This course seems valuable. Thanks for sharing!
I could see this being an inspiring resource for EAs who struggle with imposter syndrome (myself included), especially when paired with posts like seven ways to become unstoppable agentic.
This course seems valuable. Thanks for sharing!
I could see this being an inspiring resource for EAs who struggle with imposter syndrome (myself included), especially when paired with posts like seven ways to become unstoppable agentic.
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.
Thank you for pointing this out Lorenzo—I’ve removed the link from my comment.
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.
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.
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.
This is fantastic! Props to the Type 3 Audio and EA Forum team.
Quick question regarding accessibility:
I’m aware EA Forum posts can both:
Customize the alt text of an image
Provide captions to an image
Is this information included in these audio narrations?
Hi EAlly,
It seems like there are numerous questions to unpack here. If I’m understanding you correctly, it seems like you’re generally curious about how others have sought to increase their impact through an EA lense, given a background in IT. Is that right?
If so, I think your questions might be better answered by searching for, reaching out to, and scheduling informational interviews with people working at the intersection of EA and IT. I previously came across a helpful framework for doing this sort of thing here: [Webinar] The 2-Hour Job Search—YouTube
From one generalist IT person to another, would it be helpful to hop on a call to discuss your uncertainties? https://calend.ly/quinnpmchugh/meet
While I may not have a lot to offer in terms of career guidance, I can certainly relate to your position. My background is in mechanical engineering, but I currently do a mix of IT, operations, project management, and software engineering work. Professionally, I am interested in moving into project management full-time, but am also very interested in leveraging my IT skills to improve the movement’s overall coordination and intellectual diversity through projects like EA Explorer.
Based on this realization, am I right to assume you are no longer interested in coordinating this book club?
I came to the same realization after discussing it with a few members of our local group, but given my interests in animal advocacy, I think it’d be personally valuable for me to engage with.
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.
Great list, Kyle! Thanks for sharing. :)
I wasn’t aware of The Life You Can Save’s Helping Women & Girls Fund until I read your post. It’s wonderful to know something like this exists.
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.
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!
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.
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!
Hi Rakafet,
Welcome to the EA Forum!
I never knew the Abstinence Violation Effect had a name—I think that’s something I’ll have to add to my lexicon. :)
While reading through your post, I was having a bit of trouble understanding your arguments and, the evidence behind why you think this intervention is particularly important and neglected.
If I’m understanding correctly, your argument is:
More funding should be directed towards providing vegan food to soldiers, who experience difficulties maintaining a vegan diet. By providing this support, we could reduce the likelihood of soldiers falling victim to the Abstinence Violent Affect and abandoning their vegan diet altogether, which could affect ~4000 animals over the span of a given soldier’s life.
Would you say that’s accurate?
Hi David,
Memex.garden seems very similar to what you’re describing.
I recently came across this great introductory talk from the Center for Humane Technology, discussing the less catastrophic, but still significant risks of generative large language models (LLMs). This might be a valuable resource to share with those unfamiliar with the staggering pace of AI capabilities research.
A key insight for me: Generative LLMs have the capacity to interpret an astonishing variety of languages. Whether those languages are traditional (e.g. written or verbal English) or abstract (e.g. images, electrical signals in the brain, wifi traffic, etc) doesn’t necessarily matter. What matters is the events in that language can be quantified and measured.
While this opens up the door to numerous fascinating applications (e.g. translating animal vocalizations to human language, enabling blind individuals to see), it also raises some serious concerns regarding privacy of thought, mass surveillance, and further erosion of truth, among others.
https://www.quinnmchugh.net/blog-micro/llms-as-translators
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. ;)