Quinn McHugh (he/him)

Karma: 93

Quinn McHugh (he/him) 7 Feb 2021 22:17 UTC
31 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Kessler Syndrome in Effective Altruism
Great message and fun to read. Although I’m skeptical of your grandma’s personal fit, it certainly sounds like she has the passion to become an exceptional AI safety researcher. ;)

Quinn McHugh (he/him) 28 Feb 2021 21:12 UTC
2 points
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on: Would an interactive table help you to make donation decisions or understand the EA charity space better? If so, what filters would you want?
Hey Luke, great work thus far! Props to you and the rest of the GWWC and EA NYC team for making this data available in a user-friendly format.

I know this is a big ask, but I would love to see this data visualized in something like a sankey diagram (broken down by core cause area, sub-case area, and finally individual charity, for example). One of the things I’ve always been curious about is how under/overfunded a given charity or philanthropic fund is relative to other entities in the same core or sub- cause area (i.e. donor coordination problem), and I think visualizations like this could provide some really interesting insights to individual donors and fund managers alike.
Alternatively, providing a way to export this data to a CSV or creating an API for accessing the data could enable other people (e.g. me) to develop and share visualizations like the one described above.

Looking forward to seeing where this goes!

Quinn McHugh (he/him) 9 Aug 2021 0:47 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: cryptopsyfan69420’s comment on: (Video) How to be a less crappy person
While I think there’s some merit to the argument you put forth here, I think it discounts how much of a negative impact content that errs on the side of controversial can have on people’s inclinations towards an organization/idea/thing. Yes, controversial (i.e. polarizing) content tends to reach farther in certain circles, thereby increasing the likelihood of capturing people who were already inclined to join a given movement, but it can just as easily build opposition to a movement, which can become a serious hindrance to a movement’s community health and growth in the long-term. If you haven’t come across it, I’d recommend checking out Owen Cotton-Barrat’s “How valuable is movement growth?” for more on this idea.

Quinn McHugh (he/him) 31 Oct 2021 21:47 UTC
4 points
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on: Effective altruism merchandise to advertise the movement
I’ve thought about this as well and would love to see some more resources allocated to this area. In general, I think that visual marketing/branding is an undervalued area in the EA community, at least when it comes to movement building. That said, I’m an amateur graphic designer and EA group organizer, so I likely assign an unusually high importance to visual aesthetics.

Anyways, looking forward to joining the EA Creatives and Communicators Slack that @evelynciara mentioned.

Quinn McHugh (he/him) 20 Dec 2021 21:11 UTC
6 points
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on: Annual Reviews Aren’t Just for Organizations
Hey Kyle,
Great post and glad you found Alex’s framework useful! I used Alex’s guide as part of my annual review process last year and found many of the ideas helpful for clarifying my values, coming to terms with my shortcomings, and setting my intentions for the upcoming year.
Unfortunately, I often struggled with keeping myself accountable and love the idea of finding an accountability partner to go through the review process with.
Having gone through this exercise, it’s now crazy to me that it isn’t more commonly used. As someone looking to optimize my impact—and other areas of my life—over a period of many years, the annual review seems like an indispensable tool.
Agreed! As part of EA Philadelphia, I was planning to run a virtual workshop based on Alex’s guide in mid-January. If you have any additional resources on this topic, I’d love if you could send them my way.

Quinn McHugh (he/him) 25 Dec 2021 2:49 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Ben_West’s comment on: Ambitious Altruistic Software Engineering Efforts: Opportunities and Benefits
I think it would be cool for someone to create an “engineering agenda” that entrepreneurial software developers could take ideas from and start working on, analogous to e.g. this post from Michael.
As an early career software developer who’d love to take on an EA-related project for skill building purposes, I’d be great to have a resource like this available.

Quinn McHugh (he/him) 26 Dec 2021 18:48 UTC
2 points
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on: Have your community notified of new EA Jobs
Hi Hazelfire,
Thanks for taking the time to set this up. As a developer and community organizer, this seems like a great project to help out with. I’ll message you on the EA Public Interest Technologist Slack!

Quinn McHugh (he/him) 5 Jan 2022 15:39 UTC
2 points
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on: A Few Strategies for Increasing Productivity
Hey Sarah,
I really love the advice you’ve given here.
I frequently find myself getting enticed by the latest productivity tool or project management app and your simple but effective method of managing projects in a Google Doc outline is a nice reminder that the best tool is often the simplest one that works.
Clement Kao, an EA-aligned product manager, has some additional thoughts on effective 1-on-1s here.
Also, big fan of deliberate check-ins with romantic partners and have found framework outlined here to be especially useful.

Quinn McHugh (he/him) 20 Jan 2022 0:16 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Alex Barnes ’s comment on: [Talk Tuesdays] Learn how to make better decisions / Spencer Greenberg
Sure thing, Alex! We host these discussion groups like this every three weeks. If you have any ideas for a future discussion, feel free to let us know here: https://forms.gle/AcpD58kTbuwih9cYA

Looking forward to some productive conversation! :)
For other ways to stay in the loop, check out our Linktree.

Quinn McHugh (he/him) 23 Mar 2022 18:53 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Coleman’s comment on: EA directory of ideas
I’ve been starting to use Obsidian.md for knowledge management and am really interested in seeing how knowledge graphs (e.g. graph database platforms like Neo4j) could be applied towards improving community coordination.
Seems like we may have similar interests! Just DM’d you.

Quinn McHugh (he/him) 27 Mar 2022 14:21 UTC
3 points
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on: Paul Farmer (1959 – 2022)
Thank you for writing this. Learning about people like Farmer is hugely inspiring and the last two quotes you included made me surprisingly emotional. It really gives a sense for how deeply committed Farmer was to his work and makes me want to raise my own aspirations when it comes to improving the world.

Quinn McHugh (he/him) 10 May 2022 1:40 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Madhav Malhotra’s comment on: [Talk Tuesdays] The Changing Landscape of Climate Philanthropy
Hey Madhav, you can find the Zoom link here: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZUsc-6urDwsGtDJiUSvqTbJFiM-B7SGEPyw

Quinn McHugh (he/him) 31 May 2022 23:55 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Emrik’s comment on: [Talk Tuesdays] Career Strategies & Building Aptitudes / Habiba Islam
Hi Emrik,
My apologies. It appears the Zoom link was not copied over from our other events! We’ll be sure to double check this for any future online happenings.
Thanks for flagging.

Quinn McHugh (he/him) 11 Jun 2022 19:49 UTC
4 points
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on: Street Outreach
I’m a little confused on why this post was downvoted. It seems like the author has already done some limited research on this topic and presented a helpful summary of the findings.
I’d also be curious to hear if any non-university groups have done street outreach (e.g. public tablings) before. We at EA Philadelphia have considered this in the past, but given our limited organizer bandwidth, are hesitant to allocate resources towards this kind of outreach.

Quinn McHugh (he/him) 11 Aug 2022 2:26 UTC
1 point
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on: Book a chat with an EA professional
EA 101 questions
Hi Ben, I’m not clear what this refers to. Could this be clarified in the post?

Quinn McHugh (he/him) 23 Oct 2022 20:39 UTC
1 point
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on: How to start a blog in 5 seconds for $0
For those who prefer markdown, Docusaurus is another great option.

Quinn McHugh (he/him) 5 Jan 2023 23:52 UTC
1 point
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on: A Case for Better Feeds
Hi Nathan,
I came across your post just now and wanted to say that I tend think this kind of digital infrastructure is highly important but either undervalued or underdiscussed when it comes to movement building. I hope to write about this more in the future.
I’m currently in the process of curating numerous RSS feeds from https://ea.news/ and other sources in my NewsBlur in an effort to be more deliberate about my “information diet” and am a bit disappointed by the availability and quality of the RSS feeds I’ve found.
I only found one organization, Gain Health, that provides a dedicated page for the RSS feeds they have available: https://www.gainhealth.org/rss

For the vast majority, RSS Hub Radar was required to scrape RSS feeds from the website source with mixed results.
My hope is that other organizations in the EA ecosystem provide better ways of making their reports, publications, and blogs posts available to external stakeholders in a way that doesn’t require those stakeholders to comb through countless newsletters and email lists. Due to their interoperability, publishing a greater variety of RSS feeds and collections of different RSS feeds could satisfy this need, but I’d be curious to hear others’ perspectives.

Quinn McHugh (he/him) 11 Jan 2023 17:17 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Alex Long’s comment on: EA Houses: Live or Stay with EAs Around The World
Great thinking, @Alex Long. I think I would be much more likely (say, 5% → 35%) to reference this Google Sheet if it was migrated to a Notion database (with mapping capabilities). Up to you, @Kat Woods.
You might also be able to convert the Google Sheet directly into a Google Map, but I suspect it’d be a bit more challenging to implement.

Quinn McHugh (he/him) 28 Jan 2023 22:30 UTC
1 point
1 ∶ 1
on: Have worries about EA? Want to chat?
for me, I sometimes get disillusioned when reading the Forum, but in-person meetings or video calls make me feel SO MUCH better about our community

I can definitely relate to these feelings. Sometimes, I find the dichotomy between my face-to-face interactions and what I read here on the forum to be incredibly stark (and not in a good way). This is probably just due to the online disinhibition effect and thus I can’t say for sure whether or not the difference in magnitude between online/in-person experiences is unique to EA community.

Some related posts:
- It’s okay to leave EA
- Leaning into EA Disillusionment

Quinn McHugh (he/him) 28 Jan 2023 22:55 UTC
4 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Nico Hillbrand’s comment on: Excalidraw: Why and How to Use it
Hi Nico,

You might also want to try the recently released Obsidian Canvas. I’ve found both Excalidraw and Canvas to be phenomenal (and free) diagramming tools.

I have a list of other diagramming tools on my public Zotero library here.