EA - High-Impact Psychology (HIPsy): Piloting a Global Network by Inga

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: High-Impact Psychology (HIPsy): Piloting a Global Network, published by Inga on September 29, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Engaged with psychology or mental health? This is for you. Impartial compassion. Rationality. Wellbeing. For a movement built on these values, EA likely underutilizes psychology professionals. Together with our supporters from the Global Priorities Institute, the Center for Effective Altruism, and the Happier Lives Institute, HIPsy aims to help people engaged with psychology or mental health maximize their impact. Vision We will follow in the footsteps of the EA Consulting Network, High-Impact Medicine, and High-Impact Athletes. Accordingly, the goal of HIPsy shall be to increase the likelihood of high-impact decisions, make collaboration and information processes more effective, and reduce the risk of value drift for people engaged in psychology or mental health. Relevant resources shall be available, easy to access, and use: up-to-date high-quality information, career and work advice, networking and collaboration opportunities. Psychological know-how shall be effectively acquired, shared, and used for EA. Psychology expertise is particularly needed in the fields of: mental health and well-being, both within EA and globally, community building, and outreach, management, HR, and operations, priorities research, and effectiveness research, x-risk-reduction and AI safety, e.g. awareness-building, and persuasion. Summary The goal for the next few months is to find out which of the many potential actions to prioritize, and how to address them most effectively. We will check what materials, events, and services are in-demand, and pilot some of them. You want to help? Let us know here. If you'd like to collaborate, fund us, or if you have got any of the following skills, we want to hear from you: online content creation, running mentorship programs, hosting events, web-dev, community-building, running surveys, research, and cost-effectiveness analyses. Opportunities Engaging with > 50 members of the EA community and their materials revealed three major opportunities:1. EA has skill bottlenecks that psychological professionals can help with Industry: management, entrepreneurship, operations, HR Science: at universities and EA mental health/wellbeing orgs (lack of seniors) Therapy: EA-informed psychotherapists and coaches for members of the EA community 2. It’s hard for psychology professionals to enter EA even if they are likely good matches Existing materials and advice are difficult to find, scattered, contradictory, out of date, and selective (e.g. reading list, Effective Thesis) which likely discourages prospects Effectiveness and altruism: People largely enter psychology because they want to help others, and most universities have very high entrance requirements and thus select intelligent and ambitious individuals Mental health as a cause area faces large funding constraints that make it hard to enter, contribute and stick for people engaged in this field. 3. There is unfulfilled potential for synergistic action and systematic exchangeThe impact of psychology-related EA orgs could be boosted by informing members of the community of techniques, knowledge, and best practices they can use to be more impactful, e.g. status quo of psychology research fostering collaboration and joint efforts between organizations that face similar challenges, e.g. mental health orgs that need to learn how to develop scalable and sustainable psychological interventions cooperating with leading psychology experts and EA-aligned individuals outside of EA that can help EA stay up to date with current industry, market, and research standards. Conclusion. It can be easier to access up-to-date high-quality information, advice, and networking opportunities. We imagine...