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I have a rough draft of questions that I sometimes send to people who are thinking of contacting someone on the EA London directory.
Questions to ask yourself
- What is the purpose of meeting with this person?
- What could you gain?
- What could they gain?
- Is it worth their time? (Potentially let people know why you think it may be useful)
To help them decide to meet you can give your background/skills in their areas of interest
Questions you could ask (choose relevant ones)
- Why did you want to do X?
- What was your background before X?
- What are the biggest bottlenecks in cause X?
- What skills are most useful for this role?
- What projects/volunteering should/could I do?
- What is the process for being selected for interviews?
How should I prepare for interviews in this area? - If I were to be a good candidate for role X in one year, what would be the best additions to my CV?
- How do you do well in this job?
- What do you wish you knew before working here?
- Can you think of somewhere else I could have more impact with my current background and skills?
- What do you do day to day?
- What impact do you think you have/could have?
- What might be the most impactful thing you achieved last year/month?
- What might be the most impactful thing you achieve next year/month?
- What's a bottleneck you have with regard to having more impact?
- What would you do if you weren’t working here?
- What do you think is the most neglected project/activity in your field?
- If you had all your living costs paid for, what project would you work on and why?
- What was the last thing you changed your mind about (in relation to your career)?
What was the most useful thing you’ve learned in the last week/month/year? - (Meta) How could these questions be improved? Were there any particularly good or bad ones?
In London there is a directory that some people have used to arrange 1-1s, I think there are a few others for different locations, careers and causes. I don't know if it's better to have one master directory/CRM/messaging capability on the EA hub or for each group to have their own way of networking.
Yeah, it's trying to do 2/3 things at once, and using a forum software for a directory isn't optimal.
It looks like DFID have funded a similar intervention today.
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/uk-aid-to-tackle-global-spread-of-coronavirus-fake-news
"Dangerous myths about coronavirus which are hampering the global fight against the disease will be challenged thanks to a new initiative backed by UK aid.
The support from the Department for International Development will challenge misinformation in South East Asia and Africa, which is then spreading worldwide, and direct people to the right advice to help stop the spread of the virus.
False claims and conspiracy theories have spread rapidly on social media, touting ‘cures’ like drinking bleach or rubbing mustard and garlic into your skin. These pose a serious risk to health and can speed up the spread of the virus, by stopping people taking simple practical, preventative steps like washing their hands.
DFID’s £500,000 support will go to the Humanitarian-to-Humanitarian (H2H) Network, which has extensive experience addressing the spread of misinformation during epidemics, for example following the 2015 Ebola outbreak.
The work of the H2H Network will complement UK initiatives by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport and the NHS to tackle misinformation online.
International Development Secretary Anne-Marie Trevelyan said:
“Misinformation harms us all. By tackling it at source we will help stop the spread of fake news – and coronavirus – worldwide, including within the UK.”
H2H will work with partners BBC Media Action and Internews to create verified information in various languages to tackle specific mistruths spreading in South East Asia and Africa. Their work will also support journalists in these regions to write more accurately about the virus using information from the World Health Organization.
Support will also go to Translators without Borders, which monitors false information in various languages and translates validated content from WHO and other health agencies, and Evidence Aid which updates a database of research on diseases each day.
The initiative will analyse social media and online content to identify where the misinformation is coming from and how it is spreading – so victims of fake news can be sent the correct information and directed to official health advice."
Would that distinguish between people who knew about all the current resources and still wanted more versus those who hadn't been connected to what is currently available?
I think I agree with the minimum recommended resources you suggest, but I don't see Facebook group membership requirements as the only filter. It's more likely to be based on seeing what people write/projects they do/future attendance at EA events.
Sometimes obstacles can be good but maybe there are people who would be really great organisers if they just knew one other person who was interested or were encouraged to go to EAG.
A tangential issue that might be part of this disagreement is that anyone can decide to become a group leader, create a meetup page and start telling people about their version of EA as there is no official licence/certification. That would require more thought as to whether having official groups is a good idea.
I doubt the people who are plausibly good founders would actually benefit from such groups, and even less from some vague coordination due to facebook groups
I agree that Facebook groups are most likely not the ideal coordination tool, but I haven't found a platform that is as widely used without having bigger flaws.
I also agree that the impact could be negative if there are people who would build communities just because they met via Facebook but I think a lot of that depends on how it is used. One check is ensuring that people who join understand EA and have a connection to that region. Another is having filters and coaching for people do want to organise, which should reduce the chance of a negative outcome whilst making it easier for a positive one.
I think having someone involved in EA create the various focal points means that we are less likely in the future to see groups appear that have no connection to the wider EA network and research but have already become the default organisation in their area.
There is this post - Why not to rush to translate effective altruism into other languages.
And this post I wrote where one conclusion is that maybe there should be less focus on location when thinking about movement building.
I'd agree that it makes sense to get it right first time but maybe that's one reason to have someone involved in EA community building able to filter and help people who are interested in EA in neglected regions.
Switzerland seems to have a bunker and archive system - link.
I think even if it isn't inflammatory, a different title might make the intended audience less defensive and more likely to change their minds as it isn't about their identity, and more about how much weight to give RCTs versus other evaluation methods.
There is Generation Pledge, with the below description.
"Generation Pledge exists to unlock billions of dollars that can be deployed to fund the most effective solutions to the world’s greatest challenges.
We work with a community of heirs who are committed to doing good with the resources they have available. We offer opportunities to learn, connect, collaborate and take action to create large-scale positive impact."
I have quite a few newsletter subscriptions, with some that are tangentially related to EA.
I sometimes search twitter for mentions of effective altruism.
A few things come via LinkedIn connections on the newsfeed.
I think the community is composed of people who either attend multiple EA events each year or contribute to online discussion, and some proportion of people who work at an EA related organisation, so maybe between 500-2000 people.
There are quite a few people who might attend an EAG or read content but don't get involved and wouldn't consider themselves part of the community. I might be biased as part of my work at EA London has included having lots of conversations with people who often have a great understanding of EA but have never been to an event.
The 1-3X and 10/90 percent are loosely held assumptions. I think it may be more accurate to assume there are power law distributions for people who would consider themselves in the community and also for those who are in the wider network. If both groups have a similar distribution, than the network probably has an order of magnitude more people who have 100x-1000x impact. Some examples include junior members of the civil service being quite involved in EA, but there are also senior civil servants and lots of junior civil servants who are interested in EA but don't attend meetups.
I'm not sure that it is a core EA org belief that the difference is down to whether someone is heavily engaged in the community or not. Lots of examples they use of people who have had a much larger impact come from before EA was a movement.
the argument does not hold if those groups are only for people who are very familiar with EA thinking
I think when creating most groups/sub-communities it's important that there is a filter to make sure people have an understanding of EA, otherwise it can become an average group for that cause area rather than a space for people who have an interest in EA and that specific cause, and are looking for EA related conversations.
But the likelihood that I would have changed my cause area because other causes are more important to work on would have been smaller. This could be because it is less likely to come across good arguments for other causes as not that many people around me have an incentive to point me towards those resources.
I think most people who have an interest in EA also hold uncertainty about their moral values, the tractability of various interventions and which causes are most important. It can be easy sometimes to pigeonhole people with particular causes depending on where they work or donate but I don't meet many people who only care about one cause, and the EA survey had similar results.
If people are able to come across well reasoned arguments for interventions within a cause area they care about, I think it's more likely that they'll stick around. As most of the core EA material (newsletters, forum, FB) has reference to multiple causes, it will be hard to avoid these ideas. Especially if they are also in groups for their career/interests/location.
I think the bigger risk is losing people who instantly bounce from EA when it doesn't even attempt to answer their questions rather than the risk of people not getting exposed to other ideas. If EA doesn't have cause groups then there's probably a higher chance of someone just going to another movement that does allow conversation in that area.
This quote from an 80,000 Hours interview with Kelsey Piper phrases it much better.
"Maybe pretty early on, it just became obvious that there wasn’t a lot of value in preaching to people on a topic that they weren’t necessarily there for, and that I had a lot of thoughts on the conversations people were already having. Then I think one thing you can do to share any reasoning system, but it works particularly well for effective altruism is just to apply it consistently, in a principled way, to problems that people care about. Then, they’ll see whether your tools look like useful tools. If they do, then they’ll be interested in learning more about that. I think my ideal effective altruist movement, and obviously this trade off against lots of other things and I don’t know that we can be doing more of it on the margin. My ideal effective altruist movement had insightful nuanced, productive, takes on lots and lots of other things so that people could be like, “Oh, I see how effective altruists have tools for answering questions. “I want the people who have tools for answering questions to teach me about those tools. I want to know what they think the most important questions are. I want to sort of learn about their approach."
the EA community tends to be especially capable
I'm not sure that an EA community member is 'especially capable' compared to a capable person who attends less events or is less engaged with online content. The wider network may have quite a few people who have absorbed 5+ years of online material to do with EA, but rarely interacted, and those people will have used the same advice to choose donations and careers as more engaged members.
I also think the network has higher variance, you may get people who are not doing much altruistically, but there will also be more people in business with 20+ year experience, leading academics in their field and people higher up in government who want to good with their careers.
Side point
Comparisons have been made before about the impact of an EA and, e.g., the average developed country person.
Whilst I'm aware that you move on from this point, I'm not sure it's useful to have as a comparison when the post is about people who are aware of EA and of having impact within their career rather than everyone in a developed country. It may be that it's also hard to parse your text without paragraphs and removing that first point would have helped.
Thanks, updated.
I think similar areas were covered in these two posts as well 80,000 Hours - how to read our advice and Thoughts on 80,000 Hours’ research that might help with job-search frustrations.
There was a Facebook post on top 10 concepts for people to know in EA.
Here are some of the suggestions.
- Cause neutrality
- Scale, Neglectedness and Solvability framework
- Maximising welfare
- Moral patient-hood
- Moral uncertainty
- Moral trade
- Longtermism
- Hits-based giving
- Worldview diversification
- Earning-to-give
- Comparative advantage
- Epistemic principles
- Crucial Considerations
I think some of the points in this 80,000 Hours article apply to EA in general
- We’ve been wrong before, and we’ll be wrong again
- Many of the questions we tackle are a matter of balance, and different people will benefit from considering opposing messages
- Personal fit matters, so focus more on strategies than simple answers
- There are disagreements within the community
- Treat doing good as just one of many important goals in life
Also this one - Misconceptions of 80,000 Hours research (although maybe they wont be misconceptions if it is the first thing they read)
- Roles outside explicitly EA organisations are most people’s best career options.
- Sometimes these roles aren’t as visible to the community, including to 80,000 Hours, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t highly impactful.
- Many especially impactful roles require specific skills. If none of these roles are currently a great fit for you, but one could be if you developed the right skills, it can be worth it to take substantial time to do so.
- You should use 80,000 Hours to figure out what your best career is and how to get there, not what “the” best careers are.
I'd add in different ways of having impact and how they generally compare as people often ask about why EA doesn't do much in one of the following; career, donations, volunteering, influence/voting and personal consumption
Also some articles that I've shared quite regularly with people newer to EA.
Why choose a cause and how to strategically choose a cause
6 tips on choosing an effective charity
Effective altruism as question
One idea is for them to coordinate the global community of people in marketing/sales who are interested in EA.
Providing a point of entry for other marketers to see where the best places may be for them to work, what skills to build and what networks to join so that they can have more positive impact.
This may include a newsletter every few months highlighting job opportunities and examples of marketing for good, an online group(FB/Slack/etc) for people to swap ideas and potentially get mentorship.
I think that this is a good plan and it would be interesting to hear if there have been any updates in the last 4 months.
I agree with a lot of the other comments but one thing I haven't noticed is how to provide value to the wider network of people in Germany who have an interest in EA but may not want to go to events or become heavily engaged.
I don't have a complete list, but here are quite a few of the organisations that I subscribe to for updates.
Long Term Future
Centre for the Study of Existential Risk
Global Catastrophic Risk Institute
Artificial Intelligence
Center for Security and Emerging Technology
Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence
Animal Welfare
Farm Animal Welfare Newsletter from OPP
Global Development
Devex International Development
Wellcome Trust (also improving institutions)
International Initiative for Impact Evaluation
Innovations for Poverty Action
Schistosomiasis Control Initiative
Overseas Development Institute
Development Media International
Improving Institutions
Cambridge Centre for Science and Policy
Centre for Excellence in Development and Learning
UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose
Effective Altruism
Effective Altruism Newsletter (by CEA, EA Hub and Rethink Charity)
Philanthropy
The Center for Effective Philanthropy
General Interest
Matt’s Thoughts In Between - Founder of Entrepeneur First
I thought it was so that it tied in with EA Funds, which is something that made me think CEA was paying much more attention to donations, making a unified system that also allowed people to donate from one platform and automatically record donations.
Although I agree that repeated donations not being an option is quite annoying.
I used these images for a slide show a few years ago, the original source being this report by CEA (page 6).
That might be old data though, this is the most up to date version on JPALs website.
I don't think addressing these questions in a handbook that's meant to introduce EA would be that useful as most of them require much more in depth reading than a few paragraphs would allow.
It may make more sense to have an FAQ for these typical questions or to say that lots of areas within EA are still being discussed, and then list the questions.
I think this is a really good comment and probably should be it's own post.
A minor point, I would say that giving to the Against Malaria Foundation may not on it's own be systemic change, but if enough people keep on giving to charities that are evaluated on their impact, it could change individual giving as a system, as charities respond to these new incentives.
A two stage strategy might be best, outreach for the first week, then core community the rest of the semester.
It may be that getting lots of email sign ups can be okay to then pass on 80,000 Hours material, the first few events and 1-1 sign up. I've heard from quite a few people that they first heard of EA at a university fair and kept on getting the 80,000 Hours emails and then got much more involved once they started working 3-5 years later.
After focusing on outreach for the first week, I agree it probably makes sense to focus on the core 5-30 people who are actually interested in EA rather than trying to put on events for the wider student audience that signed up to everything but wont really come to anything.
If there is a situation where someone is really interested but it's hectic, I would put a note by their name to remember to reach out to them individually rather than prioritising the 5 minute conversation.
1. Most of my time will be spent doing similar things to last year, although I've only been working full time for 9 months. I think innovation, at least for me, happens over time rather than as a one off process, with ideas being formed and then being tested to see what people like. One recent example is the community spotlight, which was an idea a few weeks ago and now has become a regular post.
In terms of taking EA to the next level, there isn't a plan to grow or hire more people but rather coordinate and support nascent organisations in London that can start doing other work and grow independently.
2. I will have a look
There is a Facebook group and a small page on the website.
It's not that I don't want people to upskill, it's that I think it's best done by people who have experience in that area, whether that is via a course or workshop.
In terms of getting people to meet in person, I agree that certain talks/workshops/themes can help attract different people, but the best outcomes from that aren't usually what people learn, but the connections they make, and designing a workshop just to drive attendance may not be the most efficient way of getting people to attend.
I agree with everything you said, I guess those three points aren't things that I think about often but might make sense to update the document to better reflect that.
I may have missed this but does the $10 billion spent on peace building programs in 2016 include spending by governments, or is that just foundations?
I'm not sure that's roughly true, EA priorities also have to be neglected, generally the most effective interventions are already taken by governments and large organisations.
I don't think that this article is a good representation of the debate over these issues and takes an approach where the author seems to have already made up their mind about possible solutions.
This post from Our World in Data probably gives the best overview of stagnation in global poverty
"A generation ago the majority of the world's poorest lived in economies that went on to grow very fast. What is different now is that a rising share of the world's poorest are living in economies which have not achieved economic growth in the recent past.
Half a billion are expected to remain in extreme poverty by 2030 if current trends of economic growth and levels of within-country inequality persist.
The decline of extreme poverty is expected to slow down.
Much of the progress will be driven by economic growth in Asia, and India in particular. The number of people in extreme poverty in Africa is expected to stagnate."
I think this article in Vox covers some of the main points.
"...improving the American education system, while important, is neither a neglected cause nor a tractable one. It is a system on which hundreds of billions of dollars are spent annually by diffuse governments whose policies are difficult and expensive to change, where matters of importance are intensely contested, and where interest groups tend to fight each other to a standstill.
And it’s a system where, even after investing millions if not billions in research, we still don’t have a lot of confidence as to which interventions are helpful and which are not. The views of key actors, notably the Gates Foundation, have tended to shift rapidly on those substantive questions.
If every issue in the world were as crowded and hard to make progress on as education in the US, then I’d understand why foundations like Gates and Broad keep chugging. But that’s not the case..."
I think tags might be helpful, but would probably be used by very few people and still miss out the most important reasons for having a different structure.
Another thing to think about is that the forum as it currently is might be favoured by people who use it, but may miss out on the counterfactual people who would use an actual forum if it existed or bounce upon impact with this forum.
Functionally it would be similar, but from a user point of view it would probably be quite a different experience.
From my own usage I have rarely used tags on blogs or news feeds but have often interacted with different sub-forums.
I guess I have concerns with over valuing metrics that are easier to collect which might lead to optimising for the wrong activities.
There is the impact report from EA London for 2018.
Why not just use Glassdoor?
Thanks for writing this up, I think it's really useful to collate these resources together. Although I think some of the sources are a bit out of date and some recent write ups indicate the opposite advice in some situations - one example being outreach techniques.
Facebook advertisement, direct messages and meetup.com subscriptions are very effective
for outreach but are costly. Email lists and word of mouth are not effective.
I would say that email lists and word of mouth have been the two most useful ways of building up a community in London, this could potentially be down to how it's done, but we stopped doing FB adverts and meetup events as it would generally attract people who aren't as interested in EA.
I also have this list of various community building resources I have found useful over the last few years that might have some things that could be added to the literature review.
I wrote a similar post about this a few months ago, a few days before GiveWell announced they were looking into a wider range of interventions.
The EA fund for global development seems to be the easiest way to get funding towards this area. I suspect that most donors involved in EA would be happy to fund interventions with less hard evidence if given the choice.
One reason why there may be a lack of conversation in this area is that there are many organisations and 10,000+ experts in international development and ways to engage that don't involve EA. Whereas in factory farming and emerging technology risks there are fewer places for people to go to discuss these causes and so discussion happens in EA spaces (until causes get big enough to create their own networks).
There is a paper from the Centre for Global Development that might be relevant.
"We Can Learn a Lot about Improving Girls’ Education from Interventions That Don’t Target Girls"
It is probably this career discussion one.
One low cost way of doing this, if the EA newsletter people thought it was useful, would be to just have a link in the main newsletter for the recent updates post.
I'd be happy if someone else wanted to send out these updates or put them on a website.
These updates don't add any extra info so if people are happy to ignore jobs/events they could sign up or use an RSS feed for the website.
The books on this list by conceptually are quite useful. The ones I've read and thought are useful I've listed below.
Superforecasting
Thinking Fast and Slow
The Undercover Economist
The Righteous Mind
Predictably Irrational
The Better Angels of our Nature
Influence
Adapt
The Signal and the Noise
Some others I have found useful
4DX - How to execute plans efficiently (meant more for people in charge of orgs or teams but still applicable to individuals)
Good Strategy/Bad Strategy - Summary of a useful strategy framework
The Charisma Myth
Lean Startup
The Art of Gathering
The Art of Community
You Are Not So Smart
Also two EA reading lists that cover poverty, future generations, animal welfare, psychology, productivity, career/business and advocacy.
Not the posts exactly, but there is the EA London blog page which contains all the newsletters although they include events and job postings that might be less relevant.
I'd be happy for other people to make posts if they've found something they want to dive into.
I think the gist of the "Heretical Knot" is that we could always do more good, and so we are always second guessing ourselves and burning out attempting to do more.
Here is an edited version of the dissertation mentioned earlier. It has had most of the non EA London related content removed to help make it more relevant.