EA - Introducing School of Thinking by Luca Parodi

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: Introducing School of Thinking, published by Luca Parodi on November 17, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.(Cross-posted on LessWrong)IntroductionSchool of Thinking (SoT) is a media startup.Our purpose is to spread Effective Altruist, longtermist, and rationalist values and ideas as much as possible to the general public by leveraging new media. We aim to reach our goal through the creation of high-quality material posted on an ecosystem of YouTube channels, profiles on social media platforms, podcasts, and SoT's website.Our priority is to produce content in English and Italian, but we will cover more languages down the line. We have been funded by the Effective Altruism Infrastructure Fund (EAIF) and the FTX Future Fund.SummarySchool of Thinking was launched on Instagram in 2020 by Luca Parodi. For a year and a half, Luca's goal has been to do rationalist outreach on Instagram in Italian. The profile reached 18.000 followers in March 2022. In January 2022, Luca received his first grant (from EAIF) to leave his job, work full-time on the project, and expand it on other platforms in Italian. The goal at that moment was to do EA community building in Italy.In March 2022, Eloisa Margherita Calafiore joined the project as a co-founder and Chief Operating Officer, and in April 2022, School of Thinking received a grant from FTX Future Fund to expand globally. Being able to upscale the project, the goal shifted towards doing outreach more globally (whilst continuing our local work in Italian).Our current strategy is to focus on creating weekly long-format videos for YouTube and daily short-format videos and other content (e.g. carousels and IG stories) on TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram. In the last few weeks, we had several viral videos on Instagram Italy (+630.000 views in the last 30 days). We have a total of ~25.000 followers across six platforms and two languages and are growing steadily.We create educational content about several important concepts related to rationalism, longtermism, and effective altruism. We aim to explain them to the general public in an easy, engaging, and practical yet accurate way.We have two paths to impact, listed here in descending order of importance:Attracting new people in EAHelp people new to the Effective Altruist, longtermist, and rationalist communities become more engaged.Spreading Good Values and Improving Reflective ProcessesRaise awareness about specific topics in untouched but influential portions of the general populationIncrease epistemic hygieneSpreading important ideasOur HistoryThe First Few YearsThe general idea for School of Thinking (SoT) was formulated for the first time by me (Luca Parodi) in 2017 when I discovered LessWrong. Nonetheless, I worked on it informally for years before launching the project. The official launch happened in July 2020, with an Instagram profile with the bold goal of becoming the Italian LessWrong's voice on social media. For a year and a half, SoT was just a side activity while I worked as a management consultant. I dedicated an average of 15 extra work hours per week of my time to this project.In September 2021, the Instagram profile reached 10.000 followers, and in November 2021, I applied for the Effective Altruism Infrastructure Fund to leave my job and work full time on School of Thinking. The goal was to move to other platforms - like YouTube or a podcast - ‌and leverage School of Thinking's audience to grow the Italian EA community. EAIF accepted my grant request, so I left my job and started working on SoT full-time in January 2022.Rapidly, I realized that I was one of the few full-time content creators with a strong track record (18k followers on IG in 17 months) within the global EA community, so I started thinking globally. With Eloisa Margherita Calafiore, n...