Jordan (Jojo) Pieters. Working on operations and movement building for the most important century. Trying to better understand existential risk from AI.
In case it's not obvious, we didn't end up running this. There were a couple of reasons for that:
I personally didn't have the capacity to run a project of this size. Other residencies I attended required multiple staff members to run well
The Mexico EA Fellowship was targeting roughly the same demographic and happening at the same time. I didn't want to create competition for this and I think they had an advantage anyway (a more established LatAm community, coinciding with a local EAGx, and a strong team)
I probably wouldn't consider running it now:
Obviously, the funding situation in EA has changed significantly since the time we came up with this idea (FTX crash).
I'm also not sure how cost-effective/useful other residencies have been (Prague, Mexico City, Zanzibar). I would want some more data on these previous residencies before moving forward with more.
Wasn't sure where else to mention this – the search feature on the forum is pretty bad. I tried finding a post from Claire Zabel by searching "Claire Zabel". I couldn't find it because her username is actually "ClaireZabel"
I had previously decided to work on EA community-building full-time, and have now mostly changed my mind. I want to write up my reasoning for this. I don't think this will be entirely relevant to general movement strategy, but I think it's worth making legible for others
the question of whether we (i.e. anyone) should be doing mass outreach on the topic of AI Safety is over. It is happening.
This feels like a very hostile statement. It's not at all obvious that this question is over.
I personally feel a lot more cautious about doing mass outreach. I think there's a decent chance people could accidentally do significant harm to future efforts. Policy, politics and advocacy are complicated - regardless of the area you're working in.
For what it's worth, I've spoken to Nik and I think some of the work he's doing is great. I'm especially excited about narrative testing.
Thank you for being open about this Max. I'm sorry to hear that it's been tough. I think this post in itself is really valuable. I imagine myself using it as a good example in the future to encourage people to prioritize their mental health.
I appreciate the work you've done to make CEA into an organisation that I really admire. I'm sure you'll do great things in the future. Best wishes!
I'm optimistic about this test. Even as a community builder, I find all the community discussion overwhelming. The Forum has become a place I'm less likely to visit because something like half of the discussions don't feel productive for me to engage in.
This seems great. This org has ties to pretty influential people. A couple of things I'm curious about:
What influenced this direction? (they mentioned the doomsday clock, but I imagine lots of other sources of influence)
Could we piggyback off of this to increase buy-in for x-risk reduction from people in their network? Maybe getting some of their high net-worth supporters to start moving money towards these causes?
Is the survey data closed access? If so, would it be possible to request access? I have a few questions of my own I'd like to try answer
Some very belated updates on this project:
In case it's not obvious, we didn't end up running this. There were a couple of reasons for that:
I probably wouldn't consider running it now:
Wasn't sure where else to mention this – the search feature on the forum is pretty bad. I tried finding a post from Claire Zabel by searching "Claire Zabel". I couldn't find it because her username is actually "ClaireZabel"
I had previously decided to work on EA community-building full-time, and have now mostly changed my mind. I want to write up my reasoning for this. I don't think this will be entirely relevant to general movement strategy, but I think it's worth making legible for others
This feels like a very hostile statement. It's not at all obvious that this question is over.
I personally feel a lot more cautious about doing mass outreach. I think there's a decent chance people could accidentally do significant harm to future efforts. Policy, politics and advocacy are complicated - regardless of the area you're working in.
For what it's worth, I've spoken to Nik and I think some of the work he's doing is great. I'm especially excited about narrative testing.
Thank you for being open about this Max. I'm sorry to hear that it's been tough. I think this post in itself is really valuable. I imagine myself using it as a good example in the future to encourage people to prioritize their mental health.
I appreciate the work you've done to make CEA into an organisation that I really admire. I'm sure you'll do great things in the future. Best wishes!
I often use charity and thrift shops. The other day I was thinking about how it would be cool to have one that donates to GiveWell or something.
Good job on trying this!
I'm optimistic about this test. Even as a community builder, I find all the community discussion overwhelming. The Forum has become a place I'm less likely to visit because something like half of the discussions don't feel productive for me to engage in.
Flagging that I may be interested in helping run both EA Infrastructure and AI safety versions of this
This seems great. This org has ties to pretty influential people. A couple of things I'm curious about: