+1 and I'd further add a few points:

1. for the non-professional writer, i think Substack is a better venue to build a brand / improve career capital and ultimately help the cause(s) you care about than the EA forum.

As someone who used to post here a lot I have mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, I think writing that much did sharpen my communication and made me better (read: more efficient/transparent, but also more boring) writer. Having an avenue to post where I would get feedback was a pretty decent motivator.

On the other hand, it was also very inefficient because a lot of time was wasted on the incredibly high bar for posting (e.g. in the extremes, failing to make my points clear because I was worried about push back and criticism). I feel conflcited though because I don't see a clearly better or faster path for me to learn what I did - and even just 3 years after I joined it became much less important (in community building at least) to do this - more paid positions, internships etc.

1a) even in its heyday, there were real problems with the EA forum: Many people with really interesting takes that I thought the community should be disucssing were simply too intimidated or shy to post to the to um. I don't know if Substack fixes this. But from a writers perspective i think it's the better product: more freedom, control, les pressure to write like an EA, and be judged. I distinctly remember my very first comment on the EA forum got a very typical and critical response. I was not expecting it, and if someone else had a similar experience and was put off from posting I'd totally understand.

2. I'd like to say explicitly: specialisation is a good problem to have! While I do think the ideal of the 19th century European polymath leads to better innovation and science, I'd much rather read a highly researched piece by an org with a dedicated staff with a theory of change for who reads their research and why. Of course - I'd also love to read critiques of the piece if it's not good! And I can see strong incentives not to do this publicly as fields grow and become complex. I'm bullish on CB that builds strong interpersonal networks (i.e. enough strong ties) to compensate for this (until the field gets big enough that it's okay - e.g. the equivalent of glassdoor for impact. And actual glassdoor too of course).

This is really awesome! Gives me glucose goddess meets veritasium vibes. Loved the hook too.

Thank you for sharing this Frances, and I'm so sad to hear how difficult the past few years have been. Writing with this much clarity and precision is difficult at the best of times, I can only imagine the amount of work that went into this.

I've unfortunately had to help a number of friends raise issues to community health over the years because of how emotionally taxing and difficult it is. Sometimes, it's also a lack of faith that investing time will actually improve things for the better. And even as a third party, trying to communicate clearly, evaluate whether sufficient action has been taken, manage confidentiality etc are all incredibly high cognitive load and emotional tasks.

While I am very glad you were able to advocate for yourself, I'm so sad that you had to.

Changelog: added directorysf (https://www.directorysf.com/) to the list of places to look for housing. It's pretty active, but you will need an invite from an existing user to join.

Animal welfare fund

Some norms I would like to see when folks use LLMs substantively (not copy editing or brainstorming):

1. explaining the extent of LLM use

2. explaining the extent of human revision or final oversight

• ideally I'd love to know section by section. Personally I'd prefer it if authors only included sections they have reviewed and fully endorse, even if this means much shorter posts

3. not penalizing people who do 1) and 2) for keeping AI-speak or style

• I think this unfairly discriminates against people who are busy, weak in writing and/or English. I personally dislike it, but don't think it's fair to impose this on others

If this tool could be used by orgs I think it would be super useful. E.g. analyzing the HIP talent directory or inbound applications against a job you're recruiting for. Any chance you could make the prompts/tool available to orgs as well?

Thanks for this write up! It was really insightful. A few questions:

People who apply to found an NGO come with all sorts of motivations.

Could you say more about what motivations they come with? 

As this is a regional program, we couldn’t have a cohort composed entirely of only 4 countries, even though several were outstanding candidates.

Base on my experience working in India, I've seen a lot of benefits of having multiple orgs working in the same geographies at the same time/stage to share resources, advice, talent, etc. Curious what you were limited by here / what factors went into this decision (e.g. I imagine you could have branded this as a regional wide program with a focused initial cohort, with a plan to do focused outreach into other geographies later).

Finally

A common refrain in EA is that the broader social sector doesn’t care about impact, and that good intentions are their only north star.

I have not heard this sentiment quite stated so strongly in EA, but if it is then I'd like to also strongly disagree! After years of working with dozens of nonprofit fundraisers all over the US, I am confident that people do care about impact - they care a lot about effectiveness and using their limited time and resources efficiently. In fact, many switch into fundraising from programmatic because they their organisation needed it and saw it as important. The main difference is that they aren't prioritising EA causes, but I don't think that can be chalked up to good intentions. 

Recent example - an op ed piece on the AI safety pipeline having too many researchers is labelled community, a post advocating for more AI field building by an OP grant maker is not. 

Thanks Aaron, this is really insightful!