Author: colin

Hi EATO Community,

As everyone is contending with what the COVID-19 pandemic means for them, I wanted to send my best wishes to all of you. We’re all in this together.

Given the current situation, we’ve unfortunately had to cancel all in-person events until further notice. However, I’m excited to announce that we’ll be experimenting with virtual meetups instead. Our first virtual meetups are already scheduled and there will be more posted soon. If you haven’t already you can also join our meetup group to find those events and find a variety of options to stay in touch on our website. eatoronto.com/get-involved

If you’d like to chat, you can also schedule a call with me here. We can talk about effective altruism, or just check-in if you’d prefer.

Tackling Coronavirus

Some people have asked about actions they can take to reduce the harm of COVID-19. The opportunity cost of individuals time engaging on this is unique to each person. For some, it might be better to focus on your current important work. If you are interested in COVID-19 specific activities:

• Please follow government and/or expert advice and invest in your own self-care
• Talk to your employers, friends and family, and explain why you’re taking the Coronavirus seriously
• Take actions to convince your family/friends/social groups to follow social distancing recommendations (perhaps through one-on-one conversations or via your social media)
• Consider sharing the Stand Against Corona pledge 
• If you want to make pandemic specific donations, or if friends/family want to donate or learn more, you may want to direct them to this resource 
• If you want to connect with other EAs thinking about COVID, you can join the  EA COVID-19 Facebook group [note: this group is not CEA official and we are not endorsing projects/ideas generated by this group]

Other suggestions

As Julia Wise says in her recent Forum post, “The work EAs do is still important. Donations are still important. All the problems we’ve been working on are still here, and will still be here when this is over.“ If you’ve got some spare time, here are some things you might want to do:

• Continue to learn more about effective altruism (including Greg Lewis’s new 80,000 Hours problem profile on biosecurity)
• Figure out how you might take action based on EA principles
• Connect with the global community; join other online groups, check out EA Chats or WANBAM
• Invest in self-improvement or take an online course
• Think about your career plans; check out 80,000 Hours Key Ideas and their Job Board.

Stay safe! We’ll be in touch.

From Jan’s article on What to do with people?, we get what strikes me as a unique and valuable way of looking at doing good as part of the EA community. This take is useful for breaking down the structure and causes of EA in a way that opens up new opportunities. The main term I’d like to draw attention to is decomposition. I’ll leave this paragraph here for further reflection.

What happens if you take your “build hierarchical networked structure” hat? You pick, for example, “effective altruism movement building” as an area/task (it is likely somewhere near the top of prioritization). In the next step, you attempt to do the hierarchical “decomposition” of the area. You can get started just by looking on past and present internal structures of CEA, with sub-groups or sub-tasks like Events, Grants or Groups. Each of these “parts” usually needs all of theoretical work, research and development, and execution and ops. After a bit of looking around, you may find, for example, there are just a few people systematically trying to create amazing events. There are opportunities to practice: CFAR is often open to ops volunteers, EAG as well, you may run an event for your group, or create some new event which would be useful to have for the broader community. All of this is impactful work, if not impactful job. Or, you may find out there isn’t anyone around exactly working on research of EA events. By that, I mean questions like: “How do events lead to impact? How we can measure it? Are there some characteristic patterns in how people meet each other? What are the relevant non-EA reference classes for various EA events?” When you try to work on this you may find out it depends on specific skills, or requires contact with people working on events, so it may be less tractable – but it’s still worth trying. I would also expect good work on this topic to have impact, attract attention, and possibly funding.

– Jan’s What to do with people?

So, perhaps the next time someone you know is looking for a role to take on, perhaps they could create their own by taking some time to draw out and decompose the network structure of EA causes.

With the move to this new website, let’s take a look at the variety of ways members can engage with the community that are not yet featured in the “Get Involved” section.

1. Suggest an Event Idea & see past ideas bit.ly/theboxEATO
2. Check out and consider supporting community projects bit.ly/EATOprojects
3. Indicate your Interest in a Toronto EA House on bit.ly/joinEATOslack & then go to the slack’s house channel
4. Sign up for a course at thinkbetter.ca, a ” Toronto based not-for-profit group that teaches advanced thinking skills and evidence based self-improvement techniques. ” that works closely with EATO.
5. AI Safety Camp: volunteer your time, contact Colin
6. Sign up for our Monthly Newsletter subscribepage.com/eato
7. Join our Shared EATO Calendar bit.ly/EATOcalendar
8. Event & Project Development Schedule bit.ly/EATOschedule
9. Meeting Notes Archive bit.ly/EATOnotes
10. Group Planning Archive bit.ly/EATOplanning
11. Slack Channel bit.ly/joinEATOslack

Here is the report and you can find it later at bit.ly/EATOreport2018

Comments and questions on the report are welcome!

Highlights

EATO has grown a lot over the year, and many dreams of previous years were realized.

• Most categories of membership nearly doubled
• Ten of the community’s thirteen currently active projects were started in 2018
• EATO hosted a regional retreat in September that all 16 attendees seemed to enjoy and a few attendees found significantly impactful
• 16 case studies of individual members have been documented to show positive, EA-aligned changes in their resources, dedication, and realization, many of which are made public in this report