At the summit, I gave a talk on community building. One of my main thesis was that I think it’s actually better to do a rationality/self-improvement club that is also an Effective Altruism club than an EA club that’s also a rationality club. You’ll get people who don’t just self identify as world savers (and who can, over time, be influenced by the world savers)
The self-imp/rationality group I run begins sessions by talking about our successes from the previous week, and ends with setting goals from the previous week. This means the thing that gets positively reinforced via social pressure is actually doing things, whereas with EA it’s easy to simply reward signaling.
That’s a good idea. I could try to advertise it that way, since I’m having major issues finding a single person at my college interested in effective altruism. I might be wrong, but do you think it would be harder to get people interested in rationality, or to get them interested in effective altruism? My priors tell me that charity > rationalism in many people’s minds, but I’m not sure.
EDIT: I decided to go with the rationality club idea. There’s no real advantage in my original plan compared to opening a THINK club, which is basically the same idea except I can do more fun things with it. Thanks for the advice!
I’m a student interested in building a Rationality/Effective Altruism Club. Was this talk recorded? Because I would be interested in watching/reading it, if you have a YouTube link, etc.
At the summit, I gave a talk on community building. One of my main thesis was that I think it’s actually better to do a rationality/self-improvement club that is also an Effective Altruism club than an EA club that’s also a rationality club. You’ll get people who don’t just self identify as world savers (and who can, over time, be influenced by the world savers)
The self-imp/rationality group I run begins sessions by talking about our successes from the previous week, and ends with setting goals from the previous week. This means the thing that gets positively reinforced via social pressure is actually doing things, whereas with EA it’s easy to simply reward signaling.
That’s a good idea. I could try to advertise it that way, since I’m having major issues finding a single person at my college interested in effective altruism. I might be wrong, but do you think it would be harder to get people interested in rationality, or to get them interested in effective altruism? My priors tell me that charity > rationalism in many people’s minds, but I’m not sure.
EDIT: I decided to go with the rationality club idea. There’s no real advantage in my original plan compared to opening a THINK club, which is basically the same idea except I can do more fun things with it. Thanks for the advice!
I’m a student interested in building a Rationality/Effective Altruism Club. Was this talk recorded? Because I would be interested in watching/reading it, if you have a YouTube link, etc.
It was not recorded, but I plan to write it up soon.