Hiya! I work on data stuff at CEA. I used to be the content lead on the EA Global team at CEA, and before that I did economic consulting. Here's an old website I might update at some point.
Think I'm making a mistake? Want to give me feedback? Here's my admonymous. You can also give feedback for me directly to my manager, Oscar Howie.
Super interesting, thanks for sharing! I have some possibly dumb questions about the finding that these programs don't change behaviors:
No pressure to respond, reading this made me curious about some other stuff:
This is a cool writeup! I really enjoyed reading it, thanks for sharing and congrats on failing fast on your first charity -- it sounds like you did a bunch of ambitious work and made a tough call fairly quickly :)
Things I like about your writing style:
I found this post heartbreaking and moving to read. <3 Thank you for writing it, and for trying to help the children you mention in the post!
Thanks Vasco!
You have a graph for the "Number of EA Forum posts with 2+ upvotes (per month)". I think it would be better to have graphs for the number of posts per month and their mean karma.
Curious why — what insights do you hope to gain from this / are there specific questions you have about the Forum that you're hoping to answer with this data?
You have a graph for the "Overall EA Newsletter subscriber count (at the start of each month)". Have you considered having one for the number of subscribers of the EA Forum Digest?
Thanks, we've considered this but haven't prioritized so far. I'd be interested to know if there was a particular reason you think this would be useful, or if it's more that generally having this sort of data available to people would be nice? (Both seem like reasonable motivations ofc!)
Congrats, Niel and all! I imagine this has been in the works for a while, but even so am very impressed how quickly 80k has managed to appoint a new CEO after Howie's departure - that's great & a credit to everyone who made it happen.
Good luck in your new role Niel!
I'm pretty excited about funder circles as a structure for medium-high but not UHNW donors to scale their impact and find support. Good luck!
Quick PSA:
Feedback is appreciated as always!
I'm pretty excited about a vision of principles-first EAIF that helps drive forward better cause prioritization within EAIF, and resonated with this paragraph:
- I think that we could make EA much better than it currently is - particularly on the “beacon for thoughtful, sincere, and selfless” front.
- I don’t think EA has done much “noticing what is important to work on” recently.
- Historically, EA has many thoughtful people who have discovered or were early adopters of novel and important ideas.
- I don’t think many people have recently tried to bring those people together with the express goal of identifying and working on pressing causes.
But I'm not sure how many exciting grants you expect to find within bucket 2 — scanning through the EAIF grants database, I can't really identify anything within the last year that seems like it would push the frontier of "helping EA notice what it is important to work on".
How successful do you expect to be at soliciting grants within this area / do you have a plan on how to go about with this? (Feel free to object to the premise too.)
Nice. Thanks for an incredibly prompt and thorough response!
That makes sense to me. It is kind of interesting to me that the zeitgeist programs you mention are so different in terms of intervention size (if I'm understanding correctly, Safe Dates involved a 10 session curriculum, but the Men's Program involved a single session with a short video?), but neither seem effective at behavior reduction!
wow... oof...
Thank you for this summary + for conducting this research!