I'm one of the contact people for the effective altruism community. I work at CEA as a community liaison, trying to support the EA community in addressing problems and being a healthy and welcoming community.
Please feel free to contact me at [email protected].
Besides effective altruism, I'm interested in folk dance and trying to keep up with my three children.
Stuff I tell student organizers: Do more meta communication.
Represent the range of views that are in your group. If some people in your student group think âdo the normal thing in university and explore your career optionsâ and others think âdrop out to urgently work on 2-person AI safety projects," represent to your group members that those are both views held in your group.
If you always serve vegan food, people will assume all EAs are vegan / youâre supposed to be vegan if youâre in EA. I suggest saying something like âWe serve vegan food because thatâs what works best for the combination of people in our group, but itâs not that everybody is vegan.â About half the people in the EA survey are vegetarian or vegan.
>FWIW I did send the CEA community health team a draft of this announcement.
Since you mention my team and you emailed me an FYI about 16 hours before this announcement went up, here's my opinion: don't hire someone with a fraud conviction for a finance or philanthropy role.
In the example about careers, it could across that "do the normal thing" is a front for the more extreme thing. I think it's worth spelling out: different people do have actually different beliefs about what you should do here.
In the example about food, it's common that people assume I'm vegan because I serve vegan food for EA dinners. I'm not, and I don't want to create the impression that a specific diet is a required part of EA. (I should follow my own advice and flag this a little more clearly at my own dinners!)