Welcome!
If you're new to the EA Forum:
- Consider using this thread to introduce yourself!
- You could talk about how you found effective altruism, what causes you work on and care about, or personal details that aren't EA-related at all.
- (You can also put this info into your Forum bio.)
Everyone:
- If you have something to share that doesn't feel like a full post, add it here! (You can also create a quick take.)
- You might also share good news, big or small (See this post for ideas.)
- You can also ask questions about anything that confuses you (and you can answer them, or discuss the answers).
For inspiration, you can see the last open thread here.
Other Forum resources
Hello everyone,
I am Pacifique Niyorurema from Rwanda. I was introduced to the EA movement last year (2022). I did the introductory program and felt overwhelmed by the content, 80k hours podcast, Slack communities, local groups, and literature. having a background in economics and mission aligning with my values and beliefs, I felt I have found my place. I am pretty excited to be in this community. with time, I plan to engage more in the communities and contribute as an active member. I tend to lean more on meta EA, effective giving and governance, and poverty reduction.
Best.
Would other people find it helpful if I write an article detailing "reasons to be skeptical of working as an independent researcher?" The reasons will come from a mixture of interviews, first-principle thinking, reading past work on this topic by other people (including RP's work), some of my own experiences in research, and my observations as a grantmaker on LTFF.
"Agree"-vote if helpful, "Disagree" if not helpful; assume my nearest counterfactual is writing a different post drawn from the same distribution as my past posts or comments, particularly LTFF-related ones.
The Long-Term Future Fund is somewhat funding constrained. In addition, we (I) have written a number of docs and announcement that we hope to publicly release in the next 1-3 weeks. In the meantime, I recommend anti-x-risk donors who think they might want to donate to LTFF to hold off on donating until after our posts are out next month, to help them make informed decisions about where best to donate to. The main exception of course is funding time-sensitive projects from other charities.
I will likely not answer questions now but will be happy to do so after the docs are released.
(I work for the Long-term Future Fund as a fund manager aka grantmaker. Historically this has been entirely in a volunteer capacity, but I've recently started being paid as I've ramped my involvement up).
Hi! I'm Alyssa. I've been abstractly in favor of EA since around 2014ish when I first encountered it in the LessWrong-sphere, and actively doing the 10%-donations thing since starting my first job post-college in 2021. I've been adjacent to the EA community throughout all of time, but haven't been contributing much to it myself; thus, prior to now, my interactions with the EA forum have been purely reading-ish, rather than posting-ish. But now I've finally found something worth posting about! And thus I'm now here, introducing myself for real.
The 'thing worth posting about' in question is: slightly under two weeks ago, I found an EA channel in my company's Slack, including a nice straightforward pointer to "here are the various EA charities which the company is willing to do donation-matching towards". Previously, I'd looked up various particularly-effective charities in the company's donation-matching tool and found that it wasn't matching with any of them; but, despite this, there apparently are some it matches with! (In particular, CEA's various funds.) My company does up to $10,000 in donation-matching per person per year; I've been entirely missing that opportunity, due to not... (read more)
Hi everyone, I'm Claudia!
I found out about Effective Altruism through the Waking Up app. Sam Harris brought William MacAskill as a guest to speak about Being Good and Doing Good, and it really resonated with me. The Waking Up app already did a great job in making me contemplate on what it means to live a considered life, and then hearing about EA really got me thinking about my career and how I can contribute to the world.
I'm currently a Product Manager at a B2B startup, working remotely and based in Singapore. After reading the career guide from 80,000 hours, I found that operations management is probably the best career path for me at the moment, so I'm considering what options I can take to eventually get to Operations at a high impact organization. If anyone has a similar experience of pivoting from product management / working in startups to operations management, I'd love to get your advice!
I'm excited to be here, and looking forward to contributing to the EA community.
Hi, I'm an undergraduate psychology student from Moldova. I found effective altruism when I was searching for a list of serious global problems when I was trying to write some fiction.
Now I'm trying to learn more about affective neuroscience and brain simulation in the hope that this information could help with AI alignment and safety.
Anyways, good luck with whatever you're working on.
Hello everyone,
I am Joel Mwaura Kuiyaki from Kenya. I was introduced to the EA movement by a friend thinking it might be one of those normal lessons but I actually was intrigued and really enjoyed the first Intro sessions we had. It was what I had been looking for for a long while.
I intend to specialize in Effective giving, governance, and longtermism.
However, I am still interested in learning more about other cause areas and implementing them.
Hello everyone,
I am Janos, a newbie member of two days. Originally from Hungary but have been living in London since late 1950's.
Interested in systemic reform of the current version of "capitalism" which is not capitalism as Adam Smith taught us.
I consider Effective Altruism as an immediate response to current suffering, like a First Aid service. But it has to run in parallel with effective efforts to transform a structurally faulty global system.
As I see that problem, it is based on a bad economic model which is structured to extract the wealth created socially, and transfer it to the top percentile of a population.
PS
I have a self-taught economist's detailed view of the "nuts'n'bolts analysis of the problem...
What is your nuts'n'bolts analysis of the problem?
(Cross-posted on the EA Anywhere Slack and a few other places)
I have, and am willing to offer to EA members and organizations upon request, the following generalist skills:
- Facilitation. Organize and run a meeting, take notes, email follow-ups and reminders, whatever you need. I don't need to be an expert in the topic, I don't need to personally know the participants. I do need a clear picture of the meeting's purpose and what contributions you're hoping to elicit from the participants.
- Technical writing. More specifically, editing and proofreading, which don't require I fully understand the subject matter. I am a human Hemingway Editor. I have been known to cut a third of the text out of a corporate document while retaining all relevant information to the owner's satisfaction. I viciously stamp out typos.
- Presentation review and speech coaching. I used to be terrified of public speaking. I still am, but now I'm pretty good at it anyway. I have given prepared and impromptu talks to audiences of dozens-to-hundreds and I have coached speakers giving company TED talks to thousands. A friend who reached out to me for input said my feedback was "exceedingly helpful".
... (read more)We should use quick posts a lot more. And anyone doing the more typical long posts should ALWAYS do the TLDRS I see many doing. It will help not scare people off. Im new to these forums, joined about a month ago coming in from first hearing Will M on Sam Harris a few times, reading doing good better, listening to lots of 80k hours pods and doing the trial giving what we can pledge, joining EA everywhere slack etc. But I find the vast majority of these forum posts extremely unapproachable. I consider myself a pretty smart guy and I’m pretty into reading boo... (read more)
Hi everyone, I'm Connor. I'm an economics PhD student at UChicago. I've been tangentially interested in the EA movement for years, but I've started to invest more after reading What We Owe The Future. In about a month, I'm attending a summer course hosted by the Forethought Foundation, so I look forward to learning even more.
I intend to specialize in development and environmental economics, so I'm most interested in the global health and development focus area of EA. However, I look forward to learning more about other causes.
I'm also hoping to learn more about how to orient my research and work towards EA topics and engage with the community during my studies.
What exactly does the "Request for Feedback" button do when writing a post? I began a post, clicked the aforementioned button, and my post got saved as a draft, with no other visible feedback as to what was happening, or whether the request was successful, or what would happen next.
Also, I kind of expected that I'd be able to mention what kind of feedback I'm actually interested in; a generic request for feedback is unlikely to give me the kind of feedback I'm interested in, after all. Is the idea here to add a draft section with details re: the request for feedback, or what?
Hello! I'm just here to introduce myself as I think I'm a bit of an unusual effective altruist. I am an astrobiologist and my research focuses on the search for life on Mars. Before discovering effective altruism I was always very interested in the long term future of life in the context of looming existential risks. I thought the best thing to do was to send life to other planets so that it would survive in a worst case scenario. But a masters degree later, I got into effective altruism and decided that this cause was a 10/10 on importance, 10/10 on negle... (read more)
Hi. I am posting under my real name. I have been effectively banned from less wrong for non actionable reasons. The moderators made a bunch of false accusations publicly without giving me a chance to review or rebut any of them. I believe it was because I don't think AI is necessarily inevitably going to cause genocide and that obvious existing techniques in software should allow us to control AI. This view seems to be banned from discussion, with downvotes used to silence anyone discussing it. I was curious if this moderation action applied here.
The... (read more)
Hello! My name is Dawson. I am near to completing my PhD in aerospace engineering. I recently switched to working remotely and I have been missing collaborative projects and working with people.
If you know of projects, volunteer opportunities, or part-time jobs that would benefit from someone with an engineering research background, please let me know! My primary goal is having a regular reason to talk with people, and I would love to use that time to contribute to EA rather than working at a coffee shop or something. (I'm reading through the EA list of opportunities as well, but I thought I would post something here just in case someone reading this knows of an opportunity)
Hi everyone, I'm Paul, a software engineer based in Münster, Germany.
I came across Effective Altruism because of the book by William MacAskill a few years ago. Later, I came in contact with 80.000 hours, giving what we can and many of their representatives in various podcasts/books/articles. I consider Effective Altruism one of the greatest movements I have come across and I feel very grateful for being able to contribute.
Up until now, I have "only" earned to give. But having recently quit my job and having had a few start-up experiences, I now want ... (read more)
A thought, with low epistemic confidence:
Some wealthy effective altruists argue that by accumulating more wealth, they can ultimately donate more in the long run. While this may initially seem like a value-neutral approach, they reinforce an unequal rather than altruistic distribution of power.
Widening wealth disparities and consolidating power in the hands of a few, further marginalises those who are already disadvantaged. As we know, more money is not inherently valuable. Instead, it is how much someone has relative to others that influences its exchange value, and therefore influence over scarce resources in a zero-sum manner with other market participants, including recipients of charity and their benefactors.
I was doing the 80,000 hours career guide, but I suppose it's too ambitious for me. I just want to work for an org with a good altruistic mission, not completely maximize my impact. What's the career advice for that? I've been doing full-stack web dev for 11 years now, so I've learned a thing or two about running big complicated projects, at least in the software world, but I think this transfers, since complexity is complexity.
I looked at the orgs listed in the software dev career path, but they didn't seem very inspiring. I'm open to going back to colleg... (read more)
I think it's important that there isn't a knee jerk reaction (e.g. it may not be the fault of any person, there may be a complex cause, or there may not be any real issue at all).
Why has the virtual program scores sort of fallen off? That's a huge stat change.
Hi Defacto! I work on Virtual Programs at CEA.
I believe Angelina left a note in the post where she shared this graph, but right before that cycle we changed the quiz (only 4/10 of the questions are the same). We knew these new questions were quite a bit harder, although candidly we were not expecting score drops this dramatic. We're doing some investigation of the questions, and my guess is we'll iterate a bit more since I think some of the new questions were difficult in ways that are not actually about understanding of the content.
With all that said, I wouldn't focus too much on changes in this score right now, since they are almost certainly tracking changes in evaluation criteria and not changes in student understanding.
Are the Career Conversations and AI Pause Debate weeks on the Forum part of a trend to have 'week-specific' topics? I sort-of like the idea to focus Forum discussion on rotating/specific topics (alongside the usual dynamics) to see what the Community thinks of issue X at a given time as well as share up-to-date opinions and resources.
If it is, is there a prospective calendar anywhere?
I'm extremely upset about recent divergence from ForumMagnum / LessWrong.
- 1 click to go from any page to my profile became 2 clicks. (is the argument that you looked at the clickstream dashboard and found that Quinn was the only person navigating to his profile noticeably more than he was navigating to say DMs or new post? I go to my profile a lot to look up prior comments so I can not repeat myself across discord servers or threads as much!)
- permalink in the top right corner of comment, instead of clicking the timestamp (David Mears suggests tha
... (read more)Thanks for sharing your feedback! Responding to each point:
Hi all,
I came across the 80,000 hours initiative a few years ago and it 100% aligned with my purpose in life.
I'm on track to give 50% of my salary to the top EA charity [We are downsizing our home] later this year.
Just having this purpose has undoubtedly made me happier and I'd like to promote this benefit to others, as my second passion is increasing Happiness, the synergy between the two is fantastic.
In the meantime, I've been adjusting some famous quotes to include an EA mindset, what thinks you?
'If you want to lift y... (read more)
Perhaps not entirely EA but I came across this post that’s potentially interesting and disturbing of a statistician casting scepticism on the evidence that convicted Lucy Letby and I wondered if any rationalists could assess its claim. Potentially touches on weaknesses in the justice system regarding medical evidence and how’s it’s weighed up. https://gill1109.com/2023/05/24/the-lucy-letby-case/?amp=1
The blog post "This can't go on" is quite prominent in the introductory reading lists to AI Safety. I really struggle to see why. Most of the content in the post is about why the growth we currently have is very unusual and why we can't have economic growth forever. I think mainstream audience is already OK with that and that's a reason they are sceptical to AI boom scenarios. When I first read that post I was very confused. After organising a few reading groups other people seem to have similar confusions too. It's weird to argue from "look, we can't grow... (read more)
Hello everyone,
I was introduced to the effective altruism movement about a decade ago, but it's taken me a while to engage with it. At present, I'm interested in exploring ways that modern information and computing technology can help people more effectively align short term decisions (e.g. purchases, housing choices, transportation, employment, etc.) with their ultimate/long-term objectives (e.g. in medicine, economics, social justice, sustainability, etc.), as well as understanding the ethical implications of and possibilities allowed by emerging technologies, and what factors might ultimately determine or limit how those technologies are adopted and expressed.
I have a proposal for making an AGI killswitch.
Assuming god like computational budgets, algorithmic improvements, and hardware improvements, can you use fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) to train and run an AGI? FHE allows you to run computation on encrypted data without decrypting it. Wouldn't such an AGI find the world illegible with out its input being specifically encrypted for it with a key?
Can the key then be split into shards so that m of n shards are needed to encrypt queries to the FHE AGI? Can you also create a m of n function so tha... (read more)
Hi I am Richard. I live in the US. Moved to the US from the Dominican Republic in 1994. I am reading the career guide from 80,000 hours (starting chapter 8 today ). I have a systems/business analysis background. I want to use my career to do good in EA, extreme poverty and mental health. Looks like operations is the best path for me. Looking forward to meeting others in this space, learning more and contributing.
Hello everybody, I'm Azad.
I've been into EA for a while but I never explored the community aspect. Since I've decided to go the EAG this year and help volunteer I thought it would be worth being more active on the forums and engage with the community more.
I'm currently a student studying Computer Science. On the side I enjoy reading philosophy papers and books. My introduction into EA was through an Ethics course I took, and I pretty quickly bought it as a moral obligation. From there on I took an interest in AI and animal suffering. Nice to meet you all!
I would like for XPT to be assembled with the sequence functionality plz https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/users/forecasting-research-institute I like the sequence functionality for keeping track of my progress or in what order did I read things
Is there any online aggregator for short term volunteering opportunities with EA-affiliated orgs?
Anecdotally I've seen a lot of interest in volunteering among the EAs in my area, but a quick search for volunteering opportunities online only shows the more traditional "staff a soup kitchen" or "do phone banking" style opportunities. While certainly these are good things, it seems against the ethos of doing the most good with limited resources. Many of the EAs near me are professionals with expertise in high-demand / low-supply skill sets, and it seems like ... (read more)
I have a question regarding artificial sentience.
While I do agree that it might be theoretically possible and could cause suffering on a astronomical scale, I do not understand why we would intentionally or unintentionally create it. Intentionally I don't see any reason why a sentient AI would proform any better than a non-sentient AI. And unintentionally, I could imagine that with some unknown future technology, it might be possible. But no matter how complex we make AI with our current technology, it will just become a more "intelligent" binary sys... (read more)
Introducing Myself
Who I am
My name is Elias Malisi, though my friends call me Prince.
I am an undergraduate student of philosophy & physics at the University of St Andrews and I volunteer as an IT-officer for the physics education non-profit Orpheus e.V.
My mission is to improve the long-term future through research and advocacy that seek to mitigate risks from misaligned incentive structures while advancing the development of safe AI.
I grew up in Germany where I recently graduated high school with a perfect GPA as the best student of ethics in the countr... (read more)
Hello all, I'm new here and trying to find my way around the site. The main reasons I joined are:
- to look for practical information about donating and tax returns in the Netherlands. Does anyone know where I could find information about this? I'm trying to figure out if it's worth it to get something back from taxes and what hoops I have to jump through.
- suggestions for charities. My current idea is that I want to donate an amount to GiveWell for them to use as they see fit, and donate an amount to a charity specialized in providing contraception
... (read more)Has anything changed on the forum recently? I am no longer able to open posts in new tabs with middle-click? Is it just me?
TLDR: Bio Data scientist here concerned about AI risks , working to get his institution (DCRI) at Duke working on AI and alignment.
--
Long Version: I wrote below blurb and pasted it into https://bard.google.com/ to get TLDR to us...
Can you create a TLDR for the following post: Hi Sage Arbor here. I just joined effectivealtruism.org and have been listening to the 80K podcast for about a year. I work in data science (PhD biochem) and currently work with clinical trails at Duke. My main concernt is AI in the next 10 years. Id like my institution Du... (read more)
Hi,
My name is Dhruv and this is my first post on the forum. I have done a few EA adjacent related events like fellowships and an EAGx event. Currently most interested in AI governance policy and effective giving