I’ve spoken a lot with the Cambridge lot about this. I guess the cruxes of my disagreement with their approach are:
1) I think their committee model selects more for willingness to do menial tasks for the prestige of being in the committee, rather than actual enthusiasm for effective altruism. So something like what you described happens where “a section become more high-fidelity later, and it ends up not making that much difference”, as people who aren’t actually interested drop out. But it comes at the cost of more engaged people spending time on management.
2) From my understanding, Cambridge viewed the 1 year roles as a way of being able to ‘lock in’ people to engage with EA for 1 year and create a norm of committee attending events. But my model of someone who ends up being very engaged in EA is that excitement about the content drives most of the motivation, rather than external commitment devices. So I suppose roles only play a limited role in committing people to engage, but comes at the cost of people spending X hours on admin, when they could have spent X hours on learning more about EA.
It’s worth noting that I think Cambridge have recently been thinking hard about this, and also I expect their models for how their committee provides value to be much more nuanced than I present. Nevertheless, I think (1) and (2) capture useful points of disagreement I’ve had with them in the past.
I think there are easy ways to make it not weird. Some tips:
1) Emailing from an official email account, rather than a personal one, if you’ve never met the person before.
2) Mention explicitly that this is ‘something you do’ and that, for newcomers, you’d like to welcome them into the community. This makes it less strange that you’re reaching out to them personally.
3) Mention explicitly that you’ll be talking about EA, and not other stuff.
4) It’s useful to meet people in real life at an event first and say hello and introduce yourself there.
5) Don’t feel like you have an agenda or anything; keep it informal. Treat it as if you were getting to know a friend better and have an enjoyable time.
6) Absolutely don’t pressure people, just reach out and offer to meet up if they’d find it useful
Just wanted to say that I’d be really excited to read more of your thoughts on this. As mentioned above, I think many considerations and counter-considerations against x-risk work deserve more attention and exposure in the community.
I encourage you to write up your thoughts in the near-term rather than far future! :P
Indeed. Although there is an upper limit still, since there surely is some limit to how much value we can extract from a resource and there are only a finite number of atoms in the universe.
This is a heavily edited transcript of the popular talk “Prospecting for Gold”. We created this edited versions because we found it hard to follow the transcripts provided by CEA and thought there could be some value in condensing, clarifying and cleaning up the transcript.
“On the right is a factorisation which is mathematically trivial and looks like it just makes things more complicated. I’ve taken the expression on the left and added in a load of things which cancel each other out. But I hope I can justify this decomposition by virtue of it being easier to interpret and measure. So I’m going to present the case for why I think it is.”
Do let me know if you’d prefer something different to that :)
I also really value sequences! I’m working on an (extremely janky) web app to read sequences of content, as a way to learn web development.
I hope to eventually make it into a nice app that people can use to easily make their own sequences of EA content from around the web, and for people to discover and read this content.
I wanted to share EARadio on the Forum again. Although this project has been going for a long time, I think a lot of people probably aren’t aware of its existence.
I know a lot of my EA friends often want to watch EA Global lectures but never get round to actually doing so. I think EARadio provides a great service in allowing people to consume this content in an easy and accessible way.
On October 25th, 2020, Hilary Greaves gave a talk on ‘Cluelessness in effective altruism’ at the EA Student Summit 2020. I found the talk so valuable that I wanted to transcribe it.
I made the transcript with the help of http://trint.com/, an AI speech-to-text platform which I highly recommend. Thank you to Julia Karbing for help with editing.
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Thanks for the comment JoshP!
I’ve spoken a lot with the Cambridge lot about this. I guess the cruxes of my disagreement with their approach are:
1) I think their committee model selects more for willingness to do menial tasks for the prestige of being in the committee, rather than actual enthusiasm for effective altruism. So something like what you described happens where “a section become more high-fidelity later, and it ends up not making that much difference”, as people who aren’t actually interested drop out. But it comes at the cost of more engaged people spending time on management.
2) From my understanding, Cambridge viewed the 1 year roles as a way of being able to ‘lock in’ people to engage with EA for 1 year and create a norm of committee attending events. But my model of someone who ends up being very engaged in EA is that excitement about the content drives most of the motivation, rather than external commitment devices. So I suppose roles only play a limited role in committing people to engage, but comes at the cost of people spending X hours on admin, when they could have spent X hours on learning more about EA.
It’s worth noting that I think Cambridge have recently been thinking hard about this, and also I expect their models for how their committee provides value to be much more nuanced than I present. Nevertheless, I think (1) and (2) capture useful points of disagreement I’ve had with them in the past.
Hi!
I think there are easy ways to make it not weird. Some tips:
1) Emailing from an official email account, rather than a personal one, if you’ve never met the person before.
2) Mention explicitly that this is ‘something you do’ and that, for newcomers, you’d like to welcome them into the community. This makes it less strange that you’re reaching out to them personally.
3) Mention explicitly that you’ll be talking about EA, and not other stuff.
4) It’s useful to meet people in real life at an event first and say hello and introduce yourself there.
5) Don’t feel like you have an agenda or anything; keep it informal. Treat it as if you were getting to know a friend better and have an enjoyable time.
6) Absolutely don’t pressure people, just reach out and offer to meet up if they’d find it useful
I think that makes sense and I agree with you. We also have run the sort of things you describe in Oxford.
Maybe don’t teach can be understood as ‘prefer using resources as a way of conveying ideas, rather than you teaching’.
I agree that we should aim to ‘outreach’, in ‘(on-topic) introductory’ EA talks, and don’t disagree here.
Just wanted to say that I’d be really excited to read more of your thoughts on this. As mentioned above, I think many considerations and counter-considerations against x-risk work deserve more attention and exposure in the community.
I encourage you to write up your thoughts in the near-term rather than far future! :P
I enjoy reading Phil’s blog here: https://philiptrammell.com/blog/
I wrote this up because I wanted a single resource I could send to people that explained differential technological development.
I made it quite quickly in about 1 hour, so I’m sure it’s quite lacking and would appreciate any comments and suggestions people may have to improve it. You can also comment on a GDoc version of this here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1HcLcu-WObHO8y45yEMICfmqNpeugbmUX9HdRfeu7foM/edit?usp=sharing
Do you have a template of the shared document that you used? Or was it a quite unstructured blank document?
Indeed. Although there is an upper limit still, since there surely is some limit to how much value we can extract from a resource and there are only a finite number of atoms in the universe.
The title of the CGD article is “The UK as an Effective Altruist”
Is there a way to read the finalised (instead of penultimate) article without purchasing the book? Perhaps, Will, you have a PDF copy you own?
This is a heavily edited transcript of the popular talk “Prospecting for Gold”. We created this edited versions because we found it hard to follow the transcripts provided by CEA and thought there could be some value in condensing, clarifying and cleaning up the transcript.
You can also read a transcript of Amanda Askell’s talk ‘The Moral Value of Information’ here: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Kb66mhLuHiTByP6mk/the-moral-value-of-information-edited-transcript-1
Thanks! I’ll change that :)
I’ve now changed that section to:
“On the right is a factorisation which is mathematically trivial and looks like it just makes things more complicated. I’ve taken the expression on the left and added in a load of things which cancel each other out. But I hope I can justify this decomposition by virtue of it being easier to interpret and measure. So I’m going to present the case for why I think it is.”
Do let me know if you’d prefer something different to that :)
I believe you can edit the image size of images on old posts by dragging their bottom border down when in edit mode
I just saw this now and loved it, super excited for more content in the future!
I also really value sequences! I’m working on an (extremely janky) web app to read sequences of content, as a way to learn web development.
I hope to eventually make it into a nice app that people can use to easily make their own sequences of EA content from around the web, and for people to discover and read this content.
You can check it out here (doesn’t work great on mobile yet, unfort) : https://react-sequences.web.app/
I’m keen to work on it more once I stop having RSI 😅, so if people do have comments and feedback would love to hear it.
I wanted to share EARadio on the Forum again. Although this project has been going for a long time, I think a lot of people probably aren’t aware of its existence.
I know a lot of my EA friends often want to watch EA Global lectures but never get round to actually doing so. I think EARadio provides a great service in allowing people to consume this content in an easy and accessible way.
On October 25th, 2020, Hilary Greaves gave a talk on ‘Cluelessness in effective altruism’ at the EA Student Summit 2020. I found the talk so valuable that I wanted to transcribe it.
I made the transcript with the help of http://trint.com/, an AI speech-to-text platform which I highly recommend. Thank you to Julia Karbing for help with editing.
Thanks I’ll check it out!