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This is: EA Global Tips: Networking with others in mind, published by kuhanj on the effective altruism forum.
Summary/Context:
EAs tend to be pretty good at thinking about people other than themselves. One situation in which I don’t see this as much is when networking, where I've seen people largely focus on their careers/questions+uncertainties/projects/funding opportunities/etc.
EA Global London 2021 is a day away, and many attendees are searching for attendees to schedule meetings with (which I, and many others, usually strongly recommend over attending recorded sessions, and most other sessions too). I thought now (or more accurately a few days ago, oops) might be a good time to write down some thoughts on:
the importance and benefits of coordination in communities with shared goals like the EA community.
the implications of this for networking in EA and specifically at EA Global (the default time for many members of the community to set aside a weekend to meet with other members of the community).
how I’ve approached networking at EA Global.
Some concrete tips I’d encourage for EAs when networking (especially for EA Global):
Think about who you can help and how you can help them, along with who can help you when deciding who to reach out to.
Default to thinking about your network (EA group, friends, etc) along with yourself when deciding who to network with. In the spirit of the above point, consider how your network can help others along with how others can help your network.
When having conversations, get into the habit of regularly thinking about how you can provide value to your conversation partner, and actually following up.
I’ve listed some concrete ways I’ve applied these principles at previous EA conferences in the post, and how doing so has helped generate impact (and more specifically, Stanford EA and SERI succeed).
The Importance of Coordination:
My favourite article on the importance of coordination in EA is “Doing good together—how to coordinate effectively, and avoid single-player thinking” by Ben Todd.
In it, he writes:
The historian, Yuval Harari, claims in his book Sapiens that better coordination has been the key driver of human progress. He highlights innovations like language, religion, human rights, nation states and money as valuable because they improve cooperation among strangers.
If we work together, we can do far more good. This is part of why we started the effective altruism community in the first place: we realised that by working with others who want to do good in a similar way — based on evidence and careful reasoning — we could achieve much more.
But unfortunately we, like other communities, often don’t coordinate as well as we could.
Instead, especially in effective altruism, people engage in “single-player” thinking. They work out what would be the best course of action if others weren’t responding to what they do. But once you’re part of a community that does respond to your actions, this assumption breaks down. We need to develop new rules of thumb for doing good — the strategies and approaches that work well in a single-player situation often don’t work once you’re collaborating with a community.
Tips for Networking with Others in Mind
Given the above, here are a few recommendations for networking in EA (which apply in general, but especially for EA Global given its status as the schelling/default networking event for the community):
When considering whom to reach out to, think not only about who might be able to provide value, advice, connections, job/internship/research/funding opportunities to yourself, but how you might offer these things to others.
If you’re a group organizer, or if you know other EAs/people interested in EA (so probably most people reading this post), consider doing the above for all your group members, or all ...
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