Tee

Karma: 684

Personal Strategist & Coaching Trainer

More on how the coaching training & matchmaking went
More on my coaching trials with a dozen EA leaders

Reach out @ teebarnett.com!

I’m a co-founder and current board director of Rethink Charity (RC), a project collective that launched and/or incubated several EA community building projects, including Rethink Priorities, RC Forward, the EA Hub, the EA Survey, EA Giving Tuesday, and fiscal sponsorship for numerous startup EA-aligned projects.

RC Projects that have since closed down include Students for High-Impact Charity, the Local Effective Altruism Network and Rethink Grants.

Tee 17 Jun 2016 18:27 UTC
7 points
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on: Help SHIC Get Off The Ground
Very much appreciate the ringing endorsement, Tom. Anyone interested in discussing the project, please feel free to reach out at tee@highimpactstudents.org

Tee 29 Sep 2016 18:16 UTC
0 points
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on: Students for High Impact Charity: Review and $10K Grant
Thanks Peter Hurford for putting in the time and effort to make this process more transparent. I think it’s a great service to the EA community at large, and of course, we’re elated to be able to continue bringing effective charities to students around the world

Tee 30 Aug 2017 15:42 UTC
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in reply to: Peter Wildeford’s comment on: EA Survey 2017 Series: Distribution and Analysis Methodology

Those are the people who took the Donations Only version.

We thought this would streamline things, but it’s not entirely clear that it’s worth doing for 2018

Tee 30 Aug 2017 15:50 UTC
4 points
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in reply to: ClaireZabel’s comment on: EA Survey 2017 Series: Community Demographics & Beliefs

I think it would be useful to frontload info like 1) the number of people to took this vs. previous surveys, 2) links to previous surveys.

Thanks for bringing these to our attention, Claire. I like both of these ideas. This post will be updated to include the former, and the latter will be included in all subsequent posts for ease of navigation.

I think I would also prefer mildly strongly if all of the survey results were in one blog post

We decided to go with a multi-part series because the prior survey ended up being an unwieldy 30+ page PDF, which likely resulted in far less engagement. As I said above, in all subsequent survey posts we’ll link to the previous articles for ease of navigation.

But is seems like this post doesn’t include information that was requested on the survey and that seems interesting, like race/ethnicity and political views.

This is probably an oversight on our part. It’s likely we will revise the article to include some or all of this information very soon.

I would recommend changing “improving” to “increasing”, since I don’t think the opinion that increasing the proportion of people in EA that is religious is universal.

+1, will edit that. The first handful of posts will be more descriptive, but you can expect future ones to inject a bit more commentary

Tee 30 Aug 2017 15:54 UTC
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in reply to: kbog’s comment on: EA Survey 2017 Series: Community Demographics & Beliefs

I don’t think there is a difference between a moral duty and an obligation.

I’m not entirely sure that I would agree with this. I’m supposed to be publishing more survey content on the Forum at the moment, so parsing this out may have to wait, but obligation to me feels relatively more guilt-driven, and being duty-bound seems to invoke a more diverse set of internal and external pressures

At any rate, if it’s not clear here, it’s certainly not good as a survey question.

In 2015, there were more than 2000 respondents, right? Does this mean EA is getting smaller??

Could be! May also be indicative of year-on-year survey fatigue though. We’ll be revamping the survey for 2018 to make it a better experience in general

Tee 2 Sep 2017 20:20 UTC
4 points
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in reply to: Buck’s comment on: EA Survey 2017 Series: Cause Area Preferences
09/02/17 Update: We’ve updated the truncated graphs

Tee 2 Sep 2017 20:23 UTC
2 points
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on: EA Survey 2017 Series: Cause Area Preferences
09/02/17 Post Update: The previously truncated graphs “This cause is the top priority” and “This cause is the top or near top priority” have been adjusted in order to better present the data

Tee 5 Sep 2017 12:17 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Tee’s comment on: EA Survey 2017 Series: Cause Area Preferences
09/05/17 Update: Graph 1 (top priority) has been updated again

Tee 5 Sep 2017 12:17 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Michelle_Hutchinson’s comment on: EA Survey 2017 Series: Cause Area Preferences
09/05/17 Update: Graph 1 (top priority) has been updated again

Tee 5 Sep 2017 12:19 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: CalebW’s comment on: EA Survey 2017 Series: Cause Area Preferences
09/05/17 Update: Graph 1 (top priority) has been updated again

Tee 5 Sep 2017 12:40 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Michelle_Hutchinson’s comment on: EA Survey 2017 Series: Cause Area Preferences
Hey Michelle, I authored that particular part and I think what you’ve said is a fair point. As you said, the point was to identify the Bay as an outlier in terms of the amount of support for AI, not declare AI as an outlier as a cause area.

The article in general seems to put quite a bit of emphasis on the fact that poverty came out as the most favoured cause.

I don’t know that this is necessarily true beyond reporting what is actually there. When poverty is favored by more than double the number of people who favor the next most popular cause area (graph #1), favored by more people than a handful of other causes combined, and disliked the least, those facts need to be put into perspective.

If anything, I’d say we put a fair amount of emphasis on how EAs are coming around on AI, and how resistance toward putting resources toward AI has dropped significantly.

We could speculate about how future-oriented certain cause areas may be, and how to aggregate or disaggregate them in future surveys. We’ve made a note to consider that for 2018.

Tee 5 Sep 2017 12:54 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Michelle_Hutchinson’s comment on: EA Survey 2017 Series: Cause Area Preferences
I’ve also updated the relevant passage to reflect the Bay Area as an outlier in terms of support for AI, not AI an outlier as a cause area

Tee 10 Oct 2017 17:26 UTC
3 points
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on: The Hidden Cost of Shifting Away from Poverty
Additional data on EA shifts in cause area preference: http://effective-altruism.com/ea/1fi/have_ea_priorities_changed_over_time/

Tee 17 Nov 2017 17:13 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: Peter Wildeford’s comment on: EA Survey 2017 Series: How do People Get Into EA?
I agree, this is something we acknowledge multiple times in the post, and many times throughout the series. The level of rigor it would take to bypass this issue is difficult to reach.

This is also why the section where we see some overlap with Julia’s survey is helpful.

Tee 9 Dec 2017 19:25 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: HenryStanley’s comment on: 2017 LEAN Impact Assessment: Quantitative Findings
Richenda will have more insight on this than me, but my understanding is that when the qualitative report comes out, we will see that some of those who do have a website find it incredibly useful and it would absolutely be a disservice to pull the plug on that.

We’re erring on the side of a ‘targeted revision’ of what we provide so that our services only go to those who are most effectively using them

Tee 4 Jan 2018 20:12 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: number42’s comment on: 2017 LEAN Impact Assessment: Qualitative Findings
Absolutely—but re-Richenda’s point about deliberations at a higher level, the Hub is one of many resources we provide, and we want to make sure every donation we receive is most impactful.

Even an earmarked donation for this purpose is not a straightforward proposition. Take the decision to potentially integrate with the CEA platform as a hypothetical. If we were to spend $300 - $1k tweaking the Hub, and then had to double back (likely to change the coding language) once we decided that linking up with the CEA platform is most effective for the community, we may have wasted considerable resources.

Tee 7 Mar 2018 17:38 UTC
4 points
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in reply to: Ervin’s comment on: Announcing Rethink Priorities
Thanks for asking Ervin. Were we to scale this project according to our estimates, we would need additional funding. There are also some small gaps in Rethink Charity operations that we’d like to fill. Talks are ongoing with CEA about additional funding either through their Grants or Funds programs

Tee 12 Mar 2018 19:54 UTC
6 points
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in reply to: Ervin’s comment on: Announcing Rethink Priorities
Ben West asked this question in the EA Facebook group late last year, and I believe EA Funds has updated since then: https://www.facebook.com/groups/effective.altruists/permalink/1606722932717391/

It’s not clear what the optimal amount of funding for resurrecting LW should be, but according to the EA survey (run by Rethink), LW had been a top source for introducing people to EA until recently: http://effective-altruism.com/ea/1h5/ea_survey_2017_series_how_do_people_get_into_ea/

Qualifying this by clarifying that I’m the ED of Development for Rethink Charity – I would say the lineup of projects offered by Rethink (SHIC, LEAN, RC Forward and Rethink Priorities, EA Survey) should be among the most competitive funding options for community building, especially considering our reach and impact on a comparatively low budget: https://rtcharity.org/monthly-donor-briefing-03-2018/
What links here?
- Ervin's comment on How to improve EA Funds by HenryStanley (4 Apr 2018 22:58 UTC; 18 points)

Tee 14 Mar 2018 16:38 UTC
19 points
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on: EA Survey: Sexual Harassment Questions—Feedback Requested

I interested Tee Barnett and Peter Hurford in adding sexual violence questions to the survey. Therefore sexual violence definitions need to be created.

Thanks for your dedication to this issue. I’m compelled to point out that that briefly speaking about a particular issue in an informal manner should not be seen as an endorsement on behalf of myself or Rethink Charity.

Tee 15 Mar 2018 15:39 UTC
6 points
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in reply to: Tee’s comment on: EA Survey: Sexual Harassment Questions—Feedback Requested
In response to the comment that was deleted below, we do not intend to ignore this issue.