welcome to the nonlinear library, where we use text-to-speech software to convert the best writing from the rationalist and ea communities into audio.
this is: Things I Learned at the EA Student Summit, published by Akash on the effective altruism forum.
This weekend, I attended the EA Student Summit. Below, I’m summarizing some of my “key takeaways”—ideas that I found interesting, helpful, or thought-provoking. I’m dividing them into a few key themes and questions:
How to Learn About EA
How can we effectively learn about EA? Will Payne had some helpful suggestions, summarized below:
We don’t need to reinvent the wheel—there are already a lot of resources (and curated libraries of resources) out there. Oxford’s EA Introductory Fellowship reading list seems like a great place to start.
We should be explicit about updating our beliefs. If we change our mind about something, it’s useful for us to document it and share it with others.
We should strive to learn more effortfully. Will pointed out that it’s usually not enough to passively read an article or listen to a podcast—we’re more likely to remember information and benefit from it if we learn in more effortful ways. Some examples include summarizing an article in your own words, asking yourself reflection questions (and then answering them), or explaining an idea to others. This forum post is another example :)
Will’s talk also had one of my favorite suggestions from the summit. Instead of saying “I found this article interesting because it was about X”, Will suggests that we say “I found this article interesting because it suggests that we should do Y.” I think this is extremely clever, for at least two reasons.
First, I think it makes the person that we’re talking to more motivated and energized about the topic. There are thousands of interesting articles about interesting topics, but there are very few that directly try to make me think or act differently.
Second, I think it helps us recognize when things aren’t actually helpful. It’s easy to get lost thinking about interesting ideas that don’t actually have any impact on the choices we make. By asking “does this suggest that I should do something different or think about something differently?”, we might save ourselves a lot of time.
EA Resources that I Didn't Know About
I learned about a few useful EA resources:
The Center for Effective Altruism has a media specialist and a licensed social worker who serves as the EA community liaison. Anyone can contact them. Yes, that means you. Or me. Part of their job is literally to help us think, feel, and communicate better.
Aaron Gertler, who runs the EA forum, is willing to read/edit any potential forum posts.
Giving What We Can has a list of content ideas for blog posts.
These are just a few that I’ve learned about recently— I’m sure there are many more. This post from a few weeks ago has a more thorough list of EA-related organizations.
How often should you reach out to EAs and EA-related organizations?
I have an immense amount of respect for other EAs. These are literally people who are devoting their lives toward solving the world’s biggest problems and finding the most effective ways to spend their time and money.
So naturally, I thought that these people—especially the “big name” people—would have far better things to do with their time than talk to me. I need to wait until I have a really impressive idea before I request the time of other EAs—I could distract them from discovering the next highly effective charity or the solution to AI safety!
Nearly all of my experiences at the summit went against this idea. People wanted to talk to me, and others, about raw, unpolished ideas. Almost every EA I spoke to—including the “big names”—seemed authentically and intrinsically motivated to talk to students about their interests and ideas. I honestly think this was my biggest surprise of the conference—there are so many EAs who would genuinely like to talk to you.
Now, there’s al...
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