Apart from 80k, do you know if the other organisations have had few applicants to these jobs or lots of applicants but no-one good enough?
Richard_Batty
Karma: 318
In response to b, I think that’s true for the 80k job. I decided not to apply for the 80k job because it was WordPress, which is horrible to work with and bad for career capital as a developer. Other developers I spoke to about it felt similarly.
But this isn’t true of all of the jobs.
For example, the GiveDirectly advert says “GiveDirectly is looking for a full-stack developer who is ready to own, develop, and refine a broad portfolio of products, ranging from mobile and web applications to backend data integrations. As GiveDirectly’s only full-time technologist they will be responsible for developing solutions to the organization’s most challenging technical problems, and owning the resolution from end to end.”
When I unsuccessfully applied to Wave it similarly sounded like a standard backend web development job, not WordPress or tying together google sheets.
In addition to AGB’s point about the forum data, the EA Hub map in its default zoom state shows 746 in Europe, 669 in Eastern US, and 460 in Western US.
For the EA survey in its default zoom state, you get 298 in Europe, 377 in Eastern US, and 289 in Western US.
I agree that changing the framing away from meetings would be good, I’m just not sure how to do that.
Do you fancy running a virtual party?
Video calls could help overcome geographic splintering of EAs. For example, I’ve been involved in EA for 5 years and I still haven’t met many bay area EAs because I’ve always been put off going by the cost of flights from the UK.
I’ve considered skyping people but here’s what puts me off:
Many EAs defend their time against meetings because they’re busy. I worry that I’d be imposing by asking for a skype
I feel bad asking for a skype without a clear purpose
Arranging and scheduling a meeting feels like work, not social
However, at house parties I’ve talked to the very same people I’d feel awkward about asking to skype with because house parties overcome these issues.
The ideal would be to somehow create the characteristics of a house party over the internet:
Several people available
You can join in with and peel off from groups
You can overhear other conversations and then join in
There are ways to easily and inoffensively end a conversation when it’s run its course
You can join in with a group that contains some people you know and some people you don’t
The start time and end time are fuzzy so you can join in when you want
You can randomly decide to go without much planning, and can back out without telling anyone
Some things that have come closer to this than a normal skype:
The complice EA study hall: this has chat every pomodoro break. It’s informal, optional, doesn’t require arranging, and involves several people. It’s really nice but it’s only in pomodoro breaks and is via chat rather than voice.
Phone calls and skypes with close friends and family where it’s not seen as weird to randomly phone them
Maybe a MVP would be to set up a google hangouts party with multiple hangouts. Or I wonder if there’s some better software out there designed for this purpose.
I’m not sure if this discussion has changed your view on using deceptive marketing for EA Global, but if it has, what do you plan to do to avoid it happening in future work by EA Outreach?
Also, it’s easy for EAs with mainly consequentialist ethics to justify deception and non-transparency for the greater good, without considering consequences like the ones discussed here about trust and cooperation. Would it be worth EAO attempting to prevent future deception by promoting the idea that we should be honest and transparent in our communications?
This may just be the way you phrased it, but you talk about spreading “EA and earning-to-give” as if earning-to-give is the primary focus of EA. I’m not sure if this is your view, but if it is, it’s worth reading 80,000 Hours’ arguments on why only a small proportion of people should earn to give in the long term.
Given these arguments and the low salaries in Russia, it might be better to concentrate on encouraging other sorts of effective altruist activity such as direct work, research, or advocacy. And there may be some altruistic work that is easier to do in Russia than in other countries. Unfortunately I don’t know enough about Russia to suggest anything, but I’m sure you’d have some good ideas.
I can understand why we should care about climate change (because of the impact on humans) but I’m confused about what the purpose of environmentalism that focusses on preventing destruction of natural habitats is. Here are some possibilities:
Ecosystems with less human interference are intrinsically good, so we should save and increase them
Biodiversity (whether that’s species diversity, genetic diversity, ecological diversity) is intrinsically good and so we should prevent reductions in biodiversity through e.g. species extinction
The welfare of wild animals matters so we shouldn’t harm them through e.g. by destroying their habitat
Relatively undisturbed natural areas provide humans with beneficial things—i.e. ecosystem services
These are very different purposes that would lead to us optimising for very different things, so I think it’s important to clarify what the end goal of an effective environmentalist would be.
If I were to evaluate these different possible end goals, I would think:
1 and 2 don’t make much sense to me because I mainly value the happiness (and avoidance of suffering) of humans and animals. 3 could actually go against environmentalism because of wild animal suffering. 4 seems to fit in with the rest of EA well. Could have implications for poverty and global catastrophic risks.
Here are a few data sources for finding cities with a culture or sub-culture that has EA-potential:
Rankings of startup hubs: http://blog.compass.co/the-2015-global-startup-ecosystem-ranking-is-live/
Inglehart-Welzel cultural map using World Values Survey data—EAs would probably fit in best in high self-expression, high secular-rational cultures.
Places where digital nomads tend to congregate. My comment here contains a list of some top digital nomad hubs.
That makes sense, you’re not preventing your own moving by doing the analysis as you have other reasons for not moving yet.
Can I suggest an amalgamation of our approaches then:
Phase 1: Exploration. In this phase, those that can move in the next 4 months move to a location that would be good for them and try to join together with other EAs in doing this. They also try to explore more than one location and report back their findings to the whole group. Those that can’t move that soon but are interested in the idea can contribute through online research. Everyone can help those who are interested in moving with location choice.
Phase 2: Clumping. In this phase, we take the findings from phase 1 and choose one (or a few) standout locations to concentrate on. We encourage more people to move there, including EAs that have gone to other locations.
Phase 3: Community-building. Once we’ve got a group of > 15 people we can start to invest in community-building projects such as coliving and coworking spaces and outreach to the local community.
Each of these phases is useful even if it doesn’t progress to the next phase.
This approach gets the early adopters moving and gathering useful information whilst also creating the seed group effect that could attract more people in the future.
I agree that you have to do some thinking in advance—you have to choose at least one place to go. However, I don’t think this is a very hard a choice for someone to make because the digital nomad scene has already identified a handful of good places. From my reading of recommended places in digital nomad forums, here are the places that stand out for cutting your living costs whilst doing remote internet-based work if you are from a Western country:
Chiang Mai, Thailand
Ubud, Bali, Indonesia
Medellín, Colombia
Prague, Czech Republic
Budapest, Hungary
Las Palmas, Canary Islands, Spain
There are only a few of them, and personal preferences will play a big role in which of them each person would prefer. Each person who is seriously interested in being part of this project can choose the location that’s best for them from this or similar lists, and then report back about how it’s going once they’re there.
My plan is to go to one of the European locations this summer. And if it doesn’t work out, I can always go somewhere else.
https://teleport.org is another source of data on which cities to move to, similar to nomadlist.
I’m glad you’re doing work on this—it’s a potentially very valuable project. I think we could go about it in a different way though. There’s a risk of analysis paralysis in trying to find the optimal location in advance so that we can commit to something as big as buying and converting property. Instead we could just find the people who are likely to move somewhere cheaper in the next few months (I’m one of those people) and see if we can do it together. We might also want to drop the framing of it as ‘A new EA hub’ at this stage because that makes the task seem big, important, and intimidating. Let’s just experiment with some locations and see how it goes. We’ll learn something about living abroad and we’ll be able to observe existing coworking and coliving setups to see what works.
Yes, Sam is very good at meeting new people and getting them excited about EA. And already in his spare time he’s achieved a great deal with EA London.
Augur (http://www.augur.net/) - a decentralised prediction market.
Your suggestions are good and we can imagine doing them in the future, but I think we should prioritise the research problem for reasons I’ll explain.
For your matching developers with projects scenarios (e.g. conference or prizes), they would make sense if:
We already knew what the most effective software projects were
There was an undersupply of software developers taking them up, perhaps because they didn’t know about them
We think that there is some truth in this—it’s hard to find lists of tech orgs of any type, and there aren’t many lists of tech orgs that plausibly have a high positive impact. However, I don’t think we’re anywhere close to knowing what the most high impact software projects or organisations are. We are planning to publish a list of altruistic tech organisations, although we’ll be unable to prioritise them until we have made more progress on research.
There’s an analogy with early 80,000 Hours or GiveWell here. Early 80,000 Hours could have put all its effort into promoting what it thought at the time was the best way to have impact—earning to give. As we’ve found out, this would have been a mistake. By focussing on research they’ve developed much better advice than ‘everyone should do earning to give’.
Similarly GiveWell or Giving What We Can could have just picked a few charities that on the face of it seemed high impact and then worked on finding donors for them. If they’d done this and then stopped researching, they probably wouldn’t have found the options that they have now, nor would they be as credible for donors.
On running informal meetings:
This could have a couple of purposes:
Matching people with orgs or other people so they can work on important projects
Getting people talking about high impact tech so that we can make progress on working out what tech is high impact
I’ve addressed point 1 already. On point 2, I don’t think meetups or conferences are the best way to make progress. The questions we are trying to answer are very difficult and I don’t think people informally talking will cause much progress to happen.
Imagine if EA had started with some people asking ‘How can we have the most impact?’ and then instead of setting up organisations like GiveWell and 80,000 Hours, they had immediately concentrated on community, running conferences and meetups. I think we might have ended up like the conventional ethical sector—lots of people doing things and lots of ideas, but not much progress on prioritisation.
A stronger version of this option would be a more formal structure. There could be a forum (in person or online) for dedicated people to try to make progress on these questions. I think this could be a good option although we’d need to think about how to keep quality high.
I read Givewell’s ‘Science policy and infrastructure’ proposal but I don’t see how it relates to our project. What kinds of software regulation might we lobby politicians to change?
I’m a little unclear on what your project involves, could you email me at richard@goodtechnologyproject.org and we can talk further.
I agree that this can be a problem. I’ve previously found myself demoralised after suggesting ideas for projects only to be immediately met with questions like ‘Why you, not someone else?’, ‘Wouldn’t x group do this better?’ I think having a cofounder helps greatly with handling this. It’s also something that founders just have to learn to deal with.
In this case though, I think Gleb_T’s question was good. We explicitly asked for feedback and we wanted to get questions like this so that we were forced to think through things we may not have properly considered. On a post like this, I’d rather have lots of feedback and criticism so that we know where the potential weaknesses of the project are.
I’d suggest the heuristic: If you’re friend is enthusiastically telling you about a new idea, hold off on criticism for a while whilst you help them develop it. If someone asks for feedback, or if you’ve been discussing the project for a bit longer, give the most useful feedback you can, even if it’s negative.
Thanks for your comments about the benefits of staying independent.
Thanks for asking this as it’s made me think more carefully about it.
Partly it’s separate just because of how we got started. It’s a project that Michael and I thought up because we needed it ourselves, and so we just got going with it. Given that we don’t work for 80,000 Hours, it wasn’t part of it.
But the more important question is ‘Should it become part of 80,000 Hours in the future?’ We talked to Ben Todd from 80,000 Hours and asked him what he thought of the potential for overlap. He thought it wasn’t an issue as 80,000 Hours doesn’t have time to go in depth into technology for good. I think if we became a subproject of 80,000 Hours, it would harm them because they’d have to spend management time on it and they should focus instead on their core priorities. It’s costly to build our own brand, but I think it’s better than disrupting an existing organization with an experimental project outside their own priorities. We can also find other ways of cooperating short of merging. I imagine 80,000 Hours will want to use our research if it becomes good enough, and we will want to talk to advisees of theirs who are interested in tech for good. We’ll also be looking for ways to collaborate with other EA orgs like .impact and the London Good Code meetup.
There are also advantages to being independent of an existing project. We can target our brand more precisely at technologists and prioritize building relationships with people and orgs in the tech community. There’s also value in thinking and researching independently of existing EA orgs because we might be able to come up with different ideas and ways of doing things.
I think there’s a good chance that we’ll look less and less like 80,000 Hours as we go on. I used to work for them, which means I’m prone to copy their way of doing things. As we go on, we might find that it’s better to have a strategy less like 80,000 Hours than it is now.
Do you think it would be better if we were part of 80,000 Hours? What would that look like?
Is it worth cross-posting this to LessWrong? Anna Salamon is leading an effort to get LessWrong used again as a locus of rationality conversation, and this would fit well there.