Open and Welcome Thread: February 2021

That's awesome, congratulations!

Welcome to the EA Forum!

Welcome Lowry! I'm Brian from EA Philippines. I love  80,000 Hours' content and podcast too. I was in a similar position to you last year, in that I was in a non-EA job and wanted to see how I could have a more EA-aligned and more enjoyable career. Thankfully I now do EA-aligned work  full-time (mainly through EA Philippines), but it does take a while before that can happen for a lot of people. And I think if people broaden the scope of what they consider to be "EA-adjacent" jobs, it's much more likely they'll get one (because we have a lot of EAs and too few jobs at EA orgs).

You or others new to the EA community can feel free to message me about your cause interests, skills, and career interests, and I may have useful advice to give or resources/organizations to point you two. I've read up a lot on EA and its various concepts and causes, such as global health and development, animal welfare,  and some longtermist causes, so I can give some advice/resources there. :)

Welcome to the Forum! 

I hope your experience here is good; let me know if there's anything I can help with. (I'm the lead moderator and work for CEA, which runs the site.)

Welcome to the Forum Felix! It's good to have another journalist interested in EA (and hopefully writing about it in an informed way). I think there's relatively few of you. 

It's cool that you have a newsletter on x-risk. Maybe you could consider cross-posting an upcoming or previous writing of yours on this Forum? The interview you had with Tom Chivers might be interesting to people interested in AI Safety here. 

You can include a short summary of the post and why you think people might want to read it when cross-posting. Just a suggestion in case you'd find more subscribers or readers here. You could also link to your newsletter and include a short bio of yourself in your Forum so people can find it that way. :)

Hi Kottsiek, welcome to the Forum! Have you connected with someone from EA Berlin, such as Manuel Allgaier? Here's their website: https://ea-berlin.org/. You can also reach out to NEAD, which connects people interested in EA in Germany : https://ealokal.de/. You will likely be able to connect with EAs with a similar background or at least in the same region/country as you through EA Berlin or NEAD.

Regarding struggling with procrastination, I found the Complice's Goal-Crafting Intensive Workshop useful. It's a 5-hour event where you listen and work through content with others to help you set and prioritize goals for yourself, and come up with strategies to achieve them, among other topics. It only costs a minimum of $25. The next session is still in April, but you can already book for a class ahead and they can give you content that you can work through ahead. 

You might also like to read this EA Forum post about finding an accountability buddy to meet or chat with every week, to help you overcome procrastination: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/2RvpoWWQDiFpptpam/accountability-buddies-a-proposed-system-1. In the Complice event, they invite attendees to find an accountability buddy at the end.

You can also join the EA Life Coaching Exchange facebook group, and try to find an accountability. buddy there. A couple of people in EA Philippines have found an accountability buddy/group through there.  Hope this helps!

Hi Kate, welcome to the forum! Great to see someone with a sociology background in EA - there's relatively few of you in the movement. I'm glad that you're doing ethnographic research on people in the movement. I was a UI/UX designer before so I've done some user research / qualitative interviews before.

Another EA, Vaidehi Agarwalla, did something similar to you before where she interviewed people in EA, particularly those who were looking to make a career transition or had just made a career transition. Her undergraduate degree was also in sociology. You may be interested to read her sequence on "Towards A Sociological Model of EA Movement Building", which I think is unfinished yet, but already has 2 articles in it.

I was wondering if you were planning on focusing on a specific topic or demographic within EA for your ethnographic research? That might be good to do, since people in EA and their interests can be quite varied, so it might be worth scoping the research down rather than just asking to interview anyone in the movement. Just my two cents!

Also, if you haven't seen it yet, 80,000 Hours has a list here of research topics that people with a background in sociology can research on. You could consider researching on one of these topics as a side project or uni project in the future.

Also, if you're interested in biosecurity, David Manheim had some biosecurity project ideas for people with a sociology/anthropology background. :)

I'm pretty sure the Forum uses the same karma vote-power as LessWrong.

Your observations is correct. How much karma you start off with depends on the amount of karma you have - unfortunately I don't know the minimum required to start off with 2 karma. The more karma you have, the more weighty your strong upvotes become as well (mine are 7 karma, before I hit 2500 karma it was 6).

The size of your weak upvotes is also affected by your total karma, just more slowly. Every post starts with one weak upvote from its author.

There are multiple Discord servers with some degree of EA activity. The biggest I'm aware of is "EA Corner" (invite link), which is quite active. Thanks for the reminder to add that to our "useful links" post!

The EA Forum is very different from what Discord can accomplish; we want this to be a place where useful posts and discussions are available for decades to come -- a record of EA intellectual progress, as well as a community space for long-form discussion. Discord is great for live chat, but very poor for archiving material or crafting a "body of work".

(These open threads are the sort of thing one could replicate pretty well on Discord, but part of why they exist is for people to say hello as they enter the Forum community, so hosting them on a totally different platform would defeat the purpose.)

I definitely find this feeling relatable from my own career planning!

Inspired in part by your similar comment on another post, I've now made an open thread on the Forum for people to request and/or provide such feedback. And:

To get things going, I commit to reading and providing some feedback on at least 2 pages' worth of the documents from each of the first 5 people who comment to request feedback. (I might do more; I'll see how long this takes me.)

Try pasting in a YouTube link. Note that this doesn't work if you've enabled the Markdown editor in your settings.