I’m a medical doctor, co-founder of EA Denmark, and author.
I recently concluded a research project on biosecurity at Stanford and the CDC and I’m now looking for impactful ways of furthering the EA community.
I also care a lot about cultivating and allocating altruistic talent via personal development and education. Some years ago, I wrote a book on effective learning and worked as a lecturer where I created a course on the topic for medical students.
Thanks for the resources!
3. I’m aware of the cluelessness but I don’t think that we as a community act as if we’re clueless. At least, we prioritize a relatively narrow set of paths (e.g. 80K’s priority paths) compared to all of the possible paths out there.
4. Very interesting. Clearly, others have thought much more about the complexity of this issue than me. Nuno’s post was rather insightful and the examples used made Shapley Values seem more intuitive to me than counterfactual impact. However, the discussions in the comments made it less obvious that Shapley Values is what we should use going forward. Do you use Shapley values when thinking about your personal impact contribution?
One shouldn’t include failure-mode thinking in the brainstorming part. However, while defining the project (prior to voting) it can be useful to talk about the failure-modes. E.g. prior to voting on our project on how to offset one’s climate impact we specified that we should be careful about letting it develop into a project which also focused on how people can offset the animal suffering they induce.
That seems like some good takeaways. However, I’d expect that other groups (with more resources) can come up with more impactful projects than those you’ll find in the project ideas.
As for your three-dimensional tool:
How do you determine who the leader of a given activity should be? Also, I think it could be useful to include worst-case scenario/failure-mode thinking.
Thanks for the post! I’ve two questions:
Have you been concerned with how having one paid member of your Org could affect the volunteerism of the rest of the members? E.g. that there will arise a hierarchy which will keep “regular” members from taking on certain type of projects or feel as if they have less of a say in various decisions.
Could you elaborate on the metrics you intend to use? E.g. by “the funnel of 80k” do you then mean their significant plan changes or how many of your members receive personal coaching from them? Also, how do you track the donations made to GWWC/EA Funds?
Thank you for sharing! It seems pragmatic and I find it likely that it’ll make my reading more focused and productive—I’ll definitely try it out.
Yes, that’s why I find my initial reasoning unnuanced. Upon slightly further reflection, it seems obvious that his wealth and dedication have enabled a lot of good initiatives and I frequently see initiatives crediting Gates.
However, would you break that impact further down? Some quick approaches that I can think of:
i) Simply use the heuristic of money pledged ~ impact (“wow, that’s a lot of money. That has to be super impactful”.)
ii) Look into the causes supported in order to adjust the donations to the impact of actual causes supported.
iii) Go with the heuristic of if we have repeatedly heard someone (or something) being credited for his/her impact, then he/she must be very impactful.