Quick takes

How tractable is improving (moral) philosophy education in high schools?  tldr: Do high school still neglect ethics / moral philosophy in their curriculums? Mine did (year 2012). Are there tractable ways to improve the situation, through national/state education policy or reaching out to schools and teachers? Has this been researched / tried before?   The public high school I went to in Rottweil (rural Southern Germany) was overall pretty good, probably top 2-10% globally, except for one thing: Moral philosophy. 90min/week "Christian Religion" was the default for everyone, in which we spent most of the time interpreting stories from the bible, most of which to me felt pretty irrelevant to the present. This was in 2012 in Germany, a country with more atheists than Christians as of 2023, and even in 2012 my best guess is that <20% of my classmates were practicing a religion.  Only in grade 10, we got the option to switch to secular Ethics classes instead, which only <10% of the students did (Religion was considered less work).  Ethics class quickly became one of my favorite classes. For the first time in my life I had a regular group of people equally interested in discussing Vegetarianism and other such questions (almost everyone in my school ate meat, and vegetarians were sometimes made fun of). Still, the curriculum wasn't great, we spent too much time with ancient Greek philosophers and very little time discussing moral philosophy topics relevant to the present.  How have your experiences been in high school? I'm especially curious about more recent experiences.  Are there tractable ways to improve the situation? Has anyone researched this?  1) Could we get ethics classes in the mandatory/default curriculum in more schools? Which countries or states seem best for that? In Germany, education is state-regulated - which German state might be most open to this? Hamburg? Berlin?  2) Is there a shortage in ethics teachers (compared to religion teachers)? Can we

I think that EA outreach can be net positive in a lot of circumstances, but there is one version of it that always makes me cringe. That version is the targeting of really young people (for this quicktake, I will say anyone under 20). This would basically include any high school targeting and most early-stage college targeting. I think I do not like it for two reasons: 1) it feels a bit like targeting the young/naive in a way I wish we would not have to do, given the quality of our ideas, and 2) these folks are typically far from making a real impact, and there is lots of time for them to lose interest or get lost along the way. Interestingly, this stands in contrast to my personal experience—I found EA when I was in my early 20s and would have benefited significantly from hearing about it in my teenage years.

I'm the co-founder and one of the main organizers of EA Purdue. Last fall, we got four signups for our intro seminar; this fall, we got around fifty. Here's what's changed over the last year: * We got officially registered with our university. Last year, we were an unregistered student organization, and as a result lacked access to opportunities like the club fair and were not listed on the official Purdue extracurriculars website. After going through the registration process, we were able to take advantage of these opportunities. * We tabled at club fairs. Last year, we did not attend club fairs, since we weren't yet eligible for them. This year, we were eligible and attended, and we added around 100 people to our mailing list and GroupMe. This is probably the most directly impactful change we made. * We had a seminar sign-up QR code at the club fairs. This item actually changed between the club fairs, since we were a bit slow to get the seminar sign-up form created. A majority of our sign-ups came from the one club fair where we had the QR code, despite the other club fair being ~10-50x larger. * We held our callout meeting earlier. Last year, I delayed the first intro talk meeting until the middle of the third week of school, long after most clubs finished their callouts. This led to around 10 people showing up, which was still more than I expected, but not as much as I had hoped. This year, we held the callout early the second week of school, and ended up getting around 30-35 attendees. We also gave those attendees time to fill out the seminar sign-up form at the callout, and this accounted for most of the rest of our sign-ups. * We brought food to the callout. People are more likely to attend meetings at universities if there is food, especially if they're busy and can skip a long dining court line by listening to your intro talk. I highly recommend bringing food to your regular meetings too - attendance at our general meetings doubled last year after I s

Is there a maximum effective membership size for EA? @Joey 🔸 spoke at EAGx last night and one of my biggest take-aways was the (controversial maybe) take that more projects should decline money.  This resonates with my experience; constraint is a powerful driver of creativity and with less constraint you do not necessarily create more creativity (or positive output).  Does the EA movement in terms of number of people have a similar dynamic within society? What growth rate is optimal for a group of members to expand, before it becomes sub-optimal? Zillions of factors to consider of course but... something maybe fun to ponder. 

At this point, we need an 80k page on "What to do after leaving Open AI" 1. Don't start another AI safety lab

I’m part of a working group at CEA that’s started scoping out improvements for effectivealtruism.org. Our main goals are: 1. Improve understanding of what EA is (clarify and simplify messaging, better address common misconceptions, showcase more tangible examples of impact, people, and projects) 2. Improve perception of EA (show more of the altruistic and other-directedness parts of EA alongside the effective, pragmatic, results-driven parts, feature more testimonials and impact stories from a broader range of people, make it feel more human and up-to-date) 3. Increase high-value actions (improve navigation, increase newsletter and VP signups, make it easier to find actionable info) For the first couple of weeks, I’ll be testing how the current site performs against these goals, then move on to the redesign, which I’ll user-test against the same goals. If you’ve visited the current site and have opinions, I’d love to hear them. Some prompts that might help: * Do you remember what your first impression was? * Have you ever struggled to find specific info on the site? * Is there anything that annoys you? * What do you think could be confusing to someone who hasn't heard about EA before? * What’s been most helpful to you? What do you like? If you prefer to write your thoughts anonymously you can do so here, although I’d encourage you to comment on this quick take so others can agree or disagree vote (and I can get a sense of how much the feedback resonates).

David Rubinstein recently interviewed Philippe Laffont, the founder of Coatue (probably worth $5-10b). When asked about his philanthropic activities, Laffont basically said he’s been too busy to think about it, but wanted to do something someday. I admit I was shocked. Laffont is a savant technology investor and entrepreneur (including in AI companies) and it sounded like he literally hadn’t put much thought into what to do with his fortune. Are there concerted efforts in the EA community to get these people on board? Like, is there a google doc with a six degrees of separation plan to get dinner with Laffont? The guy went to MIT and invests in AI companies. In just wouldn’t be hard to get in touch. It seems like increasing the probability he aims some of his fortune at effective charities would justify a significant effort here. And I imagine there are dozens or hundreds of people like this. Am I missing some obvious reason this isn’t worth pursuing or likely to fail? Have people tried? I’m a bit of an outsider here so I’d love to hear people’s thoughts on what I’m sure seems like a pretty naive take! https://youtu.be/_nuSOMooReY?si=6582NoLPtSYRwdMe

Meant to post this in funding diversification week. A potential source of new and consistent funds: EA researchers/orgs could run research training programs. Drawing some of the rents away from universities and keeping it in the system. These could be non-accredited but focus on publicly demonstrable skills and offer tailored letters of recommendation for a limited number of participants. Could train skills and mentor research particularly relevant to EA orgs and funders. Students (EA and non-EA) would pay for this. Universities and government training funds could also be unlocked. (More on this later, I think, I have a whole set of plans/notes).