Note: This post was crossposted from the Coefficient Giving Farm Animal Welfare Research Newsletter by the Forum team, with the author's permission. The author may not see or respond to comments on this post.
Subtitle: On vegan advocacy, effective altruism, and FIFA
I turn 40 today. Here are some hot takes.
On factory farming
1. Our biggest challenge is salience. If factory farming led the evening news, it wouldn’t last lo...
Impressions from the 21st Annual U.S. Cluster Headache Patient Conference, organized by Clusterbusters.
On the morning of the last day of the conference, E. was hanging out with other “clusterheads” outside the conference hotel when he started having a cluster headache attack. Before he could go back to his hotel room, J. offered E. his DMT v...
TL;DR:
The movement has an evidence problem. To solve it, for each intervention we need to know:
* What types of evidence that intervention needs
* What types of evidence different sources can give us
In this post, we outline a framework for evidencing an intervention through five stages:
...
What do we do as newcomers? How do we make sense of all of the information out there? How do I get involved if I'm not an academic, and I don't have "career experience" to fall back on? I've just published a blog post about some of my impressions as a newcomer to EA. (Though I don't know if I answer any of these questions very well, because I don't know if I have the answers yet.)
Hi Danielle, welcome! I really enjoyed reading your blog post – it seems like you have a skill for communicating clearly, and I'd love to read more of your writing as you keep thinking more about EA :)
One thing you can do as you learn more is to try and crystallize what cruxes you have for your beliefs. Talking about cruxes is a common way EAs communicate, as it can help people avoid talking past each other and instead focus primarily on the things that would change each other's minds.
My take is that it's much more valuable to spend time early on thinking about your values and what you think the most important problems are, compared to finding an EA-relevant job quickly (because there are compelling cases for a lot of cause areas, and you might find that you change your mind about what path you want to pursue).
In terms of getting connected, you could try going to a meetup in your city (if there is one). Some people enjoy their city EA groups, others don't as much. EAGs and EAGx's can also be good places to meet people who share your interests. Yes, many groups use Facebook to coordinate, but I think there is less significant community discussion on FB than there used to be.
Hope this helps and good luck!