I am an Australian with an entrepreneurial spirit based in Barcelona. I have a background in linguistics and English teaching, but now I’m doing community building for our EA Barcelona city group and really enjoying it. I’m also a music artist, producer and video maker on the side.
Melanie Brennan
Karma: 141
This post made my day (to be fair, it’s only 7:40am, but whatever, I doubt anything else can put such a big smile on my face in the remaining 15+ hours).
Great article, Centre for what now? 😀
Thanks a lot for this useful overview, Grace!
Thanks a lot for sharing this refreshing take on explaining EA concepts to a broader audience (without necessarily mentioning “EA” itself) - appreciate it!
Thanks for your comment, Laura! Children Change Colombia doesn’t have a connection with EA as far as I know. However, one of our members felt an affinity for the charity and wanted to support them with her video. But in order to avoid further confusion, I’ve asked the author of this post to remove it from the list of EA-aligned charities. Thanks!
Successfully voted for all videos linked above! And a big thanks to you Felix for coordinating our collective efforts to get EA charities votes for another year running!
This is really impressive and inspiring to see! Big congratulations to the team for your hard work in putting together what seems like a highly impactful conference :) Looking forward to seeing how EA Nigeria continues to evolve.
Purpose-driven entrepreneurship: How to maximize your social impact
I would agree with Rebecca here. In my case, attending my first EAGx dramatically changed the course of my career (I’m now doing community building professionally), and if I hadn’t attended, I think there’s a fairly high chance that I’d now be in a totally different non-EA related career, and most likely a less impactful one (but that bit’s harder to measure, of course). In comparison, I attended EAG London this year, which was my second in-person conference. And while it was a really great experience all round—I learned a lot, made a lot of useful connections & strengthened old ones, and also gave (hopefully useful) advice to others—it was definitely less impactful than my first EAGx in terms of how much it directly affected my career path.
Congratulations on achieving some very impressive results with Carreras con Impacto, and with great female representation too! It would be interesting to read a follow-up report in 6-12 months to see what the more long-term impact of the program has been.
Keep up the great work! :)
What a great initiative!
Just a quick question regarding this:
Phase 2: Community members receive funds (Aug 20)
We’ll give everyone $100 to donate; more if you’ve been active in the EA community. Fill out a 2-minute form to claim your $100, plus bonuses for:
I’m writing this on August 20th—is it too late to claim the $100? If not, where is the 2-minute form you mentioned that we need to fill out? Thank you!
Thanks for writing up this concise summary, Tristan!
I second the advice from the 2-hour cocktail party :)
Or her/them? Good leaders don’t have to be male.
Done! Thanks a lot, Ben, for bringing this opportunity to our attention and explaining how to navigate the survey. Fingers crossed for a positive outcome for Scottish chickens <3
Edit: It took me around 15 minutes to read through the main points of the forum post and complete the survey (I only did the pages on Animal Welfare, Public Policy, Further Comments and About You). The survey website is very easy to navigate.
Wonderful! Many thanks :)
Oppenheimer & the world’s deadliest weapon: A discussion on nuclear risks
Very well written and eye-opening post, thanks Will!
Something I’d be really excited to see, and that I think would be really useful for community builders when doing outreach/speaking to people very new to the movement:
Information flow:
Someone could create a guide to what EA is, in practice: all the different projects, and the roles they fill, and how they relate to one another.
Someone could create something like an intra-EA magazine, providing the latest updates and featuring interviews with core EAs.
Someone could take on a project of consolidating the best EA content and ideas, for example into a quarterly journal.
Thanks Neil, I’ve left some suggested changes (mostly just additional questions I found worked well) in your doc :)
Hi again! We finally did it ;) Your discussion questions were really helpful, thanks again for sharing them. I’d also love to make a few suggestions to them, if possible?
I’m super excited for P4A 2024!
Idea for community builders: Try to get a group of your community members together so you can all film your videos at once, followed by a fun activity. It reduces the overall time each person spends on filming and makes the process much more collaborative and enjoyable, as well as amplifying your impact significantly. We are going to do this with some members of EA Barcelona this weekend and I’m feeling much more motivated than last year when I just filmed at home alone.
Vamos a por ello!
Thanks for sharing this, James. I haven’t read the book yet, so what I’m about to write is based on following RB and MA’s activites on Linkedin, looking at the MA website and talking to someone who attended one of their online onboarding sessions. So please take some aspects of my comment with a grain of salt.
As an EA city group organiser, I think what would be helpful for me (and likely for other community builders) is guidance on how to position our work in light of the new MA movement. I’m hopeful that the two can co-exist and even amplify one another. You’ve mentioned that several of MA’s co-founders have roots in the EA community (including one who co-directed EA Netherlands), which I personally find really encouraging.
However, I do feel some concern around the intentional distancing from EA (for PR reasons we assume), particularly the decision not to publically disclose the close ties between the two, the pretty blatant repackaging of the ITN framework under a new label (SSS—I found the third S—“sorely overlooked”—a bit of a stretch!), with no mention as to the origin, the omission of 80,000 hours and now, (from what I’ve heard), the recent promotion of Effective Giving without mentioning GWWC, etc. It’s my worry that all of this, from a local community building perspective, has the potential to create real friction.
For example, I can imagine a Moral Ambition Circle starting up here in Barcelona. If we from EA Barcelona try to connect or collaborate, we may be met with confusion, or worse, even suspicion. People might say, “What’s that you say? You’re part of another movement doing almost the same thing? But with a way worse reputation? Why should I believe you given that there’s no mention of EA on the MA website, etc”. That lack of transparency could lead to mistrust, even if our intentions are aligned.
Anyway, I’d really love to hear your thoughts on how to navigate this emerging dynamic in a positive and constructive way, especially in terms of messaging and collaboration with MA. Thank you!
Update: I have since finished the book. Overall, I really enjoyed reading it, and agree that it’s essentially EA repackaged for a broader audience, which I find genuinely exciting. After finishing it, I felt a renewed, strong motivation to continue striving to build a better world.
At the same time, the lack of explicit acknowledgement of EA’ obvious influence still feels quite off to me. In fact, “influence” is too weak a word—it’s clear that this book probably wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for the groundwork of EA. Others have said that Rutger speaks positively about EA in different contexts, so I can’t help but wonder: why not use this book, which looks likely to reach a huge new audience, to improve EA’s optics, rather than reinforce outdated criticisms? Like, he mostly critiques EA for being too “nerdy,” too focused on earning to give, and references SBF as a warning against extreme utilitarianism (fair), but to me it sounds like he got a bit put off by “old EA” and stopped updating his view on how the movement has expanded over the past few years.
Some things also come across uncomfortably close to plagiarism for my liking (maybe this is too deontological a stance for many people on this forum, but I believe in giving credit where credit is due). For example, the SSS model is essentially a copy of the ITN framework, but he doesn’t acknowledge that anywhere. He dedicates a full chapter to Charity Entrepreneurship and how amazing it is, without once mentioning its strong ties to the EA movement. Then later, in his one chapter where he mostly criticises EA, he says “oh, btw, remember that awesome organisation I mentioned before? That was founded through the EA movement—now, moving on...”, as if it was so… incidental. He’s clearly very impressed by Joey Savoie (fair) but Will MacAskill, Toby Ord and others don’t get much praise (unfair). And, the most serious omission in my opinion, is that 80,000 Hours isn’t referenced at all, except in a couple of footnotes, despite the book’s entire premise (and, in particular, the introduction) basically echoing 80k’s core message i.e. “You have 80,000 hours in your career. Why not use them to make a difference?”
So, while I’m still overall very excited about MA and the new energy/talent it could bring into our work and shared mission, I’m still concerned about the pretty serious lack of attribution and the strategic distancing. I think it could make it harder for us to build bridges and create a shared, transparent narrative between these two clearly very aligned communities.