Yeah I agree that some talented teenagers don’t want to engage with material targeted at their age group.
I try not to use the word teenager on the site (there may be some old references), and write basically as if it’s for me at my current age without assuming the knowledge I have.
But I’m not at all sure we’ve got the tone and design right – I’d appreciate hearing if anyone finds any examples on the site of something that seems condescending, belittling, or unempowering etc..
Thanks for the great summary!
For effective altruists, I think (based on the topic and execution) it’s straightforwardly the #1 book you should use when you want to recruit new people to EA.
I really liked the book, and think it’s an important read for folks early in their EA journey but I want to quickly say that I disagree with this claim. The book “doesn’t actually talk much about EA”, so it’d be surprising if it was the best introduction to a field. Statistics is a useful field for understanding and contributing to social science, but it’d be surprising if it was straightforwardly the #1 book to recommend to someone wanting to learn social science.
I imported them into RemNote where you can read all the cards. You can also quiz yourself on the questions using the queue functionality at the top. Or here’s a Google Doc.
If someone was interested in adding more facts to the deck, there are a bunch in these notes from The Precipice. (It’s fairly easy to export from RemNote to Anki and vice versa, though formatting is sometimes a little broken.)
Is there a way to show my appreciation for an edit?
Often I see excellent edits[1] to the Wiki show up in my Forum homepage, and I would like to be able to show my appreciation to someone[2]. Ideally with low effort and without otherwise adding any value.
Is there a like/upvote button for Wiki edits I’m missing?
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[1] For example, check out how much information this article on iterated embryo selection is collating and condensing. It was written a few months ago, and is now Google’s featured snippet for iterated embryo selection (a sign that Google ‘thinks’ it’s the best, succinct summary of the term).
[2] To be honest this is so frequently Pablo or the EA Wiki Assistant (I think also Pablo?) that I should probably just send a DM.
This is such a useful public good. Thank you!!
Thanks for writing this!
Just wanted to let everyone know that at 80,000 Hours we’ve started headhunting for EA orgs and I’m working full-time leading that project. We’re advised by a headhunter from another industry, and as suggested, are attempting to implement executive search best practices.
Have reached out to your emails listed above—looking forward to speaking.
Peter
I think I’d find them helpful, though it’s hard to say for sure. As one data point, I’m currently at an extremely basic level of learning javascript, and I find Codecademy’s quizzes useful (as well as the project-based learning, which might be cool to replicate for EA but would take a lot of work).
FWIW the quizzes are by far our most popular feature amongst users I’m doing interviews with.
Re: making them optional. It’s possible this would be better, but if a user wants to skip a quiz they can very quickly give a dummy answer, which is an ok user experience so I’m not prioritising looking into it.
One way I’m worried we’re getting things wrong is getting the question difficulty right for more users. I think the early lessons might have questions that are too easy, and later lessons don’t build enough on each other, so there’s no scaffolding. I think we’ll prioritise working on that soon. Another feature I’m hoping to build is more quiz interaction types (from cloze and drag-and-drop on the faster end to build to open text grading on the more difficult end).
I really like this framing and we’ll update it to something like this soon. Thanks!
Great article, thanks Carrick!
If you’re an EA who wants to work on AI policy/strategy (including in support roles), you should absolutely get in touch with 80,000 Hours about coaching. Often, we’ve been able to help people interested in the area clarify how they can contribute, made introductions etc.
Apply for coaching here.
It’s great to see more funding for meta initiatives, so thank you for your work on the MCF!
and we will welcome similar applications as the last round, especially “giving multipliers” that help grow the pie of effective donations.
Could you say more about your circle’s reasons for focusing on giving multipliers? I’d be especially curious about why you might focus on donations instead of multiplying other resources like human capital.
(Maybe answered in the first question) What is the object-level cause prioritisation of circle funders?
I think it’s a tradeoff between an easier question to create a success spiral, and a challenging question to spark curiosity. But you might be right that the first question is a bit too easy though – we did also get similar feedback on this question recently.
What do you think of the proposals in Longtermist Institutional Reform? If you’re supportive, what should happen at the current margin to push them forward?
Thanks for writing this up! It’s very useful to be able to compare this to census data. Did you use the same/similar message for everyone? If so, I’d be interested to see what it was. This sort of thing would also be useful to a/b test to refine it. There is also the option to add people manually, bypassing the need for admin approval; did you contact these people too?
Thanks! I’m the author of most of the concepts on Conceptually, and also the founder of Non-trivial. I’ll send you an email. :)