I know that a need for self-reliance, fear of failure, and easily activated sense of rejection can feel paralysing sometimes, particularly when you're somewhere in the 18-22 age range. I want to reassure you that I was a total reclusive nerd with a developing pretty serious mental health condition age 18, and through a series of screw-ups and being carried by a bunch of various (admittedly non-EA but they're much of a muchness) community support mechanisms I'm now 28 and a pretty successful community-builder. You're in this for the long game, and we all around the EA community know it and want to help pull you through.

Also I have never seen CEA pull groups funding from an organiser because they posted something imperfect on the Forum. To my knowledge it doesn't happen and won't ever happen. Worst that would ever happen is your post not getting much attention, and really that is no worse than not having posted in the first place.

Hello university group organisers!

Please write on the Forum. I like reading your posts, and whether it is about success or failure I think there's always stuff that can be learned from you and what you do. I also think that writing on the forum is a really easy way to get yourself and your skillsets known in the EA community, which is presumably something you would like to happen.

I think I will develop this argument: general LLM tools should not be used as pseudotherapy. There needs to be specially trained "mental health contextualised" LLMs used for pseudotherapy and they need to be tightly evaluated. You highlight suicidal ideation from your own experience and note other work about psychosis - there are also problems with eating disorders and LLMs. If ChatGPT detects a user with a mental health query, it needs to switch over to ChatGPTherapy.

I'm also very worried about the extent to which EAs use LLMs to substitute for human interaction in general. Avoiding interaction because you find other people boring / don't want to burden them leads to extremely poor relational connective networks, and it atrophies your people skills. There's good evidence that relational isolation is the health equivalent of smoking 20 cigarettes a day.

Also, well done for pulling through it. Sounds like you've had a tough and lonely few months. It's pretty amazing you found the courage to post this kind of thing on the Forum. I hope any comments you get respect your personal vulnerability in the area.

pauseai.info/local-organizing

Builds political advocacy and community-building skills in AI Safety. Highly scalable.

Sounds like the strategic animal funding circle could be interested?

https://www.animalfundingcircle.com/

Alas, you're just the wrong side of the deadline. Also I think your $ ask is slightly too large for them.

I imagine they're the kind of people who would know who any other funders in the space are, though.

I'm collating feedback right now, but I'll be doing a post about how EA in the Lakes went and what that means for future things I run.

Practically, it worked, it particularly engaged and inspired effective givers (to the point where I estimate it "paid" for itself many times over in increased effective giving, notwithstanding that it made a small surplus on the entry fee), and it was good for making fairly deep social connections though less so professional connections. Workers (both EA workers and effective givers) reported gains in mental health and productivity. People's average reported personal value from attendance (minus what they paid for travel) was more than twice the per-person running cost.

Thanks for the work you've put in here!

I believe that EA career transitions, partnerships, foundings are very often given high $ expected impact value. So even if you only got one concrete one it may have made the whole project worthwhile.

I really appreciate that you're trying to optimise on support and burnout prevention. I think that really is the way to go for young professionals in the 21-25 range.

Thank you!

As I said before, it'll probably be at least March before the next one - there's various site work that needs to happen. But I want to get to the point fairly quickly where it's suited to do week-long things.

Honestly, the best way to learn organising is experientially with a good co-organiser. A course will not teach you much more than a detailed read of the above post would, I reckon. However I imagine that having it being presented more professionally might get it wider reach.

Thanks for the post!

There are ongoing conversations in the nuclear forensics community as to the role of commercial Lithium enrichment in nuclear fusion development versus the proliferation of material for building hydrogen bombs. So many of the things you talk about aren't relics of history - they're live issues, today.