seems interested in fixing that thing.
I think it’s worth noting that from my experiences in volunteer management, I expect to have a certain number of people who join and then drop-off/ghost after a while. (For me it’s almost exactly 10% within the first month or so each time, and then the number goes towards 25-50% over a year depending on the situation.) This is completely normal, especially in university as people go on to explore other clubs or take on internships or get hit with heavier coursework. Don’t stress over these people: it’s better for them to be honest with you about their commitments than to push them to take on more responsibility than they have time for.
Update: We’ve extended the deadline to apply for LPSI to June 24. If you think you might be a good fit, we’d love to see your application!