Master in Public Policy student at Georgetown University. Previously worked in operations at Rethink Charity et. al. and co-founded EA Anywhere.
Marisa
A Qualitative Analysis of Value Drift in EA
The EA movement’s values are drifting. You’re allowed to stay put.
AMA: We Work in Operations at EA-aligned organizations. Ask Us Anything.
EA Anywhere: A Year in Review
Deadline Extended: Announcing the Legal Priorities Summer Institute! (Apply by June 24)
[Question] Advice for getting the most out of one-on-ones
AMA: We organize EA Anywhere. Ask Us Anything!
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.
Love this post and would love to see more like it on the forum! Congrats on a successful EA Student Summit.
I especially want to emphasize this:
there are so many EAs who would genuinely like to talk to you.
In my experience, EAs are almost always super willing to provide advice to others within the EA movement, often because they’re nice people, but also because they get to help you have an impact, which helps them have an impact, so everybody wins!
As a single data point, nothing makes my day more than getting emails from random EAs. :)
[Question] Is value drift net-positive, net-negative, or neither?
Hmm. On the one hand I think these are all useful topics for an EA to know. But I don’t think it’s necessary for all EAs to know these things. I think there’s a lot of EAs who don’t have this technical knowledge, but are happy to outsource decisions relying on this knowledge (such as where to donate) to people who do. That said, I think that often leads to donating less-than-effectively (e.g. giving to whatever EA Fund appeals to you personally, rather than rationally thinking about trade-offs/probabilistic outcomes).
I guess this is, in part, a big-tent vs. elite EA trade-off question. If EA is best as an elite movement, it makes sense that all the members should have this knowledge. But if we want to take an “everyone has a place in EA” approach, then it might not make sense to have a central curriculum.
Also, I don’t think we want everyone in EA to have the same skillset. EA isn’t, in my view, a single professional field, but perhaps more like a company (although this is probably an oversimplification). If a company gave all of their employees a handbook on How to Be A Great Project Manager, it’d be helpful… for project managers. But the rest of the team ought to be rounding out skills that others in the company don’t have that suit their comparative advantage and will move the company forward. The only thing everyone at the company really needs to know is the product. Basic time management / other soft skills are also useful. I don’t think we need 100% of EAs to have a solid grounding in economics. Maybe we need ~100% of EAs to trust economics. But I’d rather have some EAs focusing on building skills like movement-building, communications, fundraising, operations/management, entrepreneurship, policy, qualitative research, etc.
Granted, I’m thinking about this from the perspective of careers, rather than being able to participate in discussions in EA spaces. To answer to that aspect of it—although I certainly think it’s possible to discuss EA without knowing about economics / statistics / decision analysis knowledge, the conversation does sometimes go in this more technical direction and leave newcomers behind. The question, then, might be whether it’s the newcomers who should hold the responsibility of learning this so that they can participate in these discussions, or if the people who are discussing things at such a technical level should adjust the way they discuss these issues to make them more accessible to a non-technical audience. I lean more towards the latter (though it depends on the context).
I’ll offer a data point: I’m not particularly motivated to post on the Forum by a monetary prize. It hasn’t led me to post on the Forum more than I ordinarily would. I am somewhat interested in social rewards, but the karma feature seems to do that better than the Forum Prize.
Also, as someone who doesn’t read every single post on the Forum, I also find the Prize useful for highlighting what content is actually worth reading, but again, I think highlighting posts based on karma instead (with or without a monetary prize) would work just as well.
If the Forum Prize does continue, I do think there should be separate categories for professional researchers and “amateurs.”
Not academic or outside of EA, but this Forum comment and this Facebook post may be good starting points if you haven’t seen them already.
I agree that CEEALAR (I’m pronouncing it see-uh-lar, almost like CLR, in my head) looks a little odd and might be hard to remember the acronym for. But I also agree that to get charitable status, dropping “hotel” was probably a good choice. A lot of nonprofits in the US use “house” (e.g. Covenant House) to give more of a charitable vibe. “EA House” already sounds less for-profit, though maybe less distinctive since EA houses are all over the place. Also, Centre gives me think tank vibes, which may or may not be what you’re looking for.
If you’re tied to the name, I’d recommend dropping the first E to make it CEALAR (Centre for Effective Altruism Learning And Research) to make it more pronounceable, aesthetic, and brief.
Overall, names are hard, and I’m not sure if it’s worth stressing as people will probably keep informally calling it the EA Hotel as is.
Props for putting in the work to keep this organization alive and well. It’s a wonderful asset to the EA community. :)
I definitely agree that religious outreach is a neglected but promising area of EA community-building.
I think a big part of what makes reaching out to religious groups at least somewhat promising is that a lot of them are already trying to do good. If we focus EA outreach on the general population, or most other subpopulations that EA currently focuses outreach on, you’ll likely have some people who care about doing good, and others who have different motivations. But in many religious spaces, an obligation to help others is already at the heart of what they do. And it’s a lot easier to sell EA to someone who already agrees that we have an obligation to help others as much as possible. Of course, different sects and individual religious communities have varying degrees of commitment to service and doing good, but I would imagine there’s some research already available on which groups are most oriented towards doing good (and if not, this is certainly doable research).
Also, from anecdotal experiences from friends and ex-colleagues as well as my own personal experience, I know a lot of agnostic/atheists who are involved in religious groups because they’re looking for a community, and often more specifically, they were looking for a community oriented towards thinking deeply about the world’s truths and/or doing good in the world. I think EA groups would fulfill this need for a lot of people (and perhaps relieve them from having to pretend to believe something they don’t in exchange for social support).
[Question] What’s the evidence for and against modern psychiatry?
I’ve been thinking about this also so I’m glad to see this post!
Anecdote: I’ve been talking to friends and family about COVID-19 since late January/February, and started my first attempts at social distancing towards the beginning of March. In these first few days, a lot of my (non-EA) friends seemed to think this response was an overreaction. Later on, a lot of them came around to say, “wow, you were right,” which I’ve tried to use to point some more credibility towards EA.
Some not-fully-formed ideas I have about this:
I think there’s an opportunity, once this begins to resolve, to hopefully get some media attention and say something along the lines of “there’s a community of people who were thinking about this before it happened, and who are thinking of other possible threats. Here’s how you can help.”
I also think that we might see an influx of young not-currently-EAs interested in helping address future pandemics, but I suspect a lot of them will be drawn to becoming doctors and nurses. So perhaps some publicity for these careers and/or a talent pipeline for biosecurity careers might be useful.
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 :)
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.