I’d like to devote my career to serving the world and its inhabitants. Currently working to reduce the suffering of farmed animals. I’m interested in many EA topics in general and always happy to connect to like-minded and non-like minded individuals ;)
SofiaBalderson
Karma: 1,285
Thanks Richie for reading and your comment! I do agree with you—I think it’s worth testing what you can do and how it feels for you personally, especially if the opportunity cost isn’t very high, and if your role allows it. I’m glad I tested the “conference me” with back to back meetings all three days, because I know that while useful, it isn’t sustainable for me and my role at this time. I think I benefitted a lot from it, but with the number of conferences I go to now I probably can’t do it :)
Thank you Sarah, and we appreciate yours and your team’s work too :)
Thanks for sharing and glad you feel better! I had a very similar experience recently. I also agree that the right therapist can make a big difference. My coaching was with Overcome. https://www.overcome.org.uk/ I don’t have depression but I had pretty severe anxiety. Interestingly I also had spirals but with consistent help they are gone and it is easier and easier to deal with setbacks, which for a leadership role was big game changer. What I found most useful about my new coach is not any specific techniques they used (it was a mix of ACT and CBT which work really well on me) but the fact that they had experience and understanding of what my role is like (charity founder) and what it’s like to be an EA trying to make an impact. Also my coach has a similar cultural background to me which was a cherry on the top!
I’m voting for charities that have the biggest room for funding considering the impact the want to make. I am also prioritising meta charities, because they are less likely to receive votes due to most people supporting direct work, while meta charities are important for us to grow as a community.
I’m one of the founders on those stats and Overcome has been essential to my mental health this year. We had a lot of changes this year and I had to learn a lot, which was tough at times. As a result of my sessions with Overcome I’m thriving even though I’m increasingly doing much more challenging work, my charity is doing very well and I do think a lot can be attributed to Overcome’s support. I think their services should be accessible to the whole EA and adjacent community. I was so happy with my sessions we promoted it to whole Hive community and over 100 farmed animal advocates signed up, which says something. Mental health is the foundation of impactful work! Thank you John and the team!!!
Really interesting post Lizka—thanks a lot for writing and your reflections! I found the criticism parts quite useful. The reaction from Ben about your mistake is so wholesome—it’s definitely the kind of manager I aim to be! Running a community myself I found moderation surprisingly hard too. It seems very minor but the actual emotional experience of moderation turned out to be much bigger than I thought it would be. It can take days to resolve and comes out of nowhere—a very online community specific experience. Definitely can relate! Thanks for all your hard work on the Forum and good luck with your next role!
Thanks so much for organising and very much looking forward! Shared with our whole community :)
You are right, Dean! Thanks a lot for your comment and for reading. I think this is a very valuable perspective that folks should consider.
In hindsight, I would have had more money if I invested it into the stock market rather than just saving it. That’s probably one more mistake I’ve made as an early professional, haha!
I’m quite risk averse when it comes to money and investing, so this played into it, but also I was told that if there is a chance I may need this money in the next 5-10 years, the gains from investing are less likely to outperform the highest interest instant accounts (but they still can, just less likely due to the possibility of a crash when you may need to withdraw the money). Since I was unsure how long I could live with my parents, I concluded investing wasn’t for me yet.
Say, if I wanted to buy a house in 2022, I would have found it gutting to have lost some money. But had I invested say, back in 2018, and kept investing until 2024, I would have had more money (which we know now but I didn’t before). I still feel like with what I knew then I was a good decision, because I slept a lot better than I think I would have if my money was in stocks.
On balance, you’re right that stock market wins over, especially if you are more likely not to need this money in the next 5-10 years and can emotionally withstands the ups and downs which I couldn’t when I was younger.
Related to this topic, I found this like for like video of buying a home vs renting quite helpful (it also includes investing as part of the comparison).
Thanks for writing this Alex, I enjoyed reading it!
I can relate to the experience of precarious funding situation. It’s definitely something to get used to, and the actual experience can vary a lot.
I think my role is somewhat similar but in the online environment. I have definitely enjoyed the variety of the role a lot and a chance to do more high level work like strategy, which seems like it’s been your experience too!
Thanks a lot for your feedback Bojan!
This was actually the intention because one of our flagship programs is our Slack space with over 2000+ advocates where messaging is the main feature. We are largely an online community, so we wanted the logo to reflect that :)
Wow love this user case study Corn, thanks for sharing! Can I quote you please if someone doesn’t like the new name? 🙃😂
What We Owe to Shrimp +1 !! In case Will needs a title for his next book:)
One for the Shrimp is one of my favourites!!
I love “The Shrimp You Can Save”. We need a new book from Peter Singer!!
thanks a lot for reading and your encouragement Brennan! This helps to get out the bubble for a bit and listen to how the work looks from the outside.
Thanks a lot for this! Do you know if there is an updated version of this?
Really great to see you are doing this! Thank you!
Hey Vaidehi, thanks a lot for reading and your questions:)
1. Of the 100 strategic pairings you did, how would you break down the impact / what was the outcome of the pairings?We have only started doing strategic connections actively in August and have a follow-up time after three months of connections, so we don’t know the outcome for the majority yet. We have a system set up that notes down the input (resource provided, short or long consultation, funding, warm introduction or others) and output (tool adopted, meaningful or impactful connection, project consolidation or extension, knowledge gained, funding/volunteering/job opportunity gained, time saved, project started, co-founder paired, other). Some of the connections we have checked on had resulted in some outcomes from the above, some had no outcome, but the data we got won’t be informative yet. It is possible that long-term the impact of these connections can change too. We are going to check in on the connections in February after the survey and report back on the data in a post.
2. how do you think the AI for animals group will benefit animals? E.g. what kind of concrete outcomes do you expect to see?
It’s hard to know at this point what concrete outcomes will arise. The most ideal would be if we were able to establish a dialogue with companies that are involved with precision livestock farming and influence them to prioritize animal welfare higher than they otherwise would have. There is usually a point in intensive farming where welfare and economic gain are opposed and we would like to be in a position to influence these tradeoff decisions. With our initiatives to have animals included in the ethics frameworks in LLM companies, we are hoping that animals will have more consideration in future applications of the LLM. One hypothetical could be if someone asked for the steps to build a highway responsibly and the LLM would be more likely to advise to find and avoid cutting through any animal migration routes. Of course, we don’t expect to be able to do this on our own. Our focus on writing about AI and animals would ideally result in others feeling motivated to work on it too so this field grows faster and we can better take advantage of this window of time where changes in AI policy are easier to make. Finally, the work we do with helping animal advocates to use AI to improve their work efficiency aims to save valuable time and money in the movement.3. do you have a user survey or feedback on the relative value of the different services you provide? How do you prioritize between different initiatives?
We haven’t done extensive user surveys yet but we have done some user interviews (35 1:1 conversations) based around the needs of the community members and have incorporated some of their feedback into our strategy and programs. We also have continuous feedback being requested through all our channels.
Initially, because we started from such a small project, we were guided mainly by the feedback on the MVP experiments we conducted (which were in turn chosen because we identified a gap we thought was worth filling). Once the MVP launched and was converted into a program, the content was largely community-driven (e.g. members requesting channels). To help us decide whether a program is worth continuing, we look at the engagement indicators such as newsletter and Slack channel views, as well as talking to community members to find out whether a service is valuable. During these conversations we sometimes find more tangible impact.
We created a weighted factor model to help us choose between different programs (with Potential Impact, cost, feasibility, neglectedness and scalability as criteria). So far the highest ranking are the AI and Animals, the Slack space, resource wiki and the newsletter, with the Forum following close (largely because of the uncertainty around us being able to overcome the “cold start”). However, this model is initial, and we will be updating it based on the results of the community survey we’ll do in February.
We always have new ideas, either from ourselves or suggested. We will also ask this question in our upcoming survey to see how impactful and/or valuable these programs are to the community members and if there is something else people would like to see.
Hey Julia and Ozzie, thanks a lot for writing this! I enjoyed reading it and agree with your points, nice to see the gaps highlighted, hopefully it will lead to more people considering and starting these projects! I actually used the gap approach to start Impactful Animal Advocacy, and we now have a very active Slack space which the readers of this forum (interested in animal advocacy) are welcome to join. The main purpose is coordination and knowledge sharing in animal advocacy, and we also have a regular newsletter among other programmes like resource databases and wikis (building these up at the moment).
Thanks Zach, I didn’t go to the conference so it’s great to read this update on the high-level thinking, opportunities and direction. Inspiring!