Physics Student with a wide range of interest.
Co-organizer of EA Tübingen.
Yannick_Muehlhaeuser
Karma: 438
Thank you, this was very helpful. I think to possibility to do volunteer work remotely is something that should be stressed more and also communicated in EA local groups more frequently.
I share the impression that dedication is less encouraged in EA these days than five years ago
Not sure i agree with this. Certainly there is less focus on donating hug sums of money, but that may also be explained by the shift to EA Orgs now often recommending direct work. But i think the EA community as a hole now focusses less on attracting huge ammounts of people and more on keeping the existing members engaged and dedicated and influencing their career choice (if i remember correctly the strategic write-ups from both CEA and EAF seem to reflect this).
For instance, the recent strategy write-up by CEA mentions dedication as an important factor:
We can think of the amount of good someone can be expected to do as being the product of three factors (in a mathematical sense):
Resources: The extent of the resources (money, useful labor, etc.) they have to offer;
Dedication: The proportion of these resources that are devoted to helping;
Realization: How efficiently the resources devoted to helping are used
But i agree that there is a lot of focus on ‘talent’ and dedication seems to take a second role behind it. This may be defensable but i think that we could probably stress dedication a bit more, because talking about ‘dedication’ may turn less people of than talk about ‘talent’. To me talent seems more like something you have while dedication seems like something that ‘merely’ requires willpower. I would generaly be more worried about ‘lacking talent’ than ‘lacking dedication’, but I don’t really know how many people share that intuition.
Reading the book as Epub in iBooks, in enumerations there are often certain sentences that have a bigger font size than the normal text (for instance in the section “A Proposed Adjustment to the Astronomical Waste Argument”). I can’t post a picture here but i don’t think it was intendet to be that way. Hope that helps.
If i could only recommend one book to someone should i recommend this or Doing Good Better? Not really sure about that. What do you think?
Very helpful post. As someone running an german EA group i didn’t really find anything that doesn’t apply to us in the same way it did for you.
One interesting thing is your focus on 1on1 conversations: We have never attempted something like this, mostly because we thought it would be at least a bit weird for both parties involved. Did you have the same fear and where proven wrong or is this a problem you run into with some people?
Thank you very much for this important work. This should be an important consideration for everyone and an important factor in career planning. I’ll make sure to say something about that in our local EA group at some point.
Certainly an important question. 80k certainly explains why they don’t recommend certain careers and it’s important for them to continue to do so. In my opinion we should make our reasons for considering a cause effective very clear, so they can be challenged. In practice, of course, how such an entry depends strongly on the wording. I would prefer to word it like “Cause X has traditionally been considered not neglected enough/not tractabe/too small by EA organisations. … According to that reasoning you’d have to show Y to establish X as an effective cause. …” instead of “X is not effective, because …”.