If you're (re)starting a local EA group or running a local EA event, consider reaching out to people nearby according to the people directory or an EAG Swapcard. There will be people who do not know about a local group or event and otherwise wouldn't hear about it, and it's pretty painless on both ends! Obviously don't spam them, so (probably) only do this when (re)starting. I did this for an EA Edinburgh event and immediately got some responses. To make this easier: Put your (approximate) location on the people directory so people can tell you about nearby events and you get them suggested by the forum, especially if you're not in a hub!

Lots of people in the Bay seem to be thinking about/preparing for/making funding decisions based on the idea that lots of philanthropy will be given to AIS/EA cause areas very soon (i.e. end of year-ish). I would love for someone to write the comprehensive steel man case against this, as I think it’s probably underrated (some reasons to think they won’t give the money/it won’t be as much as some assume. Happy to comment/ speak to whoever is interested in doing this.  

Me and @Fran are co-hosting a podcast, The World Can Be Better! (hosted on Substack, also on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube) In our first co-hosted episode we interview @finm about better futures, the intelligence explosion, and Fin's underrated post 'No ghost in the machine'.  We'll be recording more episodes soon. We're aiming to a) keep it accessible to an interested but non-specialist audience, and b) to talk to cool people who are working on making the world better. This is on top of full time jobs for both of us, so we're not promising weekly uploads or anything too fancy.  LMK in the comments or dm if there is someone you'd love to be a guest on our podcast! The ideal guest is a) doing good effectively in an interesting way and b) is down to joke around a bit. 

Next week, me and @Fran will be recording with @NickLaing for The World Can Be Better.  What would you like us to ask him? 

Idea for thinking about the future of EAGs and whether to keep them cause-neutral or have separate cause-themed events: * Get (anonymised) swapcard data and look at who had meetings with whom to work out how strong the clustering is. If there are clear groups that had lots of meetings within the group, but few meetings with people from other groups, that is a sign that there should just be a separate event for that group. Whereas if there is no group that can be cleanly split into its own event, that is a sign to keep it together. * One simple metric for this could be: if you split EAG in two (e.g. longtermist vs neartermist or whatever) how many fewer total connections would there be. (Maybe this analysis already happens!)