Is there much of an Effective Altruism movement in Russia? EA funding sources might be interested, especially if there was an effort to promote Effective Altruism. BERI might also potentially be interested; they funded CFAR.
We’ve tried to start a local EA movement early on and had a few meetups in 2016. Introductory talks got stale quite quickly, so we put together a core EA team, with Trello board and everything.
It wasn’t very clear what we were supposed to do, though:
We wanted to translate EA Handbook (and translated some parts of it), but there were some arguments against this (similar to this post which was released later).
Those of us who believed that AI Safety is the one true cause mostly wanted to study math/CS, discuss utilitarianism issues and eventually relocate to work for MIRI or something.
Some others argued that you shouldn’t be a hardcore rationalist to do the meaningful job and also maybe we should focus on local causes or at least not to discourage this.
Earning to give (which I feel had more emphasis in EA 3 years ago than it has now) isn’t very appealing in Russia, since the average income here is much lower than in the US
So, we had ~5-6 people on the team and were doing fine for a while, but eventually it all fizzled out due to the lack of time, shared vision and organizational capacity.
We tested several approaches to reboot it a few times since then. Haven’t succeeded yet, but we’ll try again.
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Currently, EA movement in Russia is mostly promoted by Alexey Ivanov from Saint-Petersburg. He takes care of onlineresources and organizes introductory EA talks and AI Safety meetups. He’s doing a great work.
Another guy is working on a cool project to promote EA/rationality among the talented students, but that project is still in its early stages and I feel like it’s not my story to tell.
One easy option is to just run a drinks or dinner and label it an Effective Altruism Social. Then have someone give a 2-3 minute explanation of what Effective Altruism is at the start. For a long time, Effective Altruism Sydney was only running dinners.
Anyway, I really don’t know anything about the Russian context, but EA seems to be more viral than LW in Western contexts. So could be useful if you are trying to increase the number of members to hit financial stability.
One more thing: unlike the other stuff, I feel like developing EA movement in Russia is more talent-constrained: it could be much more active if we had one enthusiastic person with managerial skills and ~10 hours/week on their hands. I’m not sure we have such a person in our community—maybe we do, maybe we don’t. (Sometimes I consider taking on this role myself, but right now that’s impossible, since I’m juggling 3 or 4 different roles already.)
OTOH, I’m also not sure how much better things would be if we had more funding and could hire such people directly. I might significantly underestimate this course of action because I don’t have much experience yet with extending organizational capacity through hiring.
Is there much of an Effective Altruism movement in Russia? EA funding sources might be interested, especially if there was an effort to promote Effective Altruism. BERI might also potentially be interested; they funded CFAR.
We’ve tried to start a local EA movement early on and had a few meetups in 2016. Introductory talks got stale quite quickly, so we put together a core EA team, with Trello board and everything.
It wasn’t very clear what we were supposed to do, though:
We wanted to translate EA Handbook (and translated some parts of it), but there were some arguments against this (similar to this post which was released later).
Those of us who believed that AI Safety is the one true cause mostly wanted to study math/CS, discuss utilitarianism issues and eventually relocate to work for MIRI or something.
Some others argued that you shouldn’t be a hardcore rationalist to do the meaningful job and also maybe we should focus on local causes or at least not to discourage this.
Earning to give (which I feel had more emphasis in EA 3 years ago than it has now) isn’t very appealing in Russia, since the average income here is much lower than in the US
So, we had ~5-6 people on the team and were doing fine for a while, but eventually it all fizzled out due to the lack of time, shared vision and organizational capacity.
We tested several approaches to reboot it a few times since then. Haven’t succeeded yet, but we’ll try again.
---
Currently, EA movement in Russia is mostly promoted by Alexey Ivanov from Saint-Petersburg. He takes care of online resources and organizes introductory EA talks and AI Safety meetups. He’s doing a great work.
Another guy is working on a cool project to promote EA/rationality among the talented students, but that project is still in its early stages and I feel like it’s not my story to tell.
One easy option is to just run a drinks or dinner and label it an Effective Altruism Social. Then have someone give a 2-3 minute explanation of what Effective Altruism is at the start. For a long time, Effective Altruism Sydney was only running dinners.
Anyway, I really don’t know anything about the Russian context, but EA seems to be more viral than LW in Western contexts. So could be useful if you are trying to increase the number of members to hit financial stability.
One more thing: unlike the other stuff, I feel like developing EA movement in Russia is more talent-constrained: it could be much more active if we had one enthusiastic person with managerial skills and ~10 hours/week on their hands. I’m not sure we have such a person in our community—maybe we do, maybe we don’t.
(Sometimes I consider taking on this role myself, but right now that’s impossible, since I’m juggling 3 or 4 different roles already.)
OTOH, I’m also not sure how much better things would be if we had more funding and could hire such people directly. I might significantly underestimate this course of action because I don’t have much experience yet with extending organizational capacity through hiring.