EA Estonia's Impact in 2022

By Richard Annilo @ 2023-05-29T10:03 (+46)

Background

This report is about January to December 2022 in EA Estonia, corresponding to our last grant period (funding from the EA Infrastructure Fund for 1 FTE and group expenses).

Quick facts about Estonia: it has a population of 1.3 million and is placed both geographically and culturally between the Nordics and Eastern Europe. Our language has 14 noun cases, it is the birthplace of 10 unicorns, and we have the best mushroom scientists. Go figure.

In our national EA group, there are 23–30 people whom I would consider to be “highly engaged” (meaning they have spent more than 100 hours engaging with EA content, have developed career plans and have taken significant steps in pursuit of doing good). You could expect around 30 people to attend our largest community event (Figure 1) and our Slack channel has 50–60 active weekly members (Figure 2).

Figure 1: Attendees of our largest community event, the EA Estonia Summer Retreat. August 2022.

Figure 2. EA Estonia Slack statistics from its creation. Weekly active members have been oscillating between 40 and 65 throughout 2022. https://ibb.co/rHhxmfL

Group strategy

Here are the main metrics we used to evaluate our impact:

1. Awareness: Number of people aware of the term “effective altruism” and EA Estonia.
   1. Activities:
      1. Introductory talks
      2. Direct outreach
      3. Social media outreach
2. First engagement: Number of people who took action because of our outreach.
   1. Activities:
      1. Introductory course
      2. Cause-specific reading groups
3. Career planning: Number of people that develop career plans based on EA principles that are well informed and well reasoned.
   1. Activities:
      1. Career course
4. Taking action: Number of people taking significant action based on EA-informed career plans (e.g. starting full-time jobs, university degrees).
   1. Activities:
      1. 1-1 career calls
      2. Peer-mentoring
      3. Directly sharing opportunities

Concerns with this model:

• The actual impact comes when people take action within high-impact jobs, which we currently don't measure.
• We don't measure value drift or other kinds of decreased engagement after taking significant next steps.
• This model doesn't prioritize targeting existing Highly Engaged EAs (HEAs) to have a higher impact.
• This also doesn't include a more meta-level goal of keeping people engaged and interested while moving towards an HEA status. We do organize social events for this reason, however the impact of them is not quantified.

Regarless of these concerns, the main theory of change feels relatively straight-forward: (1) we find young altruistically-minded people who are unclear about their future career plans, then (2) we make them aware of the effective altruism movement and various high-impact career paths, and then (3) we prompt them to develop explicit career plans and encourage them to take action upon them.

Below I will go into more detail regarding the goals, activities and results of 2022 in two categories: (i) outreach and (ii) growing HEAs. I will end with a short conclusion and key takeaways for next year.

I Outreach

Goal: 5,000 new people who know what “effective altruism” means and that there is an active local group in Estonia. 

Actual: 20,776 people reached.

Activities:

• Liina Salonen started working full-time as the Communictions Specialist in EA Estonia. 
  • Reached at least 20,000 people on Facebook with the Introductory Course social media campaign 
• Student fair tabling. 
  • At least 155 people reached (played the Giving Game)

Goal: 10 lecturers mentioning EA Estonia

Actual: 1 lecturers reached

1. Visited a philosophy lecture. Number of students: 20.
   • Talked about effective altruism and longtermism. Created a discussion with the lecturer. 
   • Suggested people sign up for our career course. Nobody responded.

Wrote to two other philosophy lecturers, but they either didn’t respond or referred me back to the person I already talked to. Dropped this goal.

Goal: 500 Number of new people reached via 17 workshops, talks or discussions

Actual: 593 people reached, 14 activities

1. 4 workshops in Narva Language Lyceum. 
   • Replaced a history and society studies teacher for a day, teaching the. 8th, 10th, 7th, 6th, 7th, 8th and 10th grade. Didn’t mention EA concretely. Gave EA-esque talks about cause prioritization. This was in a Russian-majority area of Estonia, the students had a hard time understanding Estonian and there was a translator (another teacher) present.
   • Number of people reached: approx. 40–70 in total.
   • Impact: dubious. Next time I wouldn’t accept an invitation to talk to any grade under 10 and I would share a much more concrete actionable step for them to take after the talk.
2. Career workshop with IT undergraduate students
   • Number of people reached: 4–10 in total.
   • Impact: uncertain
3.  Talk about biorisks in collaboration with the Biology Student Society.
   • Number of people reached: 10–20 people. 
   • Impact: 2 people stayed for a discussion group. One person attended EAG San Francisco in an attempt to find her a thesis topic. Other than that, no obivous impact.
   • Next time I would want to form a more clear theory of change for the discusion group before starting it up. This time it felt unclear what we were trying to accomplish.
4. Talk at a top high school in Estonia.
   • General talk about EA, more focused on careers. 
   • 20–30 people.
   • Impact: unclear.
5. Talk at maths olympiad finals 
   • Number of people present: ~30.
   • 10 people responded with wanting more info on EA. 
   • Send books for 8 people (5x “The Precipice”, 3x “The Life You Can Save”).
   • Possible impact: an international math olympiad participant joined our Introductory Event.
6. Debate society. 
   • Talk about EA as inspiration for debating. 
   • 5–15 people.
   • Impact: unclear
7. Philosophy club. 2 events. 
   • Discussed open research questions about existential risks and cause prioritization. 
   • 4–8 attendees on each event. 
   • 3 people showed interest in applying for EA positions. One got to the third stage at becoming an office manager at EA Oxford. 
   • 1 person went to ask faculty for these events to be part of the official philosophy curriculum.
   • Note: I have not seen such quick and high excitement about EA before.
8. FB Live. Career advice. 
   • Did a virtual talk via Facebook about career planning
   • 48 responded with “interested” or “going”.
   • Didn’t get much traction. A few people actually coming on and listening.
9. "Noored Disainivad". Design hackathon for people aged 14–18. 
   • 20 people came and asked questions about EA and EA Estonia for 90 minutes.
   • Impact: dubious
10. Introductory EA event. 
    • 15 new people participated.
    • Impact: 1-3 people signed up for our Introductory Course
11. EA Estonia podcast
    • 389 listeners in total across platforms and episodes
    • During the student fair, heard at least one person say they've listened to our podcast
    • Most useful for creating collaborations between podcast guests and us. One guest became an contributor to the Food Innovation Summit (focused on alternative proteins), which the podcast host helped organize.
12. Effective Giving Day online event
    • Only Anneta Targalt team + 1 person attended.

Goal: 50 people take next steps because of our outreach (e.g. participating in our Introductory Course; reading an EA book; scheduled a 1-1 with a board member) 

Actual: 73 people take next steps

1. 21 participants in the Introductory Course in spring.
2. 2 additional people attending our Career Course
3. 3 people scheduling 1-1s with the board
4. 2 people joining a biorisk discussion group
5. 3 people joining our AI policy discussion group
6. 1 person joining our AI safety discussion group
7. 8 new people were sent an EA book (Maths olympiad finals)
8. 33 participants in the Introductory Course in autumn

II Growing HEAs

Goal: 4 new members have a serious EA-aligned career plan

Actual: 9

1. LS
   • Plan A before: Earning to give as a self-employed photographer. Maybe a Master’s degree.
   • Plan A after the introductory course. Documentary filmmaking. Self-reported scale of plan change: 10 / 10.
   • Major reason for plan change. Filling out the 80,000 Hours career plan worksheet, which she received during the Intro Course.
   • New plan B: Community development and communications.
     1. Talked through her career plans with Richard. Richard suggested she apply for an EAIF grant to be a communications manager for EA Estonia.
2. RK
   • Plan before: Work on alternative proteins. Notice business opportunities and work towards starting a business.
   • Plan A after completing the 80K career course: Realized that non-profit entrepreneurship is also a thing. Plan to start a charity.
   • Plaan B. Work at an existing CE-incubated charity.
3. KR
   • Plan A before: Work in the public or third sector in Estonia.
   • Plan A after completing the Introductory Course: Finish studies and work in operations at EA organizations.
4. HV
   • Plan A before: Continue studying mathematics.
   • Plan A after completing the 80K career course. Pursue developing cheap clean energy through nuclear fusion (or other nuclear power).
5. AV
   • Plan A after completing the 80K career course: Work through own cause-prioritization and see on from there.
6. SJ
   • Plan A after completing the 80K career course: research into China-West geopolitical relations. 
7. PJ
   • Plan A before: Work as a software engineer at non-EA organizations.
   • Plan A after engaging with EA: Work at EA-aligned organizations as a software engineer.
8. KH
   • Partially influenced by conversation with Richard. 
   • Updated plans to work as a technical AGI safety researcher or start a startup for earning to give.
9. RS
   • Had weekly check-in calls with Richard for a few months.
   • Small update and solidification of plans to do software engineering for high impact organizations in areas of mental health and improving indvidual decision making and critical thinking.

Goal: 4 members have taken significant steps on their career plans

Actual: 13

1. LS
   1. Created a documentary film, which will be shown at a famous film festival in Estonia (PÖFF).
   2. Participated at a week-long documentary film-making workshop.
   3. Became a full-time employee at EA Estonia, wants to continue.
   4. Chatted to three other documentary film-makers at EA conferences: EAG SF, EAGx Berlin. 
2. RK 
   1. Charity Entrepreneurship. Incubation Program participant in the Winter/Spring cohort of 2023.
   2. Food Innovation Summit program lead, volunteer.
3. KR
   1. Operations internship at Effective Ventures. Got offered a permanent position after the internship.
      1. This was somewhat influenced by them attending the Introductory Course
4. RS
   1. Got offered role as a senior front end developer at Metaculus.
      1. This was somewhat influenced by a long series of 1-1 mentoring calls discussing career plans and encouraging them to apply and take action
5. TP
   1. Applied to many summer AI safety internships. 
      1. SERI MATS (33% chance of getting accepted), 
      2. AI safety internship (among the last 15 applicants out of 5–10), 
      3. Redwood Research
6. SJ
   1. Applied to many summer internships: fp21, ACE, Charity Entrepreneurship reserach analyst.
7. PJ
   1. Round 5/6 of EV Salesforce Admin position. 
8. B
   1. Applyed to be an office manager at Oxford. Got to the third stage.
      1. This was in large part influence through them attending a discussion event for philosophy students, and by sharing them the 80K job board.
9. LV
   1. ALLFED volunteer. 
10. NB
    1. SERI MATS participant.
       1. There was little-to-no influence on our part here. Only possible influence through maintaining motivation to pursue the AI safety career path through social events and peer mentoring, but motivation was strong to begin with.
11. KH
    1. SERI MATS participant
       1. There might have been some influence on this decision by having a 1-1 chat with them via mutual acquiantances, introducing the EA movement and philosophy and pointing to some resources.
12. JJ
    1. Mental health navigator volunteer.
13. JV
    1. Pursuing a patentable idea to store renewable energy
       1. There was a large influence on them here through having a 1-1 chat and introducing the idea and importance of comparing intervenetions in the climate change space.

Goal: Number of members who have taken or increased their GWWC pledge (Goal: 4)

Actual: 5

1. HL. 10%
2. JT. 10%
3. IK. 10%
4. KV. GWWC pledge.
5. TT. GWWC pledge.

Additionally three people took the Try Giving pledge.

Conclusion

Looking at what prompted people to change their career plans and take action, it seems that most (>80%) of our impact in 2022 came from organizing Introductory and Career Courses. It seems to make sense to focus more narrowly on scaling these in the future.

It also seems that there is some potential in developing cause-specific groups and that philosophy students can get quickly excited about EA.

Acknowledgement

Just want to say that EA Estonia isn't just me. The activities outlined here wouldn't have been possible by our full-time communications lead Liina Salonen, volunteer core organizers Sille-Liis Männik, Simo Järvela, Piibe Nõmm, Merette Arula, and a crew of amazing volunteers.