Hi Akash, awesome that you’re doing this! 👏🏼 I’m working on putting together reading groups & curated lists [removed the link as it’s currently being edited]
mlc
Misconception: There’s tons of people working in all these important areas.
Reality: Once you start meeting people, you’ll realise that most areas have surprisingly few people giving a significant fraction of their time to them. And people are liable to spread themselves over multiple topics or switch to new things, so you can quickly become one of the “main people” in an area just by sticking around for a bit.
-Ben Snodin
“There is more scholarly work on the life habits of the dung fly than on existential risks.” Nick Bostrom
I’m helping with creating a central platform connecting funders, talent, ideas, and advisors. Let me know if you’d like to be involved or are interested in more infos on it!
Excellent overview
Including a “country” column might be valuable, especially for the national orgs (or including the location in [brackets] next to the name)
You might be able to embed a sheet view directly on the forum (maybe just a static csv file/table, dynamically showing updates on the original spreadsheet, or fully interactive)
I think there’s an incredible opportunity right now for mid-career people to do really exciting, rewarding, and high-value work with incredible colleagues in a great working environment.
This doesn’t have to mean switching to full-time EA work straight away. Smaller experiments are possible, like learning about an area of interest, or doing consulting or part-time work.
If you’re a mid-career EA lurker, don’t wait for permission! Get in touch with 80,000 Hours for free career coaching, or with organisations / individuals you might want to work with. Start working on impactful and rewarding projects!
-Ben Snodin
Agreed, I was thinking about this as well, among other things to encourage action > inaction (might calm some peoples’ fears of sharing their thoughts on the forum).
I could imagine newly submitted posts to go through an initial preliminary period of, say, 1 week. During that time they could be marked as “newly submitted” / “recent” / or similar, which makes it clear that larger changes could still be made, and encourages others’ feedback (this might even increase total post engagement). This is the period in which most interaction happens, so most obvious issues can be made aware of and corrected. After that week it could for example be “reposted” as its more or less “final” version. Or the author (or an algorithm) decides if that is needed based on e.g. the post’s similarity to its original version.
I was just wondering about the existence of such a project. Fantastic that you’re taking initiative! There are many old posts still holding contemporary relevance that might benefit from such “revivals”. Suggestions:
Maybe a title like “LW Post (Revival) Club” might be more accessible?
You could also think of connecting this to the book club/s to gain more traction there, since this represents a large overlap and is essentially the main target audience.
This seems obvious, but putting an 80⁄20 effort into some promotion might really be worth it/a deciding factor for this project’s success or failure (e.g. putting it up on the EA newsletter)
Thanks for pointing that out!
Thanks, Pablo! I replied to Michael’s message underneath with some examples of how personal development could be structured.
empty tag: now I feel inclined to write a post on productivity :p
One of the main reasons for people’s objection to working in this field is that it’s so speculative and unexplored. This is precisely why we need more exploration. Your contribution here could really make a difference.
Productivity
Serene moment in midst of all the chaos. Thank you for sharing.
“Productivity” is indeed included in the description of the personal development tag. However, I do believe/agree that this is a really big and important category that could be broken down.
Spending a couple of seconds thinking about this, I’d come up with the following suggestions:
-productivity
-mental health
-physical health
-systems
-meditation
-learning
-self-help
-PD services
-PD experiments
-spirituality.
The more severe and urgent the problem, the more resources we should be allocating to solving it. AI Safety is arguably one of the most imminent problems of our lifetime. It is also one of the most neglected areas, with about 150 full-time people currently working on it. We need you.
more distillations, yay! 🥳
the Distillation Contest, is now open to any student enrolled in a university/college
could you organize this to also include people that aren’t enrolled students?
Thanks for the great source, Richard! I intentionally didn’t include a description of how to best go about contacting people, as this post was more or less directed at more established orgs that have direct access to recruiters. However, after posting this and receiving messages from interested individuals/smaller orgs, your contribution comes in really handy!
If anyone is interested in more detailed information about contacting and/or being connected, please reach out!
Thanks for the explanation.
other thoughts: Abram’s decision theory and Vanessa’s infrabayes work might be good for distillation. Also, might be worth thinking about some type of collab with current distillers, such as Robert Miles or Mark Xu, and the site distill.pub?
Hi there! Sorry for the late reply. I was also planning on joining tomorrow. Thank you and see you soon!
Seems to me like EA Houses is doing that. What problem would the slack channel be solving that EAH isn’t?