BrianTan
Bio
Participation5
I co-founded WhiteBox Research in 2023 and lead its operations and marketing. WhiteBox aims to solve open research problems in AI interpretability and develop more AI safety researchers in Southeast Asia. I'm also a co-founder and board member of EA Philippines.
I previously was a Group Support Contractor for the Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA) for two years, where I helped support EA groups around the world.
You can reach out to me at brian@whiteboxresearch.org or find me on LinkedIn.
Posts 28
Comments465
Topic contributions6
Hi Dawn, thanks for your interest in donating to EA Philippines! I'm unsure if I understood you correctly, but EA PH's minimum funding goal on Manifund is $500, as the team would appreciate any amount of funding. So I think if your donation is at least $400, then the project would indeed be funded, and you wouldn't need to be refunded. Let me know if this answers your concern!
Hey James, sorry for the late reply, but thanks for the feedback!
Here are the averages across groups by country for each of the group measures:
It would be time-consuming to show how the group measures have changed by country across groups surveys, and some questions in the 2022 census weren’t asked previously, so I hope the above is useful enough for you.
I can share the number of groups founded per country by year since 2011 here though (for groups still currently active):
I only included countries with a minimum of 3 groups that filled out the 2022 census in both images above. I hope this helps!
Hey Manuel, sorry for the late reply, but thanks for your comment!
I agree it would be better for the results of EA surveys (including this one) to be published earlier. The reason the census results came out in June was because:
- In January-March, I had to prioritize other tasks/projects instead of analyzing and writing the census results
- Analyzing and writing the census results took longer than I expected
We'll try to publish the results for this year's census a bit earlier.
I agree that it seems good for EA to have a career-focused pledge, and I wrote up a similar idea here on the Forum two years ago, which had mixed feedback then. I think some people thought it was a bad idea because of the "maximizing" language in the pledge's name and the post though, but they may still be sympathetic to the idea of a career-focused pledge. I now think that a "do the most good" pledge is not an ideal name, and I've updated the post to say this.
One difference between your pledge idea and mine is that yours doesn't sound like a lifetime pledge - it sounds focused on being taken and adhered to during the phase where they're building career capital. Maybe that's intentional and good, but possibly a lifetime career-focused pledge might be better?
In case you haven't seen it, the Resource Centre has advice on doing 1-1's! It also links some resources on 1-1's, including the Global Challenges Project's guide.
No worries, and I'll keep an eye on it! Sorry, I missed out on your last question. During our first year, I think we viewed EA Philippines as a serious organization trying to market EA via well-run events (i.e. with speakers), rather than as a small, tight-knit community. Moreover, it was only in November that we started to feel we had enough regular attendees (i.e. 15-20) to organize a socials.
Looking back, we could have done one or two more social meetups that year. I only say one or two because I think other types of events (especially discussions of EA readings, like for an intro fellowship) are generally higher value than socials. I see higher value in socials now than in our first year, although Manila traffic can make it hard for people to meet in-person. I think it's fine for your group to have a monthly social gathering.
Got it, no problem!