Vaidehi Agarwalla

Karma: 7,090

I help lead Product at Momentum, and care about making funding for high impact causes more robust & diversified. I live in the Bay Area, advise Asia-based community builders and run Pineapple Operations. I previously worked in consulting, recruiting and marketing, with a BA in Sociology and focused on social movements. (A little on my journey to EA)

I’m always keen to hear feedback through any means. Here’s an anonymous way to share: admonymous.co/vaidehiagarwalla

Unless otherwise stated, I always write in a personal capacity.

/’vɛðehi/ or VEH-the-hee

Some posts I’ve written and particuarly like:

Advice I frequently give:

When in doubt, apply*
What Ops in EA is like
If you’re running a retreat, nail the vibes and venue
Add randomness to your conferences

Vaidehi Agarwalla 23 Sep 2022 13:47 UTC
104 points
52 ∶ 2
in reply to: Evie’s comment on: My Personal Story of Rejection from EA Global

I could be wrong, but I have a pretty strong sense that nearly everyone I know with EA funding would be willing to criticise CEA if they had a good reason to. I’d be surprised if {being EA funded} decreased willingness to criticise EA orgs. I even expect the opposite to be true.

I disagree, I know several people who fit this description (5 off the top of my head) who would find this very hard. I think it very much depends on factors like how well networked you are, where you live, how much funding you’ve received and for how long, and whether you think you could work for and org in the future.

Vaidehi Agarwalla 27 May 2022 16:06 UTC
59 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Request: feedback on my EAIF application
Hi Ariel, Thanks for sharing this document and asking for feedback publicly!
A few thoughts on your application:
General principles :
- It may in fact be better for you to spend some more time building a track record by doing a small project with very narrow goals (e.g. 1 outreach project or 1 program). Happy to brainstorm what that might be.
- In your application, I’d also encourage you to focus on just 1 minimum viable project that will help you build a track record
- It’s okay to be narrow if you’re deliberate about it, and point to the scope for expansion later. You don’t need to cover everything at once.
What I see as the most promising strategy based on your application (and my extremely limited knowledge of Romania):
- Leaning into your comparative advantage to do outreach to the tech sector (and balancing the risks of founders effects while you do so by doing targeted outreach to avoid non-tech people from being excluded—maybe by giving the project a more specific name e.g. EA Romania Tech outreach or something)
  - At the same time, I wouldn’t underestimate the challenges of recruiting in the tech sector, even if you’re part of it. I might spend more time in your application talking about what recruiting strategies you would use
- Establishing a schelling point / person (you) for EAs in Romania via monthly meetups & 1-1s
Strategy feedback :
- Right now, your application consists of too many goals and your strategy also has a lot of sub-items which I don’t think are realistic to accomplish well in 6 months. I think if you narrowed your focus and chose 1-2 goals, as well as reduced your strategy section to maybe 3-5 core activities (at most), this would be better.
- Areas to narrow or cut :
  - I don’t see obvious benefits of setting up a legal entity / NGO in Romania at such an early stage
  - I don’t know if donations are necessarily the right thing to focus on right now—if your group is producing impact, EA funders would be likely to fund it (that being said, it’s good perhaps for your org’s sustainability to have multiple donors, I just wouldn’t focus on this)
  - I’m not sure how much value a website or content creation would bring at this stage—I could imagine copying an existing group’s site and changing the language could be more than sufficient.
    Since it’s in your 1 line summary, it seems like you think this is important. If so, I’d make more of a case for it in the application.
  - It’s not clear to me how you would support students (outside of general meetups & 1-1s), maybe you could mention that you would forward them to existing resources (e.g. CEA’s UGAP program)
Feedback on the application itself (vs. the strategy)
- I would make the “what we have accomplished” section a bit more easy to understand. For example, what role did you play in getting 4 participants to EAGxPrague or the intro fellowship? Did you have 1-1 calls, encourage people to attend etc. I also wouldn’t lead with followers on social media—to me that is a vanity metric. I’d be more interested in how active your local WhatsApp group is, or if people are actively working on independent projects.
- I left a comment or two in the google doc as well.
I hope this is helpful!

Vaidehi Agarwalla 24 May 2022 0:58 UTC
57 points
0 ∶ 0
on: The EA movement’s values are drifting. You’re allowed to stay put.
Am in agreement with most of your post, except for one thing: calling these changes to our values.
The following is the beginnings of a chain of thinking that isn’t fully fleshed out, but I hope is useful. All word choices are probably suboptimal. I don’t hold the implications of these views very strongly or at all, I’m mostly trying to puzzle things out and provide arguments I think are somewhat strong or compelling.
All the things you mention don’t seem like values to me—they seem more like strategies or approaches to doing good (which
“Core” values are things like truth-seekingness, epistemic humility or maximizing impact or something, whereas for example “cause neutrality” and by extension “longtermism” are downstream of that.
But we also have “secondary values” (terrible wording) which are influenced by our core values and our worldview and specific (cognitive) beliefs about how the world works (this influence each other but are somewhat independent).
I can see a version of EA where the core values → longtermism chain becomes replaced with just longtermism as a default (just like in current EA we take the core values → helping people in developing countries chain is something of a default—I don’t think it’s very often that people come into EA strongly opposing this value set—this isn’t a bad thing—these are the low hanging fruit).
Why are core & secondary values important to distinguish?
1. People who are on board with the changes do not see the shared values as conflicting with the core values they see it as a natural progression of core values. Just like we thought that “everyone matters” leads to “donate to help improve the lives of poor people in developing countries” so too is the connection between “everyone matters” to “future people should be our priority”.
  1. Implication: people reading this post may say “this isn’t value drift”
2. I think are core values are really important and the real glue of our community, a glue that will withstand the test of time and ideally let us adapt, change and grow as we get new information and we update our beliefs.
  1. Maybe this is to idealistic, and in practice simply saying “but we share the same core values” even if true, is simply not enough.
  2. In practice, the level of secondary values can be more useful: maybe technical AI safety researchers and farmed animal welfare advocates just don’t have that much in common or the inferential distance is a bit too much in terms of their models of the world, impact, risk aversion etc. etc.

Vaidehi Agarwalla 9 Sep 2023 19:45 UTC
54 points
15 ∶ 5
on: Announcing the Meta Coordination Forum 2023
Thanks for sharing this post, this is a really positive step forward in transparency, I especially appreciated the list of attendees and description of the structure of the Forum. I like that there will be assigned owners of different projects, and I hope that outcomes of the Forum and information on initiatives that came out of it will also be shared with the community.
TL:DR;
I think that ultimately, issues pertinent to the community need to have meaningful, two way, sustained engagement with the community. I’d like to see participation from more “regular” community members as well who will add necessary and valuable perspectives to understand our community better and help improve it.
I believe there is a need for two different spaces—one for leaders to coordinate with each other, and one for a dialogue to be had. But I think the latter is essential to informing the agenda of the former. I’d love for the community survey to be a first step towards creating that second space. Perhaps something like what I’m describing could even be the kind of thing that’s discussed during the Forum.
To elaborate:
Often I think the term “EA community” or “community building” can be used to mean different things. I think there’s a difference between efforts towards “EA the movement” vs those (perhaps more internally facing) “EA the community. For example, funding a new organization to target policy professionals for AI governance would “EA the movement” decision (even though it’s community building), while improving sexual misconduct practices would be “EA the community”.
From the post, I understand that the forum’s remit is both “movement” and “community”(emphasis mine):
only focused on the “meta”/community-building space rather than object-level decisions in any cause area.
and is
aimed at improving the trajectories of EA and related communities”
They are of course very intertwined, and from the events of the past year it is likely that community concerns will be an important topic of conversation.
For such issues, I think it’s essential for there to be meaningful dialogue between (regular, representative) community members and EA decision-makers and leaders, and more mechanisms by which community members can systematically raise concerns that are directly relevant to them (e.g. a place to see current issues, how much support there is for addressing those issues, potential solutions being considered & worked on, etc.)
I think that in any community, leaders will likely not always be aware of what is happening “on-the-ground”, and that there are many systemic, power-differential related reasons that they won’t always be getting the information they need. I wouldn’t be surprised if this has improved post-FTX, but I’m pretty sure we have a ways to go in this regard.
Up until now, leaders haven’t prioritized this very highly (even if they believe it’s important). I think this is because there has historically been a lack of clarity as to whose responsibility managing the community is. The community itself has grown faster than the community infrastructure could keep up.
I don’t think setting up the infrastructure to allow for this dialogue to occur is trivial or easy. It’s costly to do well. It requires investment from leaders and others who would work on these issues full time. The work is (often emotionally) hard, unrewarding, and sometimes it’s not clear if you’ve had an impact. That being said, I believe it is essential infrastructure to make this community sustainable and health (and allow it to grow).
What links here?
- Rockwell's comment on Announcing the Meta Coordination Forum 2023 by Sophie Thomson (12 Sep 2023 17:44 UTC; 50 points)

Vaidehi Agarwalla 17 Jul 2022 22:09 UTC
51 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Let’s stop saying ‘funding overhang’
I think this post doesn’t explicitly mention some relevant context, especially for people newer to the community. While Ben mentions that he used to use this term, he doesn’t mention that he previously wrote a highly upvoted and engaged-with post that contributed to wider usage of the term.
I raise this because I’ve noticed that it is part of a larger pattern. The pattern goes something like this:
80,000 Hours introduce an idea or concept in a public, non-targeted (intended for mass consumption) and engaging (interesting to read / introducing easy-to-understand concepts) blog post such as:
- Why and how to earn to give (note: I don’t think this is the only post here, or that 80K was the only actor to promote earning to give—others also promoted it during this period)
- Management consulting (for skill-building & earning to give) - Career review
- Why you should focus more on talent gaps, not funding gaps − 80,000 Hours
- Is effective altruism growing? An update on the stock of funding vs. people
These posts sometimes end with a few very specific calls to action for a fairly small subset of the post’s readers, e.g. whether to pursue a particular (competitive) career, or becoming a researcher, grantmaker or entrepreneur.
Then, some time later, 80,000 hours publishes a post suggesting that the community is maybe going too far in one direction and that we should reverse course:
These posts sometimes mention that 80,000 Hours previously held this view but often don’t acknowledge the role that this prior communication played in contributing to the problem.
I think this points to some important questions that deserve more discussion, since communications have a strong hand to play in shaping community discourse.

Vaidehi Agarwalla 8 Mar 2022 1:11 UTC
45 points
0 ∶ 0
on: We’re announcing a $100,000 blog prize
I was discussing this with a friend who raised some interesting points (but didn’t wish to post themselves). Most of the below comes from them, with some of my own input:
- They had concerns that the $100,000 prize might change the dynamics of the EA blogging landscape a lot, because this is a very large amount of money for any new blog. I’d be curious how the team decided on the $100,000 prize amount, as opposed to say a $10,000 or $25,000 prize.
  - (note: The Liberalism 2.0 prize this was inspired by was also for $100,000, but I’d still be interested to know the thought process for our community)
- They were also concerned about some unintentional biases that may arise from this contest. For example, there could be a bias where people publish what they think funders will reward (rather than what they actually would).
  - Bloggers could have a (conscious or subconscious) bias towards things that are ultimately positive towards EA and longtermism (with authors potentially hiding their actual thoughts and objections).
    This could be something like a careful, nuanced, but ultimately super positive with no/few real negatives about EA and longtermism because that’s what they think will probably be what the reviewers want”
    One challenge could also be that sometimes people have valid criticisms of EA and longtermism that are hard to explicitly state in the way that EAs and longtermists communicate, but are still real criticisms.
    My friend gave the example of this critique which push back against some of the expected value calculations of longtermism. This critique may seem obviously wrong to longtermists, but seem reasonable given the way the OP’s saw it discussed in the Greaves / MacAskill strong longtermism paper they discuss (Strong Longtermism, Irrefutability, and Moral Progress which builds on Against Longtermism)
Would be keen to hear your thinking on these points!

Vaidehi Agarwalla 11 Jun 2023 3:34 UTC
43 points
10 ∶ 0
on: vaidehi_agarwalla’s Shortform
Suggestion for EA Forum posts: First Draft

Create a new type of post—a “First Draft” post, with it’s own section “WIP”. Basically like the current collaborative draft mode editing, but public.
This could be a expansion / continuation of the “amnesty day” posts, but more ongoing and more focused on changing the culture of the post.
- Looks like a google doc with easy commenting on specific sections, maybe more voting options that have to do with feedback (e.g. needs more structure etc.)
- You can give suggestions on what people can post e.g. “Idea bunny” “post outline” “unpolished draft” “polished draft” and give people options on the kinds of feedback they could seek e.g. “copyediting / grammar” or “tone” or “structure” or “factchecking” etc.
- Maybe Karma-free, or separate karma score so people don’t worry about how it’ll be taken
- Maybe people who give comments and feedback can get some kind of “helper karma” and be automatically tagged when the post is published and get credit of some kind for contributing to common knowledge
- Potentially have it be gated in some way or have people opt-in to see it (e.g. so more engaged people opt-in, so it becomes like the Facebook peer-editing group), with regular pushes to get high karma / high engagement forum users (especially lurkers who like and read a lot) to join
- Private by default (not searchable on web) but very clear that it’s not private private (e.g. since in practice people can always screenshot and share things anyways)
- Feature interesting stories about where first drafts start and the posts they become to encourage usage
- Get a bunch of high-status people / active forum folks to post their drafts to get the ball rolling

Vaidehi Agarwalla 1 Mar 2022 1:04 UTC
43 points
0 ∶ 0
on: The Future Fund’s Project Ideas Competition
Experiments to scale mentorship and upskill people
Empowering Exceptional People, Effective Altruism
For many very important and pressing problems, especially those focused on improving the far future, there are very few experts working full-time on these problems. What’s more, these fields are nascent, and there are few well-defined paths for young or early-career people to follow, it can be hard to enter the field. Experts in the field are often ideal mentors—they can vet newcomers, help them navigate the field, provide career advice, collaborate on projects and gain access to new opportunities, but there are currently very few people qualified to be mentors. We’d love to see projects that experiment with ways to improve the mentorship pipeline so that more individuals can work on pressing problems. The kinds of possible solutions possible are very broad—from developing expertise in some subset of mentorship tasks (such as vetting) in a scalable way, increasing the pool of mentors, improving existing mentors’ ability to provide advice by training them, experimenting with better mentor-mentee matchmaking, running structured mentorship programs, and more.

Vaidehi Agarwalla 12 Aug 2023 14:04 UTC
42 points
5 ∶ 0
on: vaidehi_agarwalla’s Shortform
I found this post by Rob Bensinger of anonymous comments on EA from 2017 , with the question prompt:
If you could magically change the effective altruism community tomorrow, what things would you change? [...] If possible, please mark your level of involvement/familiarity with EA[.].
Many still resonate today. I recommend reading the whole list, but there are a lot—so I’ve chosen a few highlights and comment exchanges I thought were particularly interesting. I’ve shortened a few for brevity (indicated by ellipses).
I don’t agree with many of these comments, but it’s interesting to see how people perceived things back then.
Highlights
On supporting community members
Related: Should the EA community be cause-first or member-first?
#28 - on people dismissing those who start as “ineffective altruists” (top voted comment with 23 karma)
I have really positive feelings towards the effective altruism community on the whole. I think EA is one of the most important ideas out there right now.
However, I think that there is a lot of hostility in the movement towards those of us who started off as ‘ineffective altruists,’ as opposed to coming from the more typical Silicon Valley perspective. I have a high IQ, but I struggled through college and had to drop out of a STEM program as a result of serious mental health disturbances. After college, I wanted to make a difference, so I’ve spent my time since then working in crisis homeless shelters. … I know that the work I’ve done isn’t as effective as what the Against Malaria Foundation does, but I’ve still worked really hard to help people, and I’ve found that my peers in the movement have been very dismissive of it.
I’m really looking to build skills in an area where I can do more effective direct work. I keep hearing that the movement is talent-constrained, but it isn’t clearly explained anywhere what the talent constraints are, specifically. I went to EA Global hoping for career advice—an expensive choice for someone in social work! -- but even talking one-on-one with Ben Todd, I didn’t get any actionable advice. There’s a lot of advice out there for people who are interested in earning to give, and for anyone who already has great career prospects, but for fuck-ups like me, there doesn’t seem to be any advice on skills to develop, how to go back to school, or anything of that kind.
When I’ve tried so hard to get any actionable advice whatsoever about what I should do, and nobody has any… that’s a movement that isn’t accessible to me, and isn’t accessible to a lot of people, and it makes me want to ragequit. …
#40 - the community should be better at supporting its members
I’m the leader of a not-very-successful EA student group. I don’t get to socialize with people in EA that much.
I wish the community were better at supporting its members in accomplishing things they normally couldn’t. I feel like almost everyone just does the things that they normally would. People that enjoy socializing go to meetups (or run meetups); people that enjoy writing blog posts write blog posts; people that enjoy commenting online comment online; etc.
Very few people actually do things that are hard for them, which means that, for example, most people aren’t founding new EA charities or thinking original thoughts about charity or career evaluation or any of the other highly valuable things that come out of just a few EA people. And that makes sense; it doesn’t work to just force yourself to do this sort of thing. But maybe the right forms of social support and reward could help.
#22 - on a lack of mentorship and guidance
I think that mentorship and guidance are lacking and undervalued in the EA community. This seems odd to me. Everyone seems to agree that coordination problems are hard, that we’re not going to solve tough problems without recruiting additional talent, and that outreach in the “right” places would be good. Functionally, however, most individuals in the community, most organizations, and most heads of organizations seem to act as though they can make a difference through brute force alone.
I also don’t get the impression that most EA organizations and heads of EA organizations are keen on meeting or working with new and interested people. People affiliated with EA write many articles about increasing personal productivity; I have yet to read a single article about increasing group effectiveness.
80,000 Hours may be the sole exception to this rule, though I haven’t formally gone through their coaching program, so I don’t know what their pipeline is like. CFAR also seems to be addressing some of these issues, though their workshops are still prohibitively expensive for lots of people, especially newcomers. EA outreach is great, but once people have heard about EA, I don’t think it’s clear what they should do or how they should proceed.
The final reason why I find this odd is because in most professional settings, mentorship is explicitly valued. Even high-status people who have plenty of stuff on their plate will set aside some time for service.
My model for why this is happening has two parts. First, I think there is some selection effect going on; most people in EA are self-starters who came on board and paved their own path. (That’s great and all, but do people think that most major organizations and movements got things done solely by a handful of self-starters trying to cooperate?)
Second, I think it might be the case that most people are good at doing cost-benefit analyses on how much impact their pet project will have on the world, but aren’t thinking about the multiplier effect they could have by helping other people be effective. (This is often because they are undervaluing the effectiveness of other, relatively not-high-status people.)
Reply from Daniel Eth:
Another possibility is that most people in EA are still pretty young, so they might not feel like they’re really in a position to mentor anyone.
On conformism / dogmatism
#1 - on conformism & CFAR commiting to AI risk
My system-1 concerns about EA: the community exhibits a certain amount of conformism, and a general unwillingness to explore new topics. … The reason I think this is an issue is the general lack of really new proposals in EA discussion posts. … The organization that seemed to me the most promising for dealing with unknown unknowns (CFAR, who are in a unique position to develop new thinking techniques to deal with this) has recently committed to AI risk in a way that compromises the talent they could have directed to innovative EA.
#27
Many practitioners strike me as being dogmatic and closed-minded. They maintain a short internal whitelist of things that are considered ‘EA’—e.g., working at an EA-branded organization, or working directly on AI safety. If an activity isn’t on the whitelist, the dogmatic (and sometimes wrong) conclusion is that it must not be highly effective. I think that EA-associated organizations and AI safety are great, but they’re not the only approaches that could make a monumental difference. If you find yourself instinctively disagreeing, then you might be in the group I’m talking about. :)
People’s natural response should instead be something like: ‘Hmm, at first blush this doesn’t seem effective to me, and I have a strong prior that most things aren’t effective, but maybe there’s something here I don’t understand yet. Let’s see if I can figure out what it is.’
Level of personal involvement in effective altruism: medium-high. But I wouldn’t be proud to identify myself as EA.
#39 - on EA having picked all the low-hanging fruit
Level of involvement: I’m not an EA, but I’m EA-adjacent and EA-sympathetic.
EA seems to have picked all the low-hanging fruit and doesn’t know what to do with itself now. Standard health and global poverty feel like trying to fill a bottomless pit. It’s hard to get excited about GiveWell Report #3543 about how we should be focusing on a slightly different parasite and that the cost of saving a life has gone up by $3. Animal altruism is in a similar situation, and is also morally controversial and tainted by culture war. The benefits of more long-shot interventions are hard to predict, and some of them could also have negative consequences. AI risk is a target for mockery by outsiders, and while the theoretical arguments for its importance seem sound, it’s hard to tell whether an organization is effective in doing anything about it. And the space of interventions in politics is here-be-dragons.
The lack of salient progress is a cause of some background frustration. Some of those who think their cause is best try to persuade others in the movement, but to little effect, because there’s not much new to say to change people’s minds; and that contributes to the feeling of stagnation. This is not to say that debate and criticism are bad; being open to them is much better than the alternative, and the community is good at being civil and not getting too heated. But the motivation for them seems to draw more from ingrained habits and compulsive behavior than from trying to expose others to new ideas. (Because there aren’t any.)
Others respond to the frustration by trying to grow the movement, but that runs into the real (and in my opinion near-certain) dangers of mindkilling politics, stifling PR, dishonesty (Sarah Constantin’s concerns), and value drift.
And others (there’s overlap between these groups) treat EA as a social group, whether that means house parties or memes. Which is harmless fun in itself, but hardly an inspiring direction for the movement.
What would improve the movement most is a wellspring of new ideas of the quality that inspired it to begin with. Apart from that, it seems quite possible that there’s not much room for improvement; most tradeoffs seem to not be worth the cost. That means that it’s stuck as it is, at best—which is discouraging, but if that’s the reality, EAs should accept it.

#32 - on the limtiations of single orgs fixing problems
There seems to be a sense in effective altruism that the existence of one organization working on a given problem means that the problem is now properly addressed. The thought appears to be: ‘(Organization) exists, so the space of evaluating (organization function) is filled and the problem is therefore taken care of.’
Organizations are just a few people working on a problem together, with some slightly better infrastructure, stable funding, and time. The problems we’re working on are too big for a handful of people to fix, and the fact that a handful of people are working in a given space doesn’t suggest that others shouldn’t work on it too. I’d like to see more recognition of the conceptual distinction between the existence of an organization with a certain mission, and what exactly is and is not being done to accomplish that mission. We could use more volunteers/partners to EA organizations, or even separate organizations addressing the same issue(s) using a different epistemology.
To encourage this, I’d love to see more support for individuals doing great projects who are better suited to the flexibility of doing work independently of any organization, or who otherwise don’t fit a hole in an organization.
#32b) - on EA losing existing and failing to gain new high-value people
The high-value people from the early days of effective altruism are disengaging, and the high-value people who might join are not engaging. There are people who were once quite crucial to the development of EA ‘fundamentals’ who have since parted ways, and have done so because they are disenchanted with the direction in which they see us heading.
More concretely, I’ve heard many reports to the effect: ‘EA doesn’t seem to be the place where the most novel/talented/influential people are gravitating, because there aren’t community quality controls.’ While inclusivity is really important in most circumstances, it has a downside risk here that we seem to be experiencing. I believe we are likely to lose the interest and enthusiasm of those who are most valuable to our pursuits, because they don’t feel like they are around peers, and/or because they don’t feel that they are likely to be socially rewarded for their extreme dedication or thoughtfulness.
I think that the community’s dip in quality comes in part from the fact that you can get most of the community benefits without being a community benefactor—e.g. invitations to parties and likes on Facebook. At the same time, one incurs social costs for being more tireless and selfless (e.g., skipping parties to work), for being more willing to express controversial views (e.g., views that conflict with clan norms), or for being more willing to do important but low-status jobs (e.g., office manager, assistant). There’s a lot that we’d need to do in order to change this, but as a first step we should be more attentive to the fact that this is happening.
On the Bay Area community
#18 - on improving status in the Bay Area community so people feel less insecure
Speaking regarding the Bay Area effective altruism community: There’s something about status that could be improved. On the whole, status (and what it gets you) serves a valuable purpose; it’s a currency used to reward those producing what the community values. The EA community is doing well at this in that it does largely assign status to people for the right things. At the same time, something about how status is being done is leaving many people feeling insecure and disconnected.
I don’t know what the solution is, but you said magic wand, so I’ll punt on what the right response should be.”
#8 - move EA to somewhere that’s not the Bay Area
Related: Say “nay!” to the Bay (as the default)!
If I could change the effective altruism community tomorrow, I would move it somewhere other than the Bay Area, or at least make it more widely known that moving to the Bay is defecting in a tragedy of the commons and makes you Bad.
If there were large and thriving EA communities all over the place, nobody would need to move to the Bay, we’d have better outreach to a number of communities, and fewer people would have to move a long distance, get US visas, or pay a high rent in order to get seriously involved in EA. The more people move to the Bay, the harder it is to be outside the Bay, because of the lack of community. If everyone cooperated in developing relatively local communities, rather than moving to the bay, there’d be no need to move to the Bay in the first place. But we, a community that fangirls over ‘Meditations on Moloch’ (http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/) and prides itself on working together to get shit done, can’t even cooperate on this simple thing.
I know people who are heartbroken and depressed because they need community and all their partners are in the Bay and they want to contribute, but they can’t get a US visa or they can’t afford Bay Area rent levels, so they’re stuck friendless and alone in whatever shitty place they were born in. This should not be a hard problem to solve if we apply even a little thought and effort to it; any minimally competent community could pull this off.
#34 - EA is unsophisticated regarding policy
See:
The way that we talk about policy in the effective altruism community is unsophisticated. I understand that this isn’t most EAs’ area of expertise, but in that case just running around and saying ‘we should really get EAs into policy’ is pretty unhelpful. Anyone who is fairly inexperienced in ‘policy’ could quickly get a community-knowledge comparative advantage just by spending a couple of months doing self-study and having conversations, and could thereby start helpfully orienting our general cries for more work on ‘policy.’
To be fair, there are some people doing this. But why not more?
On newcomers
#3 - talking about MIRI to newcomers makes you seem biased
Stop talking about AI in EA, at least when doing EA outreach. I keep coming across effective altruism proponents claiming that MIRI is a top charity, when they seem to be writing to people who aren’t in the EA community who want to learn more about it. Do they realize that this comes across as very biased? It makes it seem like ‘I know a lot about an organization’ or ‘I have friends in this organization’ are EA criteria. Most importantly, talking about AI in doomsday terms sounds kooky. It stands apart from the usual selections, as it’s one of the few that’s ‘high stakes.’ I rarely see effective altruists working towards environmental, political, anti-nuclear, or space exploration solutions, which I consider of a similar genre. I lose trust in an effective altruist’s evaluations when they evaluate MIRI to be an effective charity.
I’ve read a few articles and know a few EA people.
#31 - make EA more welcoming to newcomers
I work for an effective altruism organization. I’d say that over half of my friends are at least adjacent to the space and talk about EA-ish topics regularly.
The thing I’d most like to change is the general friendliness of first-time encounters with EA. I think EA Global is good about this, but house parties tend to have a very competitive, emotionally exhausting ‘everyone is sizing you up’ vibe, unless you’re already friends with some people from another context.
Next-most-important (and related), probably, is that I would want everyone to proactively express how much confidence they have their statements in some fashion, through word choice, body language, and tone of voice, rather than providing a numerical description only when explicitly asked. This can prevent false-consensus effects and stop people from assuming that a person must be totally right because they sound so confident.
More selfishly, another thing I wish for is more social events that consist of 10-20 people doing something in the daytime with minimal drugs, rather than 50-100 people at a wild party. I just enjoy small daytime gatherings so much more, and I would like to get closer to the community, but I rarely have the energy for parties.
#5 - lack of good advice to newcomers beyond donate & advocate
At multiple EA events that I’ve been to, new people who were interested and expressed curiosity about what to do next were given no advice beyond ‘donate money and help spread the message’—even by prominent EA organizers. My advice to the EA community would be to stop focusing so much on movement-building until (a) EA’s epistemics have improved, and (b) EAs have much more developed and solid views (if not an outright consensus) about the movement’s goals and strategy.
To that end, I recommend clearly dividing ‘cause-neutral EA’ from ‘cause-specific effectiveness’. The lack of a clear divide contributes to the dilution of what EA means. (Some recent proposals I’ve seen framed by people as ‘EA’ have included a non-profit art magazine and a subcommunity organized around fighting Peter Thiel.) If we had a notion of ‘in this space/forum/organization, we consider the most effective thing to do given that one cares primarily about art’ or ‘given that one is focused on ending Alzheimer’s, what is the most effective thing to do?‘, then people could spend more time seriously discussing those questions and less bickering over what counts as ‘EA.’
The above is if we want a big-tent approach. I’m also fine with just cause-neutral evaluation and the current-seemingly-most-important-from-a-cause-neutral-standpoint causes being deemed ‘EA’ and all else clearly being not, no matter who that makes cranky.
#23 - on bait & switch, EA as principles, getting an elite team at meta orgs like CFAR / CEA
I used to work for an organization in EA, and I am still quite active in the community.
1 - I’ve heard people say things like, ‘Sure, we say that effective altruism is about global poverty, but—wink, nod—that’s just what we do to get people in the door so that we can convert them to helping out with AI / animal suffering / (insert weird cause here).’ This disturbs me.
2 - In general, I think that EA should be a principle, not a ‘movement’ or set of organizations. I see no reason that religious charities wouldn’t benefit from exposure to EA principles, for example.
3 - I think that the recent post on ‘Ra’ was in many respects misguided, and that in fact a lack of ‘eliteness’ (or at least some components of it) is one of the main problems with many EA organizations.
There’s a saying, I think from Eliezer, that ‘the important things are accomplished not by those best suited to do them, or by those who ought to be responsible for doing them, but by whoever actually shows up.’ That saying is true, but people seem to use this as an excuse sometimes. There’s not really any reason for EA organizations to be as unprofessional and inefficient as they are. I’m not saying that we should all be nine-to-fivers, but I’d be very excited to see the version of the Centre for Effective Altruism or the Center for Applied Rationality that cared a lot about being an elite team that’s really actually trying to get things done, rather than the version that’s sorta ad-hoc ‘these are the people who showed up.’
4 - Things are currently spread over way too many sources: Facebook, LessWrong, the EA Forum, various personal blogs, etc.
Rob Bensinger replied:
I’d be interested to hear more about examples of things that CEA / CFAR / etc. would do differently if they were ‘an elite team that’s really actually trying to get things done’; some concreteness there might help clarify what the poster has in mind when they say there are good things about Ra that EA would benefit from cultivating.
For people who haven’t read the post, since it keeps coming up in this thread: my impression is that ‘Ra’ is meant to refer to something like ‘impersonal, generic prestige,’ a vague drive toward superficially objective-seeming, respectable-seeming things. Quoting Sarah’s post:
“Ra involves seeing abstract, impersonal institutions as more legitimate than individuals. For instance, I have the intuition that it is gross and degrading to pay an individual person to clean your house, but less so to hire a maid service, and still less so if a building that belongs to an institution hires a janitor. Institutions can have authority and legitimacy in a way that humans cannot; humans who serve institutions serve Ra.
“Seen through Ra-goggles, giving money to some particular man to spend on the causes he thinks best is weird and disturbing; putting money into a foundation, to exist in perpetuity, is respectable and appropriate. The impression that it is run collectively, by ‘the institution’ rather than any individual persons, makes it seem more Ra-like, and therefore more appealing. [...]
“If Horus, the far-sighted, kingly bird, represents “clear brightness” and “being the rightful and just ruler”, then Ra is a sort of fake version of these qualities. Instead of the light that distinguishes, it’s the light too bright to look at. Instead of clear brightness, it’s smooth brightness.
“Instead of objectivity, excellence, justice, all the “daylight” virtues associated with Horus (what you might also call Apollonian virtues), Ra represents something that’s also shiny and authoritative and has the aesthetic of the daylight virtues, but in an unreal form.
“Instead of science, Ra chooses scientism. Instead of systematization and explicit legibility, Ra chooses an impression of abstract generality which, upon inspection, turns out to be zillions of ad hoc special cases. Instead of impartial justice, Ra chooses a policy of signaling propriety and eliteness and lack of conflicts of interest. Instead of excellence pointed at a goal, Ra chooses virtuosity kept as an ornament.
“(Auden’s version of Apollo is probably Ra imitating the Apollonian virtues. The leadership-oriented, sunnily pragmatic, technological approach to intellectual affairs is not always phony — it’s just that it’s the first to be corrupted by phonies.)
“Horus is not Ra. Horus likes organization, clarity, intelligence, money, excellence, and power — and these things are genuinely valuable. If you want to accomplish big goals, it is perfectly rational to seek them, because they’re force multipliers. Pursuit of force multipliers — that is, pursuit of power — is not inherently Ra. There is nothing Ra-like, for instance, about noticing that software is a fully general force multiplier and trying to invest in or make better software. Ra comes in when you start admiring force multipliers for no specific goal, just because they’re shiny.
“Ra is not the disposition to seek power for some goal, but the disposition to approve of power and to divert it into arbitrariness. It is very much NOT Machiavellian; Machiavelli would think it was foolish.”
Nick Tarleton replied:
Huh. I really like and agree with the post about Ra, but also agree that there are things about… being a grown-up organization?… that some EA orgs I’m aware of have been seriously deficient in in the past. I don’t know whether some still are; it seems likely a priori. I can see how a focus on avoiding Ra could cause neglect of those things, but I still think avoiding Ra is critically important, it just needs to be done smarter than that. (Calling the thing ‘eliteness’, or positively associating it with Ra, feels like a serious mistake, though I can’t articulate all of my reasons why, other than that it seems likely to encourage focusing on image over substance. I think calling it ‘grown-upness’ can encourage that as well, and I don’t know of a framing that wouldn’t (this is an easy thing to mistake image for / do fronting about, and focusing on substance over image seems like an irreducible skill / mental posture), but ‘eliteness’ feels particularly bad. ‘Professionalism’ feels in between.)
Anonymous #23 replied:
CEA’s internal structure is very ad-hoc and overly focused on event planning and coordination, at least in my view. It also isn’t clear that what they’re doing is useful. I don’t really see the value add of CEA over what Leverage was doing back when Leverage ran the EA Summit.
Most of the cool stuff coming out of the CEA-sphere seems to be done by volunteers anyway. This is not to denigrate their staff, just to question ‘Where’s the beef?’ when you have 20+ people on the team.
For that matter, why do conversations like these mostly happen on meme groups and private Facebook walls instead of being facilitated or supported by CEA?
Looking at the CFAR website, it seems like they have something like 14-15 employees, contractors, and instructors, of which only 3-4 have research as part of their job? That’s… not a good ratio for an organization with a mission that relies on research, and maybe this explains why there hasn’t been too much cool new content coming out of that sector?
To put things another way, I don’t have a sense of rapid progress being made by these organizations, and I suspect that it could be with the right priorities. MIRI certainly has its foibles, but if you look over there it seems like they’re much more focused/productive, and it’s readily apparent how each of their staffers contributes to the primary objective. Were I to join MIRI, I think I would have a clear sense of, ‘Here I am, part of a crack team working to solve this big problem. Here’s how we’re doing it.’ I don’t get that sense from any other EA organizations.
As for ‘Ra,’ it’s not that I think fake prestige is good; it’s that I think people way overcorrect, shying away from valid prestige in the name of avoiding fake prestige. This might be a reflection of the Bay Area and Oxford ‘intellectual techie’ crowds more than EA in general, but it’s silly any way you slice it.
I want an EA org whose hiring pitch is: ‘We’re the team that is going to solve (insert problem), and if you join us everyone you work with will be smart, dedicated, and hardworking. We don’t pay as much as the private sector, but you’ll do a ton more, with better people, more autonomy, and for a better cause. If that sounds good, we’d love to talk to you.’
This is a fairly ‘Ra’-flavored pitch, and obviously it has to actually be true, but I think a lot of EAs shy away from aiming for this sort of thing, and instead wind up with a style that actually favors ‘scrappiness’ and ‘we’re the ones who showed up.’ I bet my pitch gets better people.
Julia Wise of CEA replied:
The best place to read about about what CEA is doing, and why we’re doing it, is our annual update and fundraising prospectus.

Vaidehi Agarwalla 1 Jun 2022 22:55 UTC
41 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Power dynamics between people in EA
Thanks for writing this Julia! I think this could be a helpful resource for newer EAs who haven’t interacted much with the community, a lot goes unsaid and surprises people when they are first figuring out the social dynamics in EA.

Vaidehi Agarwalla 30 Mar 2022 21:57 UTC
40 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Unsurprising things about the EA movement that surprised me
Really enjoyed this post, and will likely be sharing this with newer EAs in the future! A lot of this is what I’d call “landscape knowledge” which only becomes clear once you start interacting with the community itself. Thanks for writing it!

Vaidehi Agarwalla 15 Nov 2022 15:06 UTC
39 points
13 ∶ 4
on: Brainstorming ways to make EA safer and more inclusive
I think this topic is very important and your question prompts are great, and agree that wider community could maybe do more. I’m skeptical that much progress can be made via online community discussion.

This topic involves are sensitive, complicated and often there won’t be a obviously right answer (especially around norms).

My guess is that a dedicated person or small team would be needed to collect experiences (whether via surveys, interviews etc), consult with experts on best practices and then get buy in from relevant stakeholders (e.g ea orgs or groups) and work with them (possibly in a pretty hands on way) to test and implement norm changes.

Vaidehi Agarwalla 28 May 2022 15:33 UTC
37 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Will there be an EA answer to the predictable famines later this year?
I don’t have an answer, but I appreciate you raising this ahead of time and think it would be great if we could have well thought out answers and resources for this.

Vaidehi Agarwalla 24 May 2022 0:35 UTC
37 points
0 ∶ 0
on: The EA movement’s values are drifting. You’re allowed to stay put.
Similarly, less funding towards evidence-backed ideas, and more funding for long shot projects, of which much or most of the expected value comes from a small chance of big success.

Suggestion to change to: “Less proportion of funding towards” since the total amount of funding to e.g. GiveWell backed charities has increased but overall there is stil more funding (at least as of now, though that may change in the near future) towards that.

Vaidehi Agarwalla 8 Sep 2023 7:19 UTC
36 points
17 ∶ 6
in reply to: Minh Nguyen’s comment on: Sharing Information About Nonlinear
Hi Minh, Appreciate you sharing your views publicly here. I think you’re acting in good faith, and if others engage with this comment I hope they see that as well.
I think it’s very possible the Nonlinear team handled different employees very differently, especially since you started interning with them after Alice and Chloe had left and from Nonlinear’s account, it sounds like they made some changes (e.g. not having employees live and work with them).
Overall, I don’t think I’ve updated my views much as a result of this comment. I won’t cite every example in detail to save time, and won’t have capacity to do write it up publicly but happy to talk about it off the Forum, but here’s a quick overview of why I haven’t:

1) Most of the points you comment on here seem to be your interpretation of the accounts of the post. It seems like you don’t necessarily have a unique perspective on at least the first point, and overall I don’t agree with the conclusions you draw based on the evidence provided in the original post (e.g. the point about intimidation and Emerson)
I don’t think you are always engaging with all the context of the post (e.g. I think more so than talking about tactics, Emerson’s dealings with Adorian Deck seemed unnecessarily aggressive and doesn’t seem to be defensive in nature.) I don’t think this is intentional, but I think it could be helpful to engage with the substance of the points.
2) For pieces that you do have your own experiences to draw from, I think your situation was materially different from that of Alice and Chloe - namely, as I understand it you were not co-living and co-working for an extended period with the Nonlinear team, and your scope of work was different (e.g. I expect that house ops was not a part of your internship duties. I think most of the negative dynamics described resulted from the environment. I think it’s a fairly common occurrence that same thing in different contexts can have a very different meaning & consequences (e.g. the safety net point—which you also mentioned was insensitive—or the short deadlines).

It’s possible I could change some of the above views it in light of new evidence.

Vaidehi Agarwalla 4 Sep 2022 15:02 UTC
36 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Celebrations and gratitude thread
I’m grateful for all of the thoughtful, motivated and kind community builders from Asia, the middle east and Africa I’ve met them past few weeks. It’s really hard to be an EA, and it’s so much harder without an existing community.

Vaidehi Agarwalla 14 Dec 2021 19:36 UTC
36 points
0 ∶ 0
on: A huge opportunity for impact: movement building at top universities
I’m glad to see community building becoming more professionalized and CEA thinking more about how to support community builders.
I would like to hear your thoughts on what the potential downsides, risks or caveats could be for someone considering this path, or the work itself so that people seriously considering this opportunity can take those things into consideration

Vaidehi Agarwalla 22 Jun 2023 15:50 UTC
35 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Rejection thread: stories and tips
Thanks for starting this thread!

When I graduated college I was did a lot of job hunting and got rejected from something like ~100 jobs, including several top consulting firms (which I had been preparing interviews & networking for for over 9 months) and Open Philanthropy. I got rejected from most of the 100 I applied to, including places with warm referrals.

I actually found the OP trial was really useful because I realized I really didn’t enjoy that kind of work.

I think the rejection is harder when you have more than just a job riding on it. For me, getting a job after college was also about being able to get a work visa and stay in the US, which I felt was the best option for building career capital. So getting rejected was stressful for that reason.

I think having friends who support you is really important for handling rejection. One my of college friends (who’s went into investment banking) helped me a lot throughout the process—sending networking emails, prepping my resume and for interviews. I don’t think I would have been as successful or put myself out there as much without her.

Since college, I think I’ve gotten some rejections that felt more personal. I think in those cases I’ve found it helpful to give some space and then come back to the rejection and process the feedback (if you receive any). Often I find I’m in a better place to view it more constructively and reflect on what I’d do differently in the future.

Vaidehi Agarwalla 12 Sep 2022 12:08 UTC
34 points
4 ∶ 0
on: My closing talk at EAGxSingapore
I really loved this speech, a lot. I had a lot of guesses on what the speech was going to be, but it ended up surprising & moving me. It takes a lot of courage to talk about your fears in front of 350 people, and more so to then post it on the internet.
For context, I am from / grew up in Singapore, and want to add some more context for those reading this who didn’t attend EAGxSingapore and would like to know more.
(The majority, if not all, people raised their hands)
Someone who’d previously attended EAG’s and EAGx’s previously told me that EAGxSingapore was the most welcoming and warm conferences they had attended, and many other conference attendees had told them the same thing.
EAGxSingapore had about 70% first-time attendees, many of whom could not attend EAG’s due to visa issues. So you have this group of super engaged EAs, who are going to their first proper EA conference and are just super excited and grateful to be there.
Something Dion didn’t mention in the speech (or needed to) was that this was (I believe) the most diverse EA conference ever. It was pretty cool to sit in the auditorium during her talk, and see a sea of black hair and people from cultures I grew up with.
Two things stem from this: One, I think this might have made people more open to being open and learning from each other, because you can’t assume shared context. Two, conversely, you get a bunch of people from Asian / African / LMIC backgrounds who get that your parents may be confused, suspicious or skeptical, the illegibility of trying to explain a movement doing 300 different things, the weirdness of becoming close friends with a bunch of internet strangers.
What I’m trying to say is that EA can be hard. It can be very demanding of you and your worldviews. … We emphasize taking the next steps when leaving a conference, but there will be many frustrations when you leave this room. You might want to apply for a high-impact job, but there’s nothing on the job board you can apply to in your country. You might want to socialize or network with EAs, but there’s no event in your time zone. You might even get offered a job or accepted into another conference but can’t go because of visa issues. Many factors might keep you from being as effective as you want to be, and these might be circumstances beyond your control.
(Nothing to add, other than a very very strong +1)
There was a feeling of emptiness on the flight back to the real world where no one knew or cared about x-risks or longtermism. The jarring difference felt very destabilizing. Many of you here who don’t live in EA hubs like me, and this might hit you the same way it did to me.
My past self resonated with this a lot. I’m sure many people have felt the pressure of being the “most EA” person in their city or country, and not feeling like others care as much about it. It can feel pretty lonely and hard, feeling like the most meaningful parts of your life are things you can’t fully share with your friends and family because they don’t “get” it.
Ironically, this conference actually helped me to bridge that gap, to make EA feel more part of my “real” life. Being able to spend time with EAs in my home- eating local food and making new memories in old haunts, giving them tourist tips, meeting each others’ parents and home friends—those moments were so wonderful and important.
I think my favorite moment is that Dion, after meeting my mother, proceeded to tell everyone “I love Vaidehi’s mother, I’ve never seen anyone insult someone so gracefully” (that someone was me, the insult was my mother calling me a “dum dum”).
There’s a lot more I could say, but I think I’ll end there for now.

Vaidehi Agarwalla 19 Aug 2022 10:33 UTC
33 points
1 ∶ 0
on: The community health team’s work on interpersonal harm in the community
It might be helpful, in this or another post, to talks bout what kind of support you can / can’t offer to EA-aligned or adjacent organizations dealing with interpersonal issues in the workplace, since many of the examples here are related to groups.

(Also this is very helpful and I think will be a useful resource I expect to share with group organizers and community members in the future)

Vaidehi Agarwalla

Highlights

On supporting community members

On conformism /​ dogmatism

On the Bay Area community

On newcomers

On conformism / dogmatism