Quick takes

Learnings from a day of walking conversations  Yesterday, I did 7 one-hour walks with Munich EA community members. Here's what I learned and why I would recommend it to similarly extroverted community members: Format * Created an info document and 7 one-hour Calendly slots and promoted them via our WhatsApp group * One hour worked well as a default timeframe - 2 conversations could have been shorter while others could have gone longer * Scheduling more than an hour with someone unfamiliar can feel intimidating, so I'll keep the 1-hour format * Walked approximately 35km throughout the day and painfully learned that street shoes aren't suitable - got blisters that could have been prevented with proper hiking boots Participants * Directly invited two women to ensure diversity, resulting in 3/7 non-male participants * Noticed that people from timeslots 1 and 3 spontaneously met for their own 1-1 while I was busy with timeslot 2 * Will actively encourage more member-initiated connections next time to create a network effect Conversations * My prepared document helped skip introductions and jump straight into meaningful discussion * Tried balancing listening vs. talking, succeeding in some conversations while others turned into them asking me more questions * Expanded beyond my usual focus on career advice, offering a broader menu of discussion topics * This approach reached people who initially weren't interested in career discussions * One participant was genuinely surprised their background might be impactful in ways they hadn't considered * Another wasn't initially interested in careers but ended up engaging with the topic after natural conversation flow * 2 of 7 people shared personal issues where I focused on empathetic listening and sharing relevant parts of my own experience * The remaining 5 discussions centered primarily on EA concepts and career-related topics Results * Received positive feedback suggesting participants gained eithe

I would like to publicly set a goal not to comment other people's posts with a criticism of some minor side point that doesn't matter. I have a habit of doing that, but I think it's usually more annoying than it is helpful so I would like to stop. If you see me doing it, feel free to call me out (I reserve the right to make substantive criticisms of a post's central arguments)

I'm visiting Mexico City, anyone I should meet / anyone would like to meet up? About me: Ex President LSE EA, doing work in global health, prediction markets, AIS.https://eshcherbinin.notion.site/me

I’ve been working a few hours per week at the Effective Altruism Infrastructure Fund as a Fund Manager since Summer this year. EA’s reputation is at a bit of a low point. I’ve even heard EA described as the ‘boogeyman’ in certain well-meaning circles. So why do I feel inclined to double down on effective altruism rather than move onto other endeavours? Some shower thoughts: * I generally endorse aiming directly for the thing you actually care about. It seems higher integrity, and usually more efficient. I want to do the most good possible, and this goal already has a name and community attached to it; EA. * I find the core, underlying principles very compelling. The Centre for Effective Altruism highlights scope sensitivity, impartiality, recognition of tradeoffs, and the Scout Mindset. I endorse all of these! * Seems to me that EA has a good track record of important insights on otherwise neglected topics. Existential risk, risks of astronomical suffering, AI safety, wild animal suffering; I attribute a lot of success in these nascent fields to the insights of people with a shared commitment to EA principles and goals. * Of course, there’s been a lot of progress on slightly less neglected cause areas too. The mind boggles at the sheer number of human lives saved and the vast amount of animal suffering reduced by organisations funded by Open Philanthropy, for example. * I have personally benefited massively in achieving my own goals. Beyond some of the above insights, I attribute many improvements in my productivity and epistemics to discussions and recommendations that arose out of the pursuit of EA. * In other roles or projects I’m considering, when I think of questions like “who will actually realistically consider acting on this idea I think is great? Giving up their time or money to make this happen?” the most obvious and easiest answer often looks like some subset of the EA community. Obviously there are some echo chamber-y and bias-related reasons tha

EA Awards 1. I feel worried that the ratio of the amount of criticism that one gets for doing EA stuff to the amount of positive feedback one gets is too high 2. Awards are a standard way to counteract this 3. I would like to explore having some sort of awards thingy 4. I currently feel most excited about something like: a small group of people solicit nominations and then choose a short list of people to be voted on by Forum members, and then the winners are presented at a session at EAG BA 5. I would appreciate feedback on: 1. whether people think this is a good idea 2. How to frame this - I want to avoid being seen as speaking on behalf of all EAs 6. Also if anyone wants to volunteer to co-organize with me I would appreciate hearing that

I took the 10% Pledge earlier this year, but was contemplating it a lot for a while before. After taking the pledge, I noticed a couple of insights that I think would have probably made me pledge earlier. I think these insights most directly apply to people who were in a similar situation as I was[1]-  but they might be useful for others as well: * You don’t have to donate 10% right away. Today (!) I learned that "while studying or unemployed, it is within the spirit of the Pledge to give 1% of spending money instead of the income-based pledge amount" and the 10% kicks in once you start earning a stable income. When I first learned about the pledge, I was still at uni and thought I should wait until I had a full-time job and some comfortable savings. However, even if I were already full-time employed at the time and wouldn’t donate at all for the next 4 years, I’d only have to donate ~11%[2] for the rest of my career to compensate for the lack of donations over my lifetime. As someone having a ~median income in a high-income country, I believe that 11% is very doable. In fact (hot take!) I believe that 15-20% should be the norm for people in my situation.  * 10% is not as much as you might think. I think for me, there was a strong anchoring effect here - in my city, most people I know donate something like 30-50€ a month, so 10% (100+ €/month at the time I learned about the pledge) felt like a huge step. Instead of pledging, I decided to just donate what I could “easily miss”. This included instances in which I surprisingly saved money, birthday and Christmas gifts and occasionally deliberate decisions to not purchase “luxuries”. Tracking all of these was a bit tedious, but it showed me how I could easily donate more than 10%, by reframing my donations around what I could genuinely “easily” give away, instead of seeing it in relation to what other people give. * Nowadays I'd recommend people to take the trial pledge, but doing so at 10% for say 6-12 months. My

I'm going to be leaving 80,000 Hours and joining Charity Entrepreneurship's incubator programme this summer! The summer 2023 incubator round is focused on biosecurity and scalable global health charities and I'm really excited to see what's the best fit for me and hopefully launch a new charity. The ideas that the research team have written up look really exciting and I'm trepidatious about the challenge of being a founder but psyched for getting started. Watch this space! <3 I've been at 80,000 Hours for the last 3 years. I'm very proud of the 800+ advising calls I did and feel very privileged I got to talk to so many people and try and help them along their careers! I've learned so much during my time at 80k. And the team at 80k has been wonderful to work with - so thoughtful, committed to working out what is the right thing to do, kind, and fun - I'll for sure be sad to leave them. There are a few main reasons why I'm leaving now: 1. New career challenge - I want to try out something that stretches my skills beyond what I've done before. I think I could be a good fit for being a founder and running something big and complicated and valuable that wouldn't exist without me - I'd like to give it a try sooner rather than later. 2. Post-EA crises stepping away from EA community building a bit - Events over the last few months in EA made me re-evaluate how valuable I think the EA community and EA community building are as well as re-evaluate my personal relationship with EA. I haven't gone to the last few EAGs and switched my work away from doing advising calls for the last few months, while processing all this. I have been somewhat sad that there hasn't been more discussion and changes by now though I have been glad to see more EA leaders share things more recently (e.g. this from Ben Todd). I do still believe there are some really important ideas that EA prioritises but I'm more circumspect about some of the things I think we're not doing as well as we could (

One challenge in AI safety field-building is that otherwise-useful resources – like lists of courses or funders or local groups – generally become outdated over time. We’ve tried to solve this by collecting a bunch of resources together at AISafety.com and dedicating considerable bandwidth to keeping them updated. Until recently, this maintenance has been largely ad hoc, making additions and changes as we learned of them. To ensure nothing slips through the cracks, we’ve now added a schedule for doing thorough sweeps through the entire database for each resource. Below is our current plan: * Courses * Every 3 months: general sweep * Communities * Every 3 months: general sweep * (maybe) Every 6 months: request update from organisers * Projects * Every 3 months: general sweep * Every 6 months: request update from owners of active projects * Jobs * [This is a filtered subset of 80k’s database and updates automatically] * Events & training * Twice weekly: check for new events and programs * Every 2 weeks: add any dates previously unannounced and check for changes to application deadlines * Funders * Every 2 weeks: check for changes to “applications open/closed” status * Every 3 months: general sweep * Landscape map * Every 1 month: check no links are broken * Every 3 months: general sweep * Donation guide * Every 3 months: check no links are broken * Every 6 months: review entire guide * Speak to an Advisor * Every 3 months: general sweep We’re also continuing to make immediate updates whenever we become aware of them. In other words, this is just the minimum you can expect for regular maintenance. If you spot a correction or want to add something new, please get in touch via the form on the relevant resource page. Our goal is to keep AISafety.com’s resources as accurate and up to date as possible.