GOOD/Corps (www.goodcorps.com) is another nice resource. I’ve been in contact with them in case anyone wants an intro.
tyleralterman
Karma: 605
Also, I plan to strategize soon on shifting corporate philanthropy in a top-down way with Google’s global corporate social responsibility lead (she self-identifies as EA). (Example: sell corporate decision-makers on EA.) So let me know if you dig up anything in this arena.
Hey Jonathan, right now I’m chatting with the founder of The Feast (http://feastongood.com) to set up an international network of EA dinners. Personally, I’ve had a lot of success in using dinners as a mechanism for community building. I’m a bit at capacity between EA Ventures, EA Global, and other EA outreach work to get a lot of momentum going on the partnership. However, would you be interested in an introduction?
Here’s some of the reasoning I sent Ben Todd back in the day on the potential effectiveness of dinners: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1PGfQF9R5nJtygF_O2M6E-2Iu8an9VNhkX37xizOs1uM/edit?usp=sharing
Announcing EffectiveAltruism.org
Hi Daniel, for further reach, the X-Risk comm channels on this spreadsheet might help: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1_EH3cpHUJw052iXNI1Q_b-FgHBBNuXe_a4ZjM6uqzpU/edit?usp=sharing
Cool. Is the site targeted at people new to EA? Yup!
Maybe you could link to the EA Forum and the EA Job Board? Have a news feed containing original content, news articles, blog posts, or .impact hackpad posts? Have or link to a page of open research questions? Soon we hope to revise the “Get Involved” section to incorporate much of this.
What are GCRI’s current plans or thinking around reducing synthetic biology risk? Frighteningly, there seems to be underinvestment in this area.
Also, with regard to the research project on altruism, my shoot-from-the-hip intuition is that you’ll find somewhat different paths into effective altruism than other altruistic activities. Many folks I know now involved in EA were convinced by philosophical arguments from people like Peter Singer. I believe Tom Ash (tog.ash@gmail.com) embedded Qs about EA genesis stories in the census he and a few others conducted.
As for more general altruistic involvement, one promising body of work is on the role social groups play. Based on some of the research I did for Reducetarian message-framing, it seems like the best predictor of whether someone becomes a vegetarian is whether their friends also engage in vegetarianism (this accounts for more of the variance than self-reported interest in animal welfare or health benefits). The same was true of the civil right movement: the best predictor of whether students went down South to sign African Americans up to vote was whether they were part of a group that participated in this very activity.
Buzz words here to aid in the search: Social proof Peer pressure Normative social influence Conformity Social contagion
Literature to look into:
Sandy Pentland’s “social physics” work: http://socialphysics.media.mit.edu/papers/
Chapter 4 (“Social proof”) of Cialdini’s Influence: Science and Practice: http://www.amazon.com/Influence-Science-Practice-5th-Edition/dp/0205609996
McKenzie-Mohr’s book on Community–Based Social Marketing: http://www.cbsm.com/pages/guide/preface/
Just signed up and left a review on Amazon. Awesome idea.
This sounds awesome, and perhaps even the sort of thing we could use to assess the applications we get for EA Ventures (eaventures.org). I imagine the tough part will be acquiring and sustaining a user base of reviewers. Toward this end, you might first recruit an official board of dedicated reviewers yet still allow for anyone to leave impact estimates.
The next couple weeks are going to be serious crunch time on EA Global, but feel free to ping me about this in ~2 weeks if you’re interested in a potential EAV integration: tyler@centreforeffectivealtruism.org
How to save more lives today than in a year of earn-to-give
Mass-scraping is great when you’ve already identified the webpages to scrap from. Identifying these webpages, however, is half the battle. (We’ve already combined THINK’s list with ours, but thanks for the heads up!)
If you know someone at SER, I’d love to chat with them about what their strategy was.
Peter Buckley attempted to hire some virtual assistants from ODesk. They were way too slow. My guess would be that EAs have a much better sense of what types of groups to look for and where to find them. The task also requires a decent amount of research, which is a comparative advantage of many EAs.
Would love to get tons of VAs on this though if you can think of a better way to use them.
The difference between this and vegan flyering is that you’re already targeting groups that have already self-selected for one aspect of EA. That said, I could definitely see a much lower than .1% rate being the case. Though the cost-effectiveness still seems competitive even at a conversion rate of .01% or even .001%. That’s 10 days and 100 days, respectively, of work for a year of earn-to-give.
That said, as Peter alluded earn-to-give still seems competitive if, e.g., you’re funding that much more of this work happens. Unless, by doing the work, you’re recruiting EtGers that will fund the work. Unless… [mind explodes]
Yearly salary range (helpful for getting sponsorships in the future of EA events if the average yearly salary turns out to be high)
Thoughts on how favorably or unfavorably pursuing movement-building compares to other EA career paths?
[Discussion] What does winning look like?
Should EAs influence corporate giving?
Thanks for the comments, all! I pretty much agree with the bulk of them so far, and have added an edit to the post above.
A growing body of evidence seems to suggest that aerobic exercise is best for improving cognitive fitness.
See:
http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/16/what-sort-of-exercise-can-make-you-smarter/?_r=0
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=aerobic+exercise+cognition&hl=en&as_sdt=0&as_vis=1&oi=scholart&sa=X&ei=o2eOVOS6CtLyoASd3YFo&ved=0CBsQgQMwAA
etc