Kaleem&#x27;s Quick takes

14

There's an effective environmentalism group focusing on that. Founder's Pledge Climate Fund is another salient point.

Perhaps they should post more here.

Lukas Trötzmüller

4

A new report from Founders Pledge just came out - although it's just an overview article and doesn't go into much depth. https://founderspledge.com/stories/changing-landscape

6

A productivity tip (kind of).

I procrastinate A LOT. I don't feel bad about it, because I make sure to have a number of important/impactful things going at all times so that when I'm about to procrastinate away from my actual job, I end up doing something useful rather than wasting time or engaging in guilt-ridden leisure.

Evan_Gaensbauer

-2

Downvoted. If you're procrastinating to do EA work, you should be bold enough to encourage your peers to do more of the same.

2

I think you're assuming my actual job isn't also EA work? Otherwise I don't understand what you're saying

Evan_Gaensbauer

5

Yeah, I was assuming your regular job wasn't related to EA and that was one of the less thoughtful comments, so I'm sorry and please pardon my mistake.

4

I'm looking for a couple of grant-makers to read a draft of a post I'm writing about grant making. Its v short (3 pages). Please DM me if interested

3

I'm going to be reading Bill Gates' "How to prevent the next pandemic" in the next 5 days, would anyone else be interested in reading it and working on a "shared thoughts"/collective review/takeaways type post for the forum? Book reviews are cool, but I was thinking about doing something slightly different where a bunch of people write something much shorter and give a bullet pointed list of pros, cons, and main takeaways from the book. Thoughts?

7

Update: I read the book and didn't think it had much information that was particularly insightful or novel. As a public health professional, it was very boring, but I'd be happy for as many people to read it and take it seriously as possible because the information is sensible and likely to be unharmful and helpful in the case of future pandemics. As an EA working on GCBRs, it was very underwhelming and failed to mention many of the things that biosecurity people in the EA space seem to think are vitally important, like next-gen PPE, the NAO, the BWC etc.

EdoArad

3

I think this is a great idea! Not for me at this time, but I'd be interested in reading such a post.

Also, if you could use some inspiration for the format, I've done a collaborative note-taking group with a random person on the internet on the book "How to Take Smart Notes": https://roamresearch.com/#/app/roamexample4muli/page/u1M-bz2nZ

We basically agreed to read 1 chapter a week (not always successfully) and write main notes from it, while reading and responding to each other. It was fun and gave us plenty of room to engage with it more deeply. (In the end we had a zoom call for the first time, which was pretty cool).

Roam is definitely not needed, and gdoc would work as well, but it was a nice meta gimmick ;)

2

We're thinking of naming an office "Focal Point" - let me know what you think !

1

I'm working on building a community building-centric EA outreach office in Harvard square, and we still don't have a great name for the office (e.g. Constellation, Lightcone, Trajan House).

Please Suggest some names that you think would be great (maybe with some explanation) and you might get to name a long-lasting piece of EA community infrastructure !

niplav

1

The ones that come to my mind are Momentum, Gravity well, Embedding and Pulsar.

But you might want to contact naming what we can for further suggestions (maybe you could even get "Constellation" or "Lightcone" and they get another name!)