Why more effective altruists should use LinkedIn

By Benjamin_Todd @ 2016-06-03T16:32 (+14)

People in the community often talk about how nice it would be if there was an EA social network: somewhere with a database of everyone interested in effective altruism, that you could search by skills/location/experience/cause, that would show how involved someone is in the community, and where you can message and chat to the other members.

In fact, there has been more than one attempt to build such a social network from scratch. One of these was pushed by me and 80,000 Hours back in 2012-2013. And I recently heard about a proposal to try again.

But such a network already exists, and it's called LinkedIn.

What we need is for everyone in the community to join a group on LinkedIn. One already exists here with 300 members. 80,000 Hours also has a group with over 1200 members, rising at about 20 per week.

Then you can:

Use advanced search to search the group by any linkedin data fields, including skills/education/keywords/causes/location/company.
For everyone in the group, you can see how connected they are to others in the community, giving a proxy for level of involvement.
Chat on a shared private forum
Message other members, so long as you have a mutual connection, which reduces the chance of spam.

This is far better than making our own social network, because most people already have LinkedIn profiles containing a huge amount of data, AND they keep them up to date because they need to in order to get jobs. With past attempts to make our own networks, no-one keeps their profile up to date or regularly visits. In addition, the features are much better because thousands of person-years of work have gone into making the code.

It's even better than just using Facebook because we have all the employment information we want. (Downside being that LinkedIn's interface is worse, and people use it about 10% as much.)

Some advanced features we could also add:

Ask everyone to put "effective altruism" as a cause in the cause section of their profiles. This helps to spread awareness. If people fill out global poverty, animal welfare, catastrophic risks etc. then we'll be able to search by cause too.
If people make "effective altruism" as one of their skills, then people in the community can endorse them for that skill. This provides a proxy for how dedicated someone is to effective altruism.
People could mention how much income they're pledging on their profile too.

The main feature that's lacking is donations tracking. However, we already have Giving What We Can's My Giving platform for that, so I suggest people just use that for now.

What to do right now:

Join the 80,000 Hours and Effective Altruism LinkedIn groups.

undefined @ 2016-06-05T15:12 (+2)

Couple of points.

It seems that effective altruists and similar folks have gravitated more towards Facebook than LinkedIn, largely because I think they generally like to spend more time discussing things, and Facebook is a much better place to carry out discussions (it has a good system for notifications, tagging, comments, replies, emoticons, etc.) LinkedIn is more heavily used by people who want networking benefits rather than as a place to carry out actual, on-site discussion.
In general, there is a tendency among some self-identified EAs to build their own tools, or their own versions of reality. It's somewhat like the Not Invented Here syndrome. Look at all the Facebook groups with names of the form "EA X" -- while some of the names make sense, others mainly serve to restrict discussion of X, when more could be gained from engaging with the wider pool of people and thought on X. The relatively low use of LinkedIn (which is the standard in the business world) and the significant effort spent on building niche tools is another facet of this.

undefined @ 2016-08-31T23:05 (+1)

Would it be a good idea to create a centralized mechanism that would allow EAs who have a job to indicate their willingness to review the resumes of EAs who are seeking a job in their profession? Job seeking EAs do currently have the ability to seek help from EAs with jobs, but some of them may be reluctant to do so unless the other person has explicitly indicated their willingness to spend time doing this.

undefined @ 2016-06-03T17:35 (+1)

Though I suspect it will be difficult to get to a sufficient threshold of EAs using LinkedIn as their social network without something similar to a marketing campaign. Any takers?

undefined @ 2016-06-03T23:34 (+3)

Why would it be difficult? LinkedIn is already quite popular, and the groups Ben named have lots of members.

undefined @ 2016-06-03T18:28 (+3)

LinkedIn addict here but somewhat new to effective altruism. Please let me know how I can help!

undefined @ 2016-06-03T22:39 (+2)

One slightly boring, but very useful thing, would be posting more of the good job opportunities from here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1062957250383195/ To the 80k linkedin group.

Also inviting more people to the 80k group who should be in there.

undefined @ 2016-06-03T22:40 (+1)

Yes, though if people just join the group it's already very useful, since then you're searchable. The group doesn't need to be highly active to be useful.