Quick takes

Into Financial Independence and EA? Check out the Generosity, Legacy, & FI forum on the ChooseFI Forum. I’m continuing to explore this theory of change: if we can give people financial literacy tools to build confidence and financial security, we can help create the conditions for more people to give back, and give more effectively. A big part of that is creating a space where people who care about personal finance and doing good can find each other. If you’re interested in both FI and effective giving, I’m hoping this can become a place for you to connect, learn, and share ideas. The founders of ChooseFI graciously agreed to create this forum at my request, and now I’m hoping we can get it off the ground. Head here: https://app.choosefi.com/d/hi-everyone-welcome-to-generosity-legacy-fi

I want to see more EA blog/forum posts that don't use AI images

EA intro fellowships should include a "consider community-building" CTA in their syllabus. I looked at multiple syllabi and only found one that does this explicitly (shout out Yale EA!). The last section in an IF syllabus (titled "Putting It Into Practice" or "Taking Action" or something) often focuses on careers and doesn't prompt students to seriously consider organizing the group as a valid option. I think career decisions take time (even small ones like "I should start rethinking my major"), and unpreparedness to Take Big Action sometimes results in no action at all. Community-building is a valid high-value plan that sharpens thinking and leads to the other things the Take Action section of every intro fellowship syllabus is trying to optimize for. Also, meta EA isn't what people new to EA imagine when they think about what "doing good" looks like. That's not because they don't view it as such, but because they often don't see that framing (which is fair; it's an intro, you shouldn't be talking about the talking). But I feel like by the end of a 5-8 week fellowship they should think about meta EA and learn why it's so important (based on the EA principles they learend), the same way they learned about animals, AI, and biosecurity as "cause areas" they can do good in.

Suggestion for the forum: prompt anyone who downvotes a (new) post to leave a comment If you look at the newest posts on any given day, you'll see a number with 0 or 1 karma. If my understanding is correct, this means they have been downvoted. Yet a lot of these posts clearly involved a lot of work and are well intended. I imagine that to put so much effort into a post only to be immediately downvoted, and possibly have your post disappear from the front page and be read by very few people as a result, must be quite disheartening. Of course many of these posts have flaws. But it would be good then for anyone who downvotes it - or even disagree-votes - to say why and provide feedback. I think requiring this would be too much, but if downvoting triggered a comment-box to pop up, that might help to encourage such feedback to be given. I'm imagining this working the same way voting on a poll prompts you to also add a comment. And if doing this across the board seems too annoying, it could be made to apply only to posts with, idk, <10 karma?

Suggestion: Leverage Research deep dive Someone (other than me) should write a deep-dive post about the cult Leverage Research and its infiltration of effective altruism. The story, in brief: * Leverage Research is a cult. * Leverage Research organized the first EA Summit in 2013 and the second EA Summit in 2014. The EA Summits were the first effective altruism conferences of any kind. * Leverage Research also helped to organize the first EA Global conferences, which began in 2015 and continue to this day. * In 2016, a major EA program, the Pareto Fellowship, was run largely by Leverage Research. There is some evidence the Pareto Fellowship was run in a cult-like fashion. * Leverage Research eventually gained full control of the Centre for Effective Altruism in 2018 when one of its members, Larissa Hesketh-Rowe, became the CEO.  The purpose of the deep-dive post would be for people in EA to understand the truth about what happened. And to learn whatever lessons they think they should learn from that. These are the questions I would recommend asking and attempting to answer in the deep-dive post: * Is Leverage Research a cult? * Did it take over the Centre for Effective Altruism? * Did it organize the EA Summits and the Pareto Fellowship? Did it play an important role in organizing the first EA Globals? * If so, how could the EA movement, particularly the core international leadership, let this happen? * If so, what might be the broader ramifications of this for the EA movement? * What (if anything) is there to learn from this? I don’t know what the chances would be of actually getting funded, but someone who wanted to spend a lot of time investigating this topic could apply for a $1,000+ grant from the EA Infrastructure Fund.  I’m not sure if Coefficient Giving (formerly Open Philanthropy) would even consider funding something so small and so specific to EA community self-reflection, but you can look at the relevant info here.

It seems pretty bad to allow people to react to their own comments/posts beyond the initial karma bump of an upvote. It allows users to artificially create the appearance of positive engagement with their posts, which skews initial perceptions and detracts from the truth-seeking goals of the Forum.

Have @Matt Beard and @Mjreard considered having a child and naming it Matt BrEArdon? 

The Straw and the Camel's back I recently had a colleague complain that oat milk was a 'luxury' that the work coffee machines didn't need. And this tiny little comment kind of broke me. I feel like I am so careful not to judge or lecture everyone around me for their insanely massive moral failings around animal welfare, or donating - yet apparently people can't even just let me have my suffering-free milk in peace.  Which prompted me to re-evaluate something I hadn't really thought about in a long time - being EA (or EA-adjacent or however people wanna identify) is just really hard sometimes. I used to be more actively advocatey about things, but it can be exhausting, and at some point I just kinda stopped. But now I feel very motivated to figure out how to start being a lil more vocal again, because it turns out that pretending like I don't have strong opinions on these things is also exhausting! Which is all to get to the point of: there are a lot of posts on here about EA being hard, and how to talk about EA, and reading those posts helps get a feeling of support but knowing this doesn't magically make it all easier. I am just really grateful for this awesome community, and want to just normalise a bit more to share when it gets hard because thats ok. We are doing a hard thing.  (Note: while this one colleague clearly pushed my buttons, further reflection got me very happy that clearly a bunch of other people had been advocating to get the oat milk at LUMC and I'm very happy they exist and that they succeeded)