I would really like a narration of new EA Organization Updates, and the EA Newsletter! For most posts I skim them first in order to check if I want to read them, but for the updates/newsletter I usually just read all of it, so that could be replaced well by audio for me.
mawa
Karma: 13
I think reading Why We Sleep is good for some people, but may be harmful for others.
If you are already convinced that sleep is really important, but find it hard to fall asleep, and therefore going to bed starts feeling aversive, then reading a lot about not sleeping enough will harm you will probably only increase anxiety, making it harder to fall asleep.
In that case, I recommend reading Say Goodnight to Insomnia by Greg D. Jacobs instead. I read Why We Sleep first, and then Say Goodnight to Insomnia, and it is remarkable how different the two books interpret findings on sleep. Jacobs basically says that it’s really normal to sleep less than 8 hours and it will probably not harm most people much. I found it really helpful to become more relaxed about sleeping, and it also has a lot of actionable advice.
We’re particularly interested in hearing about things that you, personally, would actually read // use // engage with
I would personally be excited about a filtering tool similar to the 80000 Hours job-board, that lets you filter resources for background, cause area, role type, etc. (E.g. “If your background is in economics, and you are particularly interested in animal welfare, we would recommend the following resources” )Background:
I would distinguish the different concreteness levels of career advice/career-relevant information, maybe like this:
1. General, can be applied at almost any level and job, e.g. career capital, self-care, cause-prioritization,...
2. Role-specific, e.g. specific advice for entrepreneurship, PhD, …
3. Concrete, e.g. answering the questions “What are high-impact options for someone with a background in X?” “What are possible caveats in taking up job Y?”, …
The more concrete the information, the more it depends on the specific situation of the person that benefits from it—and is therefore harder to provide for a large number of people.
In my experience however, surprisingly often there was relatively concrete information available where someone addressed just the issue I was currently thinking about. So I think there is probably a bottleneck in actually finding this concrete information. I think having a filter for resources may help with that.
Possible Downsides:
* It may be too much work to implement this, especially the classification of articles regarding their usefulness for specific situations
* It might give the reader the impression that they have read everything relevant for their situation, and thereby reduce exploring other content that would have been useful.
Thanks for writing up your thoughts on the incident and showing that much respect to both sides of the argument!
I’m a bit confused about the last parts (7. and 8.):
1. Would a rephrasing of 8. as “Some of the people who spent a lot of time having private conversations with community members think that EA should be more cautious and attentive to diversity. And some of them don’t. So we can’t actually draw conclusions from this.” be fair?
2. By whom is EA is presented as some kind of restrictive orthodoxy? So far, I did not get the impression that it is such presented.
What do you think are the main trade-offs to be made in making EA more attentive to diversity? That there are more impactful causes to invest time and effort in? Or would making EA more attentive to diversity actually have potential negative effects? Is there a good write-up of these trade-offs?
I meant just the newsletter itself, not the linked posts.