Catherine Low🔸

Community Liaison, Community Health and Special Projects Team @ Centre for Effective Altruism
4371 karmaJoined Working (15+ years)Christchurch, New Zealand

Bio

I'm one of the Community Liaisons for the EA community (alongside Julia Wise and Charlotte Darnell).

I'm a contact for community health support for EA groups, and I also works on assessing and mitigating risks to the EA community. 

I initially studied a lot of physics, then was a high school teacher for 11 years before moving full time into EA community building. I ran local and national EA groups and worked on EA outreach projects,  before joining CEA’s Groups Team in early 2020 to support EA groups worldwide. I started working for the Community Health team mid 2021. 

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This is a great story of someone taking a selfless and high expected value bet, that sadly didn't work out. 
I'm grateful and impressed that you tried so hard to make the donation happen Santeri!
I hope Mikko gets a new kidney ASAP, and that you both experience excellent health in the future.  

Depopulation is Bad


I think humans are good. And larger groups of people can do a lot more (more innovation, more cultural activities, more variety of human experiences). 

Right now, in 2025, I would not advocate for more people due to animal welfare and environmental costs of having more people. 

But looking at the many countries that have gone through a very demographic transition to less-than-replacement fertility (and all the other countries that seem to be following a very similar trajectory), I'm worried that the population will plummet shortly after it hits peak. 

I'm not sure what to do about it. And I'm worried about governments/other people in influence increasingly trying to increase fertility in ways that reduce individual freedom. 

Thanks for those analyses Lorenzo! I was aware of the claims that people don't tend to be good at knowing what makes them happy or unhappy (thanks to an old 80K article!), but it didn't occur to me that this could have influenced this data.  

With this in mind it seems fairly possible that the real distribution should be more negative. Despite that, I still feel that the data feels like a positive update for me. 
a) There are just quite a few people reporting that being in EA is good for their mental health - and I don't want to doubt that too much (but maybe that is hopeful thinking on my part)
b) Also, before the survey results came out I expected that a larger number would report negative impacts as I had heard many people in the community reporting to me that EA had negatively affected their mental health (which is expected given my role), and I'd also heard some community builders tell me that they felt that EA was often bad for members mental health (which worried me a lot more).

It would be interesting to ask people in comparable groups, the same question of how involvement changed their mental health - if the distributions were a lot more positive or negative than EAs then that would be interesting. Maybe environmentalism or animal advocacy would be a reasonable comparison group as involvement might also give a similarly increased sense of awareness and obligation.

Turns out Rethink Priorities have been funded by EA Funds to work on something that could shed some light on this question. I'm looking forward to hearing how they get on at gathering survey respondents and seeing the results they get.

I'm really not sure. 

I do think it is likely that many people get exposed to EA and realise it isn't a great space for them personally, and choose not to engage as a result. These people won't have filled in the EA Sometimes those people might not be a good fit for EA anyway -- they have different priorities or values in their lives. But I expect some would have been very value aligned and gotten a lot out of being involved, so that is the group I'm worried about.  

The Rethink Priorities data makes me (tentatively) a little less worried that a large number of people spend a couple of years engaging EA (and so fill in the survey) and find it too rough for them and then leave (and don't fill in subsequent surveys). I DO think this happens to some people. But if this was a very large pattern I would expect community member who had been around longer to say it is more positive for their mental health, whereas the data points gently in the opposite direction.  

I don't know whether active community members are more or less likely to fill in the survey if they're having a rough time in EA. I think it could go either way. 
 

This sounds plausible. Unfortunately I don't think we or Rethink Priorities have this data to do this breakdown at the moment. 

I'm a bit of a Benthamite "The question is not, 'Can they reason?' nor, 'Can they talk?' but rather, 'Can they suffer?'"

For any plausible (to me) guess about which non-human animals are capable of suffering, there are far far more non-human animals living in terrible conditions than humans in similarly bad conditions, and there just seems to be so many underfunded and underexplored ways we could help reduce that suffering. I've also seen some cost-effectiveness estimations that indicate you can help thousands of animals a lot for the same cost as helping one person a lot. ("a lot" being very vague!)

The only reason why I'm not at 100% agree is because helping humans become healthier might cause larger positive flow on effects, and this might add up to more impact in the long run. That's super tentative and could go either way - e.g. it seems possible that helping animals now could lead to our species being more ethical towards sentient beings in the long run too.  

Thanks for your questions James 

> This should therefore be easily transferable into feedback to the grantee. 

I think this is where we disagree - this written information often isn’t in a good shape to be shared with applicants and would need significant work before sharing. 

> The post you linked by Linch and the concern he raises that by being transparent about the reasons for not making a grant may risk applicants overupdating on the feedback seems unfounded/unevidenced. I also question how relevant given they weren't funded anyway, so why would you be concerned they'd over update? 

The concern here is that people can alter their plan based on the feedback with the hope it would mean that they’d have a better chance of getting the opportunity in the future. As Linch says in his post
> Often, to change someone’s plans enough, it requires careful attention and understanding, multiple followup calls, etc. 

I’ve personally seen cases where it seems that feedback sends a project off in a direction that isn’t especially good. This can happen when people have different ideas of what would be reasonable steps to take in response to the feedback.

But you’re right, Linch and I don’t provide evidence for the rate of problems caused by overupdating. This is a good nudge for me to think about how problematic this is overall, and whether I’m overreacting due to a few cases.

> If you don't tell them they were a near miss and what changes may change your mind, then instead the risk is they either update randomly or the project is just completely canned - which feels worse for edge cases.

I think it is most useful for decision makers to share feedback when a) it is a near miss, and b) the decision maker believes they can clearly describe something that the applicant can do that would make the person/project better and would likely lead to an approval. 

Hi Frida, 

I’m really sorry you had a bad experience with our team. You are welcome to share your experience with our team lead Nicole (nicole.ross@centreforeffectivealtruism.org).  

Sometimes people want to discuss a concern with us confidentially  – our confidentiality policy is outlined here. This means we sometimes don’t have permission to talk to the person concerned at all, or can't share many details as it might identify the people that came to us. In those cases we sadly aren’t in a good position to discuss the situation in depth with the people involved. I realise it is really frustrating to receive only vague feedback or none at all, and in an ideal world this would be different.

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