EA Talks

Workplace and professional EA groups | EA Global London 2021

May 30, 2022
EA Talks
Workplace and professional EA groups | EA Global London 2021
Show Notes Transcript

A key concern of the effective altruism community is the risk that highly engaged community members lose interest in EA (value drift). This might be especially true for those who don’t work for EA-aligned organizations. EA workplace and professional groups might be a potential countermeasure. Promising paths for impact may be strategies to attract and retain highly engaged community members and to offer support for EA allies to continuously transition towards a high impact career. The panel will discuss key uncertainties, paths to impact and some early signs of success focusing on the examples of the EA finance and consulting networks.

Panellists:
Devon Fritz | Co-founder, High Impact Professionals
Joan Gass | Managing Director, Centre for Effective Altruism
Jona Glade | Founder, Effective Altruism and Consulting Network
Meg Tong | Quantitative Strategist, Morgan Stanley

This talk was taken from EA Global London 2021. Click here to watch the talk with the PowerPoint presentation. 

Effective Altruism is a social movement dedicated to finding ways to do the most good possible, whether through charitable donations, career choices, or volunteer projects. EA Global conferences are gatherings for EAs to meet. You can also listen to this talk along with its accompanying video on YouTube.

we are really excited to welcome you to our session on workplace and professional


0:10

effective altruism groups according to the 2019 ea survey almost


0:16

50 of self-identified community members work in the private sector


0:22

35 of them um are planning or doing earning to give


0:28

and at the same time we can see that there is a robust evidence on the risk of value drift


0:35

this led to the to the hypothesis that there is currently an underserved segment in


0:41

the ea community and strengthening workplace and professional groups


0:47

might as well as offering services to high impact professionals might be viable counter measures


0:54

our session today will consist of three parts first we're going to have a panel discussion


1:00

followed by a q a you're invited to submit your questions with the swap card app i think


1:07

everybody's familiar with that in the meantime and after that the live stream part is


1:12

going to end and we are going to divide the audience into four groups where you can approach the panelists


1:18

directly and talk about certain questions and also we encourage you to


1:25

get some one-on-one connections and now i'm really excited to introduce


1:30

the panelists to you devin is the co-founder of high impact


1:36

professionals a charity entrepreneurship incubated organization that aims to


1:42

enable working professionals to have the biggest positive impact possible


1:47

previously he worked at founders pledge found his pledge at as the cto and managing director of germany


1:55

joan gass is the managing director of the center for effective altruism and she's in charge of ea groups and started


2:02

to look with drona and myself into workplace and professional groups jonah glade is the founder of the


2:09

effective altruism consulting network he works as a consultant for the boston


2:14

consulting group ncea where he looks into workplace and professional groups


2:19

and mctong has a background in natural natural science and computer science she


2:24

worked as a quantitative strategist at morgan stanley and will be joining


2:29

the ea crypto hedge fund lantern ventures as a trader she runs the ea finance group


2:37

thank you so much for joining this panel i'm really looking forward to an interesting discussion and also to the


2:42

questions from the audience well to start mac what is it you


2:47

actually do at the finance network maybe you can tell us a bit about that yes so um i mean the ultimate thing that we're


2:54

doing in the finance network is trying to have as much impact as possible and so i guess the terminal goals of that


2:59

are really to increase the amount of donations that our members are having and also to make sure that people are moving into high-impact careers which


3:06

may or may not be inside finance um so all of the goals and are really structured and the activities


3:12

are really structured around trying to achieve those terminal goals um instrumentally that also means


3:17

strengthening the community making sure that people have close connections with the community and also expanding communities so making sure that more


3:24

people who are interested in finance and also interested in ea actually find out that the ea finance group exists


3:30

so to recap terminal goals donations and high impact careers are really important to us and the activities that we do


3:36

really support that that sounds great um jonah how is the


3:41

effect of altruism consulting network different if at all yeah i think


3:46

two main things obviously we have a lot of similarities but i think we are structure-wise we are set up a little


3:52

bit differently so we are really organized about around workplace groups so at a consulting network every


3:58

workplace for example mckinsey or bcg has one workplace group with one ea node


4:03

who runs the workplace group and we have this effective autism and consulting network as an umbrella organization


4:09

where we coordinate between the different groups and see what's working in which company and we learn from each other and we also use like economies of


4:16

scale so if one company for example prepares something we can quite often use in our case quite often slides and


4:22

apply them to the other company as well um so i think that's might be one key difference i think you are more


4:27

decentral yes i think it's largely one group most people invited to most events um i think


4:34

the main aim is to get everyone talking to each other and everyone actually um getting good information from each other


4:39

and getting support for their donations and careers but in kind of one more centralized yeah yeah that's interesting


4:44

yeah and i think um the second difference is also our theory of change so obviously for you it's a lot about


4:50

money and in our cases can also be about money but i think for us the much bigger level is actually the careers and


4:56

influencing the careers of consultants as most of us only stay in consulting for two to three years and i really try


5:02

to transition and then having them transition to ea orgs is also i think a much higher priority for us than maybe


5:09

for the ein finance network that sounds so interesting devin i think you took a slightly


5:15

different angle by founding high impact professionals can you tell us about that yeah sure so there's definitely some


5:20

overlap we definitely plan to support and expand the workplace and professional groups


5:26

and we plan to do things a bit differently as well so we envision not only


5:32

supporting community building with these groups but to be the so-called switchboard operator between the as you


5:38

said 50 of eas who are in the private sector and ea organizations who could very much benefit from the skills


5:45

that the private sector has that ea organizations might be missing so our vision is that


5:50

someone in the private sector let's say someone from the consulting network says i want to engage more i want to do


5:55

something with my skills maybe i'm a strategic consultant what can i do and we can say aha you'd be great well


6:00

suited to go to this organization and maybe give a workshop or mentor somebody there and and


6:06

provide this cross-pollination of these two different groups that's very interesting and joan what is


6:12

your perspective on the workplace and professional groups landscape and what do you think how can they have the most


6:17

impact yeah i'm really excited to see the emergence of more workplace and professional groups


6:23

stepping back within the center for effective altruism one kind of thing that we think about in terms of our


6:29

theory of change is sharing ea principles when individuals are around university maybe even younger


6:36

to have them encounter ideas at the time when they're shaping their world view and then knowing that folks are going to


6:41

have peak career impact in their 50s or 60s it's really important to retain individuals and so i think city groups


6:48

that form forms of professional networks and workplace and industry groups are going to be really really key pillars for that um i definitely think we're in


6:55

the early stage of you know figuring out the playbook and what this can look like as the community grows i'm excited to


7:00

see a bunch of innovative models um on the stage today yeah and i think that also bri kind of


7:06

connects my next question because meg i'd like to ask you what you think workplace and professional groups can do


7:12

to retain highly engaged eas because i think it might be one of the key aspects of your work yes absolutely i'm


7:19

really glad that jane mentioned it actually um so i think value like avoiding value drift and promoting retention is something that's really


7:25

important for workplace groups especially if you're working around people who are maybe non-ears and have very different values to you so i think


7:31

having a close-knit community of people who are friends who can come to meetups and see the same faces again and again


7:38

and actually form really close connections is very important to promote retention i think another


7:44

thing is which is actually really useful about having these like close-knit connections that you can get useful information from people so talking about


7:50

how you're donating um because i think i mentioned to you earlier the donations that can be very individual things so


7:57

having a community which with which you can actually talk about the things that you're doing on an individual basis can be really useful or getting career


8:03

advice from people who are connected to you very well and actually understand your situation can be really really valuable and something that you get from


8:10

having this very close-knit community and maybe expanding on your thoughts on the impact um we did a lot of interviews


8:17

with different workplace and professional groups and what we saw that they are very structured differently right so there's quite often it's a


8:23

facebook group where they communicate ideas then it's like more advanced structures like with the ea and finance network and obviously also the race to


8:30

impact may vary a lot between the workplace groups so for example here's the quite clear case of


8:36

donations and careers but then also for example the uk civil service or public service group might have other levels


8:42

for example influencing their organizations or like policies and one way we are thinking currently about


8:49

it is this probably there's like some core every workplace and professional group could be doing so


8:54

providing caviar advice helping eas who are thinking about joining this career giving them insights


9:00

helping them enter if it's the best career decision for them and or just having like a healthy community and then


9:06

there are some optional parts which might vary between groups right so this is for example donations super important


9:11

for you for a public service people may be not as relevant they're like the influencing the organization is much


9:17

more important and i think also figuring out like this theory of change for each group is super relevant and a very


9:23

important next step to develop the space further yeah you and i have talked about like what might be the unique comparative advantage of each group


9:30

depending on what the eu ecosystem needs as a whole and then what that workplace or industry can offer yeah absolutely


9:37

yeah and that being said like you mentioned uh yonah um not only are there differences but there's a we saw in


9:42

these interviews that there were a lot of uh similarities between groups and there were a lot of gaps between groups because most are volunteer runs so they


9:49

haven't done everything yet like this pathway from students to joining the professional


9:54

groups looked like a missing gap and doing general outreach there's a lot of things that can be done that seem like


10:00

they're cross-applicable across all groups and do you think there's anything we can


10:06

learn from successful university or local groups yeah so um one thing that i think is


10:13

really interesting is a question of how to preserve high fidelity ideas within effective altruism and so i


10:20

think there have been interesting ways of thinking about engagement that don't require people to


10:25

recreate the wheel so can we have an 80 000 hours podcast that everybody listens to and then comes together to discuss um


10:31

or what are ways that you know reading groups could take off and so i think that might be one um option is thinking about how you take


10:38

busy students engage them with high fidelity content and what workplace groups does that work in maybe what


10:43

workplace groups doesn't need to be adapted to um i think a second thing is thinking about what's the


10:49

way that folks that are excited can have leadership opportunities because i think when you have voluntary leadership


10:55

opportunities that can really promote engagement and so you know in our university chapters or city chapters


11:00

sometimes that's being a facilitator but in workplace groups that might look different it might look like advocacy or


11:05

serving as a career mentor or running a donation-based event and so um i think there's some interesting question around


11:12

what's the what's the scalable way that you create leadership or engagement opportunities for folks within workplace


11:18

groups that we could look at university groups and study groups for joan i really like what you said about students being really busy i think this


11:23

is actually something that's super relevant for careers yeah people often don't have time to really fully engage in the same way and i think providing


11:30

opportunities where people can do things really easily and efficiently is really important so if people want to act


11:35

altruistically providing means for them to do it in an easy way that actually makes sense to them and doesn't really


11:40

interfere with a lot of the rest of the life in a significant way is super important so i love what you said about that and maybe building on that like


11:47

even like also having their collaborations with other ea organizations might be super helpful as well because quite often like just


11:53

having some outside views relevant so for example the consulting network we have one consultant who aligns with the


11:59

ceo from ea orc by weekly and have just has just a one-hour call with her and then they just like spare on ideas and


12:06

that's just like a way where you can like as a consultant get involved with the ea community also network but also


12:11

can offer something relevant to the a community by just having like this outside perspective having seen different organizations how they are run


12:18

so there are many different options which we need to explore further yeah and i add on there that since time


12:25

is such a premium with um people in these workplace groups because they're very intense industries um that makes


12:30

money all the more better and no way to keep engaged so donations is something that people can do since money is


12:36

something they have a lot of compared to time to maintain their engagement over time and stay engaged with ea yeah


12:42

and thinking even more about time resources here what do you think when should individuals prioritize


12:50

putting an effort into workplace and professional groups what could be risks here what do you


12:55

think about that oh yeah i mean that's a really good question i think um often understanding like what your theory of


13:00

change is is really important so keeping that in mind like how is the thing that you're doing actually resulting in the


13:06

end goal which is having more impact so is the thing you're doing actually increasing donations is it making people make bigger donations is it making


13:12

people make better donations is it actually helping people make better career decisions and really trading that


13:18

off against what other things you might otherwise be doing are you going to be um scaling up your own career maybe you want to actually put more effort into


13:24

making sure that your own career is actually more impactful um so doing those kind of trade-offs and making sure you actually understand what you're


13:30

trying to do and what you're trying to achieve is really important and do you think speaking about the ea


13:37

community in general are there any risks or uncertainties why we shouldn't prioritize this as all from an ea


13:44

perspective yeah i think there are several risks involved um


13:49

first of all what we see also in the consulting network that people tend to stay longer in consulting just because


13:54

they like hanging out with eas and like many people so that can be a good thing in some


13:59

cases but it can also be a bad thing so maybe it hinders people to transition earlier to an a ea they would normally


14:06

so i think that's one thing also another thing what is imaginable that like also ea align students might enter consulting


14:13

earlier or i just entered instead of having a more direct career path just because there's like a group who's uh


14:19

hopefully friendly and helps them to enter the space so i think they're having a very balanced career advice and


14:26

i also like giving the counter arguments is super important to not like have too many eas joining us um it can make sense


14:33

in some circumstances but i think in most cases it doesn't make sense for example to join consulting i think that's one key risk then also um


14:40

then they like typically risk like when your community communicating about ea especially like at the workplace where


14:46

people don't have a lot of time to engage with the ideas that are some misconceptions about it um so these are


14:52

just some ideas which come to mind and i think there's also lots of uncertainties like we already discussed right like we


14:58

are not really sure yet like which activities are most valuable and what the actual impact will be so i think


15:04

just exploring that and doing a lot of hypothesis testing and trying a lot of things and learning from university


15:09

groups learning from city groups and then just finding a model which works best for us and every group is also like


15:15

one key next step i also think we're still in the process of figuring out how to measure retention


15:20

and so i think there's some folks in like kind of outside view like this idea that like you know if you're in a


15:26

community of folks that have pretty different values than you it's really helpful to be around folks that are value-aligned i think that makes sense


15:32

but then there have also been some people who have done some analyses that are like well if you're really engaged in university maybe we see you know lack


15:39

of retention for folks that were less engaged but for folks that were super engaged they like stay over time so i


15:44

think on balance there's a question at least in meta organizations which is how much effort should we put into growth


15:49

and outreach at university versus how much effort on the margin should we put into things like retention and that


15:54

doesn't mean that both aren't important but there's still an outstanding question around allocation and so if an individual is in a position


16:01

where they specifically are thinking about you know outreach efforts versus retention or should that happen at


16:07

student and like students or should it help along with folks that are more mid-career i think there are still like marginal questions there that we're


16:13

figuring out which doesn't mean that compared to doing nothing they're not good um but for stu for people that are


16:19

choosing between different options i think we're still getting some data about which ones are more important to do on the margin


16:26

and looking at the workplace groups in for example different consulting firms i


16:32

think jonah you were involved or you were part of the process when different consulting firms installed workplace


16:38

groups um what what do you think went well what were success factors there


16:44

yeah i think uh some similarities between let's see for like successful workplace groups especially like when


16:49

starting them so i realized like folks who really focus like on output and just being practical and just getting it started is


16:55

super important so in the beginning like many people think about oh with whom do i have to align in my company to


17:01

founders and it's more often just quite practical to just start like having a whatsapp group or a slack channel and


17:07

just adding people like looking up on linkedin in the atk group who of my company works uh


17:12

is an ea and is in the atk group and just adding them and then going from there instead of having too much


17:18

thoughts about like which structure what is my target structure and where are we going and what we realized also is it's


17:25

a lot about the people so i think it's good to have your theory of change and like your target picture on the back of


17:31

your head but then like also being a little bit opportunistic and just seeing like who comes up and also like grabbing


17:36

the good people who are super engaged and seeing what's interesting for them and helping them to grow and then nudge


17:41

them no more and more towards ea courses and your target picture is something very relevant


17:47

and yeah and i think overall um also just doing a lot of hypothesis


17:53

testing super important like um if something is not working like as people are working full time at least um i


17:59

wouldn't push too hard on it to not also not get disappointed but like also like see what's emerging and quite often


18:05

especially like what i notice in a consulting network it's a lot about being at the right place at the right time to identify for example company


18:12

donations and influencing them and that's something which is very unforeseen and you like it doesn't make


18:17

sense like to push very hard on your csr team so corporate social responsibility team to really change it if they are not


18:23

interested in it i would just leave it but it can be indeed very impactful so for example one member who just recently


18:28

influenced like two million of the nations of this company but just like there was no one who would care about it and it was like no way we could have


18:35

foreseen that in other companies it wouldn't work simply yeah i want to jump on to that a bit um


18:41

one thing we want to do at high impact professionals is to inspire people to affect change now i think often in ea


18:47

there's this sentiment that uh i'm going to okay i just left university now i'm joining the workplace i'm going to build


18:53

career capital and then in some future nirvana state i'm going to have all this crazy impact and kind of along the way


18:59

everything else is instrumental and i think there's a lot of things that people can do down do now that they're not doing and yona is actually a great


19:05

example so at bcg you want to have the idea oh i can send make a slide deck about effective giving blast it out


19:11

to bcg and it resulted in 150 000 dollars and effective donations going out and it was just like he had the idea


19:17

to do that he did it like you said you don't need a you can start a whatsapp group or something you don't need this massive theory of change of course you


19:24

want to think things through but i think the barriers are a lot lower than people think in general to just having impact and you can do that now yeah


19:32

that's great so um [Music] are there any other next steps that come into your mind you would advise the


19:38

audience to do if they want to get involved with workplace and professional groups


19:46

yeah i can go for it so i imagine the audience we probably have three target groups in here right so one is like


19:53

people working at non-ea orcs um so i would really encourage them to reach out to their like workplace groups or maybe


19:59

even finding one if there isn't one and if it's the most impactful thing you can do you might have other opportunities


20:04

other projects which are more impactful then the second group is probably like students so i think all of the workplace


20:09

and professional groups are super keen on giving advice and like helping out with career decisions so i would really


20:15

encourage you to just reach out of us to us and also see if there are any groups around and then the other group is


20:21

probably effective altruism organizations who might be interested in corporations and see some synergies there so i would also


20:27

just really encourage you to reach out to us and then we can see like what the different needs are and how we can help in the most effective way and hopefully


20:33

create some synergies and i would say feel free to come talk to me there are a lot of groups out there that like i mentioned before


20:40

aren't super transparent because they don't have the capacity to build a website or something like that so you might not even know that a group exists


20:47

so if you're interested in finding out what groups are out there just feel free to come chat to me and i'll help you out


20:53

great that sounds very motivating um is there anything we left out that you'd like to share


20:59

with the audience from your perspective


21:06

great and i'm gonna look have a look um into the q a


21:12

section okay we have a quest we have a question for


21:18

jonah how does the process of presenting ea concepts to other consultants look like


21:24

do the firms allow time for building company groups is it happening simply by sending slide decks towards colleagues i


21:29

think we probably answered that already but maybe we can go deeper into that um or is it mostly happening during


21:35

personal conversations with interested colleagues yeah yeah so um first of all we are still


21:41

exploring so i don't have like the golden like thing you can do and it will always work and what i noticed it's a lot about


21:49

personal contacts also like in the a consulting network like the people who are most engaged or that bcg are just


21:54

like also some are friends or people i worked with and who know me personally


21:59

um so i think like these personal contexts are super relevant and for example in the beginning i just like


22:04

before founding the consulting network i was just giving a talk about ea at the workplace in my office just to see like


22:10

how people would react and test the hypothesis is actually relevant for consultants and they got very good feedback there and


22:17

from there it really went on basically because then like they would know me as the donation guy and then like cases


22:23

would reach out to me and um you would build your brand also within your company and also accelerate your


22:28

career with it actually with ea thinking because um you have knowledge others don't have um so this is one answer and


22:35

in the beginning i i gave a lot of talks i i organized them um in the beginning on myself but then i realized it's much


22:42

easier to reach also a counterfactual um audience by using existing formats and


22:48

also just much less work so like having like checking out what formats are there like if the social impact meetings if


22:54

you can talk there and then i also decided to go just offline and just blast out a donation


22:59

guide and i think that was probably the most impactful thing i did because of two things first of all and the donations we collected but then also


23:05

based on the feedback we got from the people right so there were people messaging us oh that's great it's so logical how can i help we identified


23:11

volunteers we identified eas we didn't know before existed at bcg and that was super helpful for us to accelerate the


23:17

group um so these are some ideas we are trying but then i think it also depends on the workplace and your culture and um


23:24

also like your position where you start and i would like always recommend to do a hypothesis testing do something easy


23:31

in the beginning you're working full time and then just see where it takes you and what's working yeah


23:37

great and i think there's also other groups which can help people out for example i'm really happy that high impact for professionals is going to


23:43

exist and i know groups like one for the world are really interested in giving more workplace talks and have a whole slide deck set up


23:50

and have given really successful talks at places like microsoft so i'm really excited about having kind of also external help so you're not actually


23:56

creating all this stuff yourself you can use um stuff that jonas made which is pretty great or you can use things that


24:02

devon is going to make you can use stuff that people want for the world have already made so it's pretty exciting


24:07

that's great um the next question is it seems like there's some really positive professionalization of various


24:14

ea groups high impact professionals has a 100 100k um sorry 100 000


24:22

um jonah is working part-time for cea ca is funding offices and staff on some uni


24:27

campuses how do you feel these efforts will add significant counterfactual value over what people might achieve as


24:34

volunteers good question so i think


24:39

as i mentioned before most i think all except for now the ea consulting network they're all run by


24:45

volunteers and they tend to be in industries that are very time constrained so the people just don't have the the capacity to put in the


24:51

effort that's required to make sure these things are successful and that professionals don't value drift off


24:58

and so we envision keeping people engaged in their ea journey so that maybe they one day go on


25:04

to work at an ea organization and i think it's a there's a pretty plausible theory of change here that um this is a


25:10

mechanism uh whereby people will join the ea organizations where they otherwise wouldn't have


25:17

and with nca one thing that we haven't mentioned here is also the funding that we have for city groups so if you have a


25:22

person having an individual in person through our community building grants program where they can create an


25:28

in-person professional network and these are different than workplace groups because you know as opposed to be like ea and consultants where you're across a


25:33

consultant anywhere in the world these would be eas in new york um and you know the ea finance group is like a


25:38

sub-community of the ea london community as one example um but also has some global members as well um


25:45

meg feel free to correct me oh no i think that sounds approximately correct yeah um and so um yeah i think that


25:52

another step in professionalization that we've seen is being able to have physical meetings for professionals


25:58

across different industries in one geographic location in addition to connecting professionals within a given industry or in a given workplace


26:05

and i think being able to have someone full time to help be a nodal person and figure out who are all the other


26:11

professions in my professionals in my uh geographic area can help strengthen some


26:17

of those connections that are really valuable to folks great what are some suggestions on how to find


26:23

members for your groups while unis have freshers fair and central places to advertise we as a city group have found


26:30

it difficult to find members members within the workplace or within


26:37

like a four-year group so i guess like for um i understand the question


26:43

is that um how can you find new members for the eacn and for the ea i can do the


26:49

workplace and university groups okay yeah so for the workplace groups how we always get started we looked like uh in


26:54

linkedin groups ea org so for example atk has a huge linkedin group but then also i think that's the general effect


27:00

of autism linkedin group and we just type in the company name and just write everyone who's in this group and it's


27:06

very likely that they are at least ea aligned and interested and from there we take it and what we i always recommend


27:12

also in the acn is the second step is sending our destination guide because then you will just like identify much more eas which you won't find be


27:18

linkedin and then yeah you see where it goes from there and hopefully and you also have like a website or like in


27:24

facebook group and the mechanism where people can sign up where you can even where people can find you and then they


27:31

reach out to you so i think these are the three main overviews for us i've also had a lot of success with personal connections um just asking people to


27:38

tell their friends and that's actually been probably the most successful way of getting people who are actually engaged and interested


27:45

so yeah and on a community infrastructure level as cea puts more effort into university groups we're really interested in this transition


27:51

from university to workplace i think when you start your first job or move to a new city that's like another really


27:56

kind of critical place where you might be thinking about who are my friends what are my peer networks what kind of values are going to be around me and so


28:03

things that we're thinking about in this space or what could hand off look like from university groups to city groups as


28:09

we have a you know more in-depth list of workplace groups we can think about how to add that on


28:15

thinking about when individuals sign up for virtual programs and your exit survey you can say please connect me to my local in-person group when you log


28:22

into the ea forum there's now a list of geographical groups that you can see and we're building hoping to build in a


28:27

geographical feature where you can say oh i'm in this location so you know the group around you i'm so really thinking about how to strengthen those


28:33

connections between different parts of our program so individuals don't feel like they're they're alone


28:40

great what other professions or fields do you think there should be an ea group for


28:45

next aside from finance and consulting do you want to talk about i mean there


28:51

are several others right now do you want to talk about some of some of the ones that do exist or highlight some of those


28:56

yeah sure so um i think several which come to mind and please jump in if you have no more like i'm in


29:02

the public sector there's the uk civil service group that in germany we also have like a public sector group then in


29:08

the private sector um we have the finance network the consulting network um medicine medicine


29:16

and there's even subgroups under these groups so yes this has been a real exploration there's uh ea's and medicine


29:21

in the uk he is in medicine in the german speaking world and if you just go deeper and deeper there are these groups


29:26

that are out there and you just don't know they exist there's even like an ea jet propulsion lab


29:32

group which was mind-blowing to me that it could be that specific but yeah and coming back to the question are


29:38

there any fields where they'd where there aren't any groups yet but you think it would totally make sense to


29:44

have some i think this is worth exploring so i i think there could be um


29:50

not workplace groups per se but different stratification so like maybe earning to-givers who are giving certain


29:55

amounts might want to interact with each other um even cause areas i think are groups that don't exist but could exist


30:02

and uh draw meaningful engagement so i think there's a there's a lot of work to be done there i think maybe adding on


30:08

that what i would be personally super excited to see is um journalism i think there are some and i think that's just


30:14

like create synergies and great learnings you can exchange between each other what's working and what's not working and what your priorities should


30:19

be being and it's also just a very motivational factor i think the second one is really like public sector


30:25

probably in different countries i mean the uk civil service group is really doing a great job in influencing um the


30:31

public sector and policies there and i think that's potentially a high impact path and then maybe also for research or for


30:37

some research fields aligning the people better there could be also very impactful


30:42

and you can kind of think of this as like a what's the top down and bottom up model so the top down might be something like look at bin todd's talk look at the


30:49

state of ea look at on the margins some of the skills where organizations or other play or funders are saying they


30:54

feel like they're particularly talent constrained in their field and that might give you a top down on the margin what's most important for us to build up


31:00

professional networks in so maybe something like journalism or communicating ideas might be one example of a field but then you also want to be


31:07

opportunistic and bottom up and think about who are the people that are like well positioned have a good understanding of ea ideas and are you


31:13

know poised to lead that network and so i think there's kind of a matching situation that needs to go on in order


31:19

to answer that and i mean there are also like many groups in the tech space so i think facebook microsoft have very


31:25

strong groups so i think maybe even having there like an umbrella organization um like the ac and for consulting and maybe a number


31:31

organization for tech firms could also be something which is could be impactful like just for saying from the outside


31:37

obviously you would need to explore when you know the space better than i do but it's just another idea which could be


31:42

relevant right um i think we have time for one more question so i'm gonna prioritize here um


31:49

how and how much do you talk about effective giving at work i have heard of giving what we can members


31:55

putting in their email signatures etc but i avoid talking about it talking about it as i don't know how to without


32:01

causing negative reactions um seem like you are bragging


32:07

i think that's a great question yeah and so for me i always like i don't talk


32:13

directly about ea i see what the person is interested in and then i see if i can find a hook somewhere so now about


32:19

donations so if someone's really interested in finance or investing then i just drop like in a sense oh you could


32:25

also think about the return of investment for your donation and then i just simply see like how the person is reacting and then if he's super open for


32:32

it i will like go further but um i'm very conservative personally like with


32:37

doing like pushing too hard for ea courses or even just mentioning ea so even though if the person is interested


32:43

like quite often they will just mention here in the third discussion and just see where the person stands what's like a specific question which is relevant


32:49

for them and then just like meet him where he or she is and um yeah talk about the topics there and provide some


32:56

ea content and then maybe i might broaden the scope um i think i personally could be more proactive about


33:01

it because also quite a lot of people's and are grateful for having this information um yeah but that's just not


33:08

my style i know i fully agree i think there's a lot of work to be done like i


33:14

said before of encouraging people to do push a little bit more i think there's really low risk in talking about effective giving i agree effective


33:21

altruism is maybe a bit heavy-handed but just saying like hey some charities are way better than others


33:26

look at this evidence can't feel too risky to me and


33:31

like jonah said kind of feeling it out and seeing how it goes and taking the people who want to go on the journey further further it feels pretty robustly


33:38

good to me and something we should be doing more of great


33:44

thanks a lot before we move on to the next part of the session i would like to thank the


33:49

virtual audience for attending and this is going to be the end of the live


33:54

stream so please join me thanking devin jones jonah and mack for this interesting discussion


34:07

you