Have your EA conflicts on... THE FORUM!

In general, I think it's much better to first attempt to have a community conflict internally before I have it externally. This doesn't really apply to criminal behaviour or sexual abuse. I am centrally talking about disagreements, eg the Bostrom stuff, fallout around the FTX stuff, Nonlinear stuff, now this manifest stuff. 

Why do I think this?

• If I want to credibly signal I will listen and obey norms, it seems better to start with a small discourse escalation rather than a large one. Starting a community discussion on twitter is like jumping straight to a shooting war. 
• Many external locations (eg twitter, the press) have very skewed norms/incentives to the forum and so many parties can feel like they are the victim. I find when multiple parties feel they are weaker and victimised that is likely to cause escalation. 
• Many spaces have less affordance for editing comments, seeing who agrees with who, having a respected mutual party say "woah hold up there"
• It is hard to say "I will abide by the community sentiment" if I have already started the discussion elsewhere in order to shame people. And if I don't intend to abide by the community sentiment, why am I trying to manage a community conflict in the first place. I might as well just jump straight to shaming. 
• It is hard to say "I am open to changing my mind" if I have set up the conflict in a way that leads to shaming if the other person doesn't change theirs. It's like holding a gun to someone's head and saying that this is just a friendly discussion. 
• I desire reconciliation. I have hurt people in this community and been hurt by them. In both case to the point of tears and sleepless night. But still I would prefer reconciliation and growth over a escalating conflict
• Conflict is often negative sum, so lets try and have it be the least negative sum as possible. 
• Probably a good chunk of it is church norms, centred around 1 Corinthians 6^[2]. I don't really endorse this, but I think it's good to be clear why I think thinks. 

Personal examples:

• Last year I didn't like that Hanania was a main speaker at manifest (iirc) so I went to their discord and said so. I then made some votes. The median user agreed with me and so Hanania didn't speak. I doubt you heard about this, because I did it on the manifold discord. I hardly tweeted about it or anything. This and the fact I said I wouldn't created a safe space to have the discussion and I largely got what I wanted. 

You might think this is a comment is directed at a specific person, but I bet you are wrong. I dislike this behaviour when it is done by at least 3 different parties that I can think of. 

1. ^{^}

    

2. ^{^}

    If any of you has a dispute with another, do you dare to take it before the ungodly for judgment instead of before the Lord’s people? ² Or do you not know that the Lord’s people will judge the world? And if you are to judge the world, are you not competent to judge trivial cases? ³ Do you not know that we will judge angels? How much more the things of this life! ⁴ Therefore, if you have disputes about such matters, do you ask for a ruling from those whose way of life is scorned in the church? ⁵ I say this to shame you. Is it possible that there is nobody among you wise enough to judge a dispute between believers? ⁶ But instead, one brother takes another to court—and this in front of unbelievers!

   ⁷ The very fact that you have lawsuits among you means you have been completely defeated already. Why not rather be wronged? Why not rather be cheated?

I feel like I want 80k to do more cause prioritisation if they are gonna direct so many people. Seems like 5 years ago they had their whole ranking thing which was easy to check. Now I am less confident in the quality of work that is directing lots of people in a certain direction.

I know of at least 1 NDA of an EA org silencing someone for discussing what bad behaviour that happened at that org. Should EA orgs be in the practice of making people sign such NDAs?

I suggest no.

Some things I don't think I've seen around FTX, which are probably due to the investigation, but still seems worth noting. Please correct me if these things have been said.

• I haven't seen anyone at the FTXFF acknowledge fault for negligence in not noticing that a defunct phone company (north dimension) was paying out their grants.
  • This isn't hugely judgemental from me, I think I'd have made this mistake too, but I would like it acknowledged at some point
  • Since writing this it's been pointed out that there were grants paid from FTX and Alameda accounts also. Ooof.

The FTX Foundation grants were funded via transfers from a variety of bank 
accounts, including North Dimension-8738 and Alameda-4456 (Primary Deposit Accounts), as 
well as Alameda-4464 and FTX Trading-9018

• I haven't seen anyone at CEA acknowledge that they ran an investigation in 2019-2020 on someone who would turn out to be one of the largest fraudsters in the world and failed to turn up anything despite seemingly a number of flags.
  • I remain confused
• As I've written elsewhere I haven't seen engagement on this point, which I find relatively credible, from one of the Time articles:

"Bouscal recalled speaking to Mac Aulay immediately after one of Mac Aulay’s conversations with MacAskill in late 2018. “Will basically took Sam’s side,” said Bouscal, who recalls waiting with Mac Aulay in the Stockholm airport while she was on the phone. (Bouscal and Mac Aulay had once dated; though no longer romantically involved, they remain close friends.) “Will basically threatened Tara,” Bouscal recalls. “I remember my impression being that Will was taking a pretty hostile stance here and that he was just believing Sam’s side of the story, which made no sense to me.”"

• My comment on the above "While other things may have been bigger errors, this once seems most sort of "out of character" or "bad normsy". And I know Naia well enough that this moves me a lot, even though it seems so out of character for [will] (maybe 30% that this is a broadly accurate account). This causes me consternation, I don't understand and I think if this happened it was really bad and behaviour like it should not happen from any powerful EAs (or any EAs frankly)."

Feels like we've had about 3 months since the FTX collapse with no kind of leadership comment. Uh that feels bad. I mean I'm all for "give cold takes" but how long are we talking.

People voting without explaining is good. 

I often see people thinking that this is bragading or something when actually most people just don't want to write a response, they either like or dislike something

If it were up to me I might suggest an anonymous "I don't know" button and an anonymous "this is poorly framed" button.

When I used to run a lot of facebook polls, it was overwhelmingly men who wrote answers, but if there were options to vote, the gender was much more even. My hypothesis was that a kind of argumentative usually man tended to enjoy writing long responses more. And so blocking lower effort/less antagonistic/ more anonymous responses meant I heard more from this kind of person. 

I don't know if that is true on the forum, but I would guess that the higher effort it is to respond the more selective the responses become in some direction. I guess I'd ask if you think that the people spending the most effort are likely to be the most informed. In my experience, they aren't.

More broadly I think it would be good if the forum optionally took some information about users - location, income, gender, cause area, etc and on answers with more than say 10 votes would display some kind of breakdown. I imagine it would sometimes be interesting to find out how exactly agreement and disagreement cut on different issues. 

edit More broadly I think it would be good if the forum tried to find clusters and pattterns in votes, perhaps allowing users to self nominate categories and then showing how categories split once there were enough votes. I'm a little wary of the forum deciding what categories are important and embedding that, but I'd like to see if an opinion was mainly liked by longtermists, women, etc.

Also I think it's good to be able to anonymously express unpopular views. For most of human history it's been unpopular to express support for LGBT+, the rights of women, animals. But if anonymous systems had existed we might have seen more support for such views. Likewise, pushing back against powerful people is easier if you can do it anonymously.

If anyone who disagrees with me on the manifest stuff who considers themselves inside the EA movement, I'd like to have some discussions with a focus on consensus-building. ie we chat in DMs and the both report some statements we agreed on and some we specifically disagreed on.  

Edited:

@Joseph Lemien asked for positions I hold:

• The EA forum should not seek to have opinions on non-EA events. I don't mean individual EAs shouldn't have opinions, I mean that as a group we shouldn't seek to judge individual event. I don't think we're very good at it.
•  I don't like Hanania's behaviour either and am a little wary of systems where norm breaking behaviour gives extra power, such as being endlessly edgy. But I will take those complaints to the manifold community internally.
• EAGs are welcome to invite or disinvite whoever CEA likes. Maybe one day I'll complain. But do I want EAGs to invite a load of manifest's edgiest speakers? Not particularly. 
• It is fine for there to be spaces with discussion that I find ugly. If people want to go to these events, that's up to them.
• I dislike having unresolved conflicts which ossify into an inability to talk about things. Someone once told me that the couples who stay together are either great at settling disputes or almost never fight. We fight a bit and we aren't great at settling it. I guess I'd like us to fight less (say we aren't interested in conflicty posts) or to get better at making up (come to consensus afterwards, grow and change)
• Only 1-6% of attendees at manifest had issues along eugenicsy lines in the feedback forms. I don't think this is worth a huge change. 
• I would imagine it's worth $10mns to avoid EA becoming a space full of people who fearmonger based on the races, genders or sexualities of others. I don't think that's very likely.
• To me, current systems for taxing discussion of eugenics seem fine. There is the odd post that gets downvoted. If it were good and convincing it would be upvoted. so far it hasn't been. seems fine. I am not scared of bad arguments ^[1]
• Black people are probably not avoiding Manifest because of these speakers because that theory doesn't seem to hold up for tech, rationalism^[2], EA or several other communities. 
• I don't know what people want when they point at "distancing EA from rationalism"
• Manifest was fun for me, and it and several other events I went to in the bay felt like I let out a breath that I never knew I was holding. I am pretty careful what I say about you all sometimes and it's tiring. I guess that's true for some of you too. It was nice (and surprisingly un-edgy for me) to be in a space where I didn't have to worry about offending people a lot. I enjoy having spaces where I feel safer.
• There is a tradeoff between feeling safe and expression. I would have more time for some proposals if people acknowledged the costs they are putting on others. Even small costs, even costs I would willingly pay are still costs and to have that be unmentionable feels gaslighty. 
• There are some incentives in this community to be upset about things and to be blunt in response. Both of these things seem bad. I'd prefer incentives towards working together to figure out how the world is and impliment the most effective morally agreeable changes per unit resource. This requires some truthseeking, but probably not the maximal amount. and some kindness, but probably not the maximal amount. 

1. ^{^}

   Unless there was some kind of flooding of the forum to boost posts repeatedly.

2. ^{^}

   LessWrong doesn't have any significant discussion of eugenics either. As I (weakly) understand it they kicked many posters off who wanted to talk about such things.

Sam Harris takes Giving What We Can pledge for himself and for his meditation company "Waking Up"

Harris references MacAksill and Ord as having been central to his thinking and talks about Effective Altruism and exstential risk. He publicly pledges 10% of his own income and 10% of the profit from Waking Up. He also will create a series of lessons on his meditation and education app around altruism and effectiveness.

Harris has 1.4M twitter followers and is a famed Humanist and New Athiest. The Waking Up app has over 500k downloads on android, so I guess over 1 million overall. 

https://dynamic.wakingup.com/course/D8D148

I like letting personal thoughts be up or downvoted, so I've put them in the comments.

Nathan Young @ 2020-09-25T22:36 (+6)

Harris is a marmite figure - in my experience people love him or hate him. 

It is good that he has done this. 

Newswise, it seems to me it is more likely to impact the behavior of his listeners, who are likely to be well-disposed to him. This is a significant but currently low-profile announcement. As will the courses be on his app. 

 I don't think I'd go spreading this around more generally, many don't like Harris and for those who don't like him, it could be easy to see EA as more of the same (callous superior progessivism).

In the low probability (5%?) event that EA gains traction in that space of the web (generally called the Intellectual Dark Web - don't blame me, I don't make the rules) I would urge caution for EA speakers who might pulled into polarising discussion which would leave some groups feeling EA ideas are "not for them".

MichaelDickens @ 2020-09-26T03:55 (+12)

Harris is a marmite figure - in my experience people love him or hate him.

My guess is people who like Sam Harris are disproportionately likely to be potentially interested in EA.

David_Moss @ 2020-09-26T09:24 (+18)

This seems quite likely given EA Survey data where, amongst people who indicated they first heard of EA from a Podcast and indicated which podcast, Sam Harris' strongly dominated all other podcasts.

More speculatively, we might try to compare these numbers to people hearing about EA from other categories. For example, by any measure, the number of people in the EA Survey who first heard about EA from Sam Harris' podcast specifically is several times the number who heard about EA from Vox's Future Perfect. As a lower bound, 4x more people specifically mentioned Sam Harris in their comment than selected Future Perfect, but this is probably dramatically undercounting Harris, since not everyone who selected Podcast wrote a comment that could be identified with a specific podcast. Unfortunately, I don't know the relative audience size of Future Perfect posts vs Sam Harris' EA podcasts specifically, but that could be used to give a rough sense of how well the different audiences respond.

Aaron Gertler @ 2020-09-28T08:42 (+2)

Notably, Harris has interviewed several figures associated with EA; Ferriss only did MacAskill, while Harris has had MacAskill, Ord, Yudkowsky, and perhaps others.

David_Moss @ 2020-09-28T09:02 (+3)

This is true, although for whatever reason the responses to the podcast question seemed very heavily dominated by references to MacAskill. 

This is the graph from our original post, showing every commonly mentioned category, not just the host (categories are not mutually exclusive). I'm not sure what explains why MacAskill really heavily dominated the Podcast category, while Singer heavily dominated the TED Talk category.

Nathan Young @ 2020-09-25T22:37 (+4)

The address (in the link) is humbling and shows someone making a positive change for good reasons. He is clear and coherent.

Good on him.

An alternate stance on moderation (from @Habryka.)

This is from this comment responding to this post about there being too many bans on LessWrong. Note how the LessWrong is less moderated than here in that it (I guess) responds to individual posts less often, but more moderated in that I guess it rate limits people more without reason. 

I found it thought provoking. I'd recommend reading it.

Thanks for making this post! 

One of the reasons why I like rate-limits instead of bans is that it allows people to complain about the rate-limiting and to participate in discussion on their own posts (so seeing a harsh rate-limit of something like "1 comment per 3 days" is not equivalent to a general ban from LessWrong, but should be more interpreted as "please comment primarily on your own posts", though of course it shares many important properties of a ban).

This is a pretty opposite approach to the EA forum which favours bans.

Things that seem most important to bring up in terms of moderation philosophy: 

Moderation on LessWrong does not depend on effort

"Another thing I've noticed is that almost all the users are trying.  They are trying to use rationality, trying to understand what's been written here, trying to apply Baye's rule or understand AI.  Even some of the users with negative karma are trying, just having more difficulty."

Just because someone is genuinely trying to contribute to LessWrong, does not mean LessWrong is a good place for them. LessWrong has a particular culture, with particular standards and particular interests, and I think many people, even if they are genuinely trying, don't fit well within that culture and those standards. 

In making rate-limiting decisions like this I don't pay much attention to whether the user in question is "genuinely trying " to contribute to LW,  I am mostly just evaluating the effects I see their actions having on the quality of the discussions happening on the site, and the quality of the ideas they are contributing. 

Motivation and goals are of course a relevant component to model, but that mostly pushes in the opposite direction, in that if I have someone who seems to be making great contributions, and I learn they aren't even trying, then that makes me more excited, since there is upside if they do become more motivated in the future.

I sense this is quite different to the EA forum too. I can't imagine a mod saying I don't pay much attention to whether the user in question is "genuinely trying". I find this honesty pretty stark. Feels like a thing moderators aren't allowed to say. "We don't like the quality of your comments and we don't think you can improve".

Signal to Noise ratio is important

Thomas and Elizabeth pointed this out already, but just because someone's comments don't seem actively bad, doesn't mean I don't want to limit their ability to contribute. We do a lot of things on LW to improve the signal to noise ratio of content on the site, and one of those things is to reduce the amount of noise, even if the mean of what we remove looks not actively harmful. 

We of course also do other things than to remove some of the lower signal content to improve the signal to noise ratio. Voting does a lot, how we sort the frontpage does a lot, subscriptions and notification systems do a lot. But rate-limiting is also a tool I use for the same purpose.

Old users are owed explanations, new users are (mostly) not

I think if you've been around for a while on LessWrong, and I decide to rate-limit you, then I think it makes sense for me to make some time to argue with you about that, and give you the opportunity to convince me that I am wrong. But if you are new, and haven't invested a lot in the site, then I think I owe you relatively little. 

I think in doing the above rate-limits, we did not do enough to give established users the affordance to push back and argue with us about them. I do think most of these users are relatively recent or are users we've been very straightforward with since shortly after they started commenting that we don't think they are breaking even on their contributions to the site (like the OP Gerald Monroe, with whom we had 3 separate conversations over the past few months), and for those I don't think we owe them much of an explanation. LessWrong is a walled garden. 

You do not by default have the right to be here, and I don't want to, and cannot, accept the burden of explaining to everyone who wants to be here but who I don't want here, why I am making my decisions. As such a moderation principle that we've been aspiring to for quite a while is to let new users know as early as possible if we think them being on the site is unlikely to work out, so that if you have been around for a while you can feel stable, and also so that you don't invest in something that will end up being taken away from you.

Feedback helps a bit, especially if you are young, but usually doesn't

Maybe there are other people who are much better at giving feedback and helping people grow as commenters, but my personal experience is that giving users feedback, especially the second or third time, rarely tends to substantially improve things. 

I think this sucks. I would much rather be in a world where the usual reasons why I think someone isn't positively contributing to LessWrong were of the type that a short conversation could clear up and fix, but it alas does not appear so, and after having spent many hundreds of hours over the years giving people individualized feedback, I don't really think "give people specific and detailed feedback" is a viable moderation strategy, at least more than once or twice per user. I recognize that this can feel unfair on the receiving end, and I also feel sad about it.

I do think the one exception here is that if people are young or are non-native english speakers. Do let me know if you are in your teens or you are a non-native english speaker who is still learning the language. People do really get a lot better at communication between the ages of 14-22 and people's english does get substantially better over time, and this helps with all kinds communication issues.

Again this is very blunt but I'm not sure it's wrong. 

We consider legibility, but its only a relatively small input into our moderation decisions

It is valuable and a precious public good to make it easy to know which actions you take will cause you to end up being removed from a space. However, that legibility also comes at great cost, especially in social contexts. Every clear and bright-line rule you outline will have people budding right up against it, and de-facto, in my experience, moderation of social spaces like LessWrong is not the kind of thing you can do while being legible in the way that for example modern courts aim to be legible. 

As such, we don't have laws. If anything we have something like case-law which gets established as individual moderation disputes arise, which we then use as guidelines for future decisions, but also a huge fraction of our moderation decisions are downstream of complicated models we formed about what kind of conversations and interactions work on LessWrong, and what role we want LessWrong to play in the broader world, and those shift and change as new evidence comes in and the world changes.

I do ultimately still try pretty hard to give people guidelines and to draw lines that help people feel secure in their relationship to LessWrong, and I care a lot about this, but at the end of the day I will still make many from-the-outside-arbitrary-seeming-decisions in order to keep LessWrong the precious walled garden that it is.

I try really hard to not build an ideological echo chamber

When making moderation decisions, it's always at the top of my mind whether I am tempted to make a decision one way or another because they disagree with me on some object-level issue. I try pretty hard to not have that affect my decisions, and as a result have what feels to me a subjectively substantially higher standard for rate-limiting or banning people who disagree with me, than for people who agree with me. I think this is reflected in the decisions above.

I do feel comfortable judging people on the methodologies and abstract principles that they seem to use to arrive at their conclusions. LessWrong has a specific epistemology, and I care about protecting that. If you are primarily trying to... 

• argue from authority, 
• don't like speaking in probabilistic terms, 
• aren't comfortable holding multiple conflicting models in your head at the same time, 
• or are averse to breaking things down into mechanistic and reductionist terms, 

then LW is probably not for you, and I feel fine with that. I feel comfortable reducing the visibility or volume of content on the site that is in conflict with these epistemological principles (of course this list isn't exhaustive, in-general the LW sequences are the best pointer towards the epistemological foundations of the site).

It feels cringe to read that basically if I don't get the sequences lessWrong might rate limit me. But it is good to be open about it. I don't think the EA forum's core philosophy is as easily expressed.

If you see me or other LW moderators fail to judge people on epistemological principles but instead see us directly rate-limiting or banning users on the basis of object-level opinions that even if they seem wrong seem to have been arrived at via relatively sane principles, then I do really think you should complain and push back at us. I see my mandate as head of LW to only extend towards enforcing what seems to me the shared epistemological foundation of LW, and to not have the mandate to enforce my own object-level beliefs on the participants of this site.

Now some more comments on the object-level: 

I overall feel good about rate-limiting everyone on the above list. I think it will probably make the conversations on the site go better and make more people contribute to the site. 

Us doing more extensive rate-limiting is an experiment, and we will see how it goes. As kave said in the other response to this post, the rule that suggested these specific rate-limits does not seem like it has an amazing track record, though I currently endorse it as something that calls things to my attention (among many other heuristics).

Also, if anyone reading this is worried about being rate-limited or banned in the future, feel free to reach out to me or other moderators on Intercom. I am generally happy to give people direct and frank feedback about their contributions to the site, as well as how likely I am to take future moderator actions. Uncertainty is costly, and I think it's worth a lot of my time to help people understand to what degree investing in LessWrong makes sense for them. 

How are we going to deal emotionally with the first big newspaper attack against EA?

EA is pretty powerful in terms of impact and funding.

It seems only an amount of time before there is a really nasty article written about the community or a key figure.

Last year the NYT wrote a hit piece on Scott Alexander and while it was cool that he defended himself, I think he and the rationalist community overreacted and looked bad.

I would like us to avoid this.

If someone writes a hit piece about the community, Givewell, Will MacAskill etc, how are we going to avoid a kneejerk reaction that makes everything worse?

I suggest if and when this happens:

1. individuals largely don't respond publicly unless they are very confident they can do so in a way that leads to deescalation.

2. articles exist to get clicks. It's worth someone (not necessarily me or you) responding to an article in the NYT, but if, say a niche commentator goes after someone, fewer people will hear it if we let it go.

3. let the comms professionals deal with it. All EA orgs and big players have comms professionals. They can defend themselves.

4. if we must respond (we often needn't) we should adopt a stance of grace, curiosity and humility. Why do they think these things are true? What would convince us?

Personally I hate being attacked and am liable to feel defensive and respond badly. I assume you are no different. I'd like to think about this so that if and when it happens we can avoid embarrassing ourselves and the things we care about.

Suggestion. 

Debate weeks every other week and we vote on what the topic is.

I think if the forum had a defined topic (especially) in advance, I would be more motivated to read a number of post on that topic. 

One of the benefits of the culture war posts is that we are all thinking about the same thing. If we did that on topics perhaps with dialogues from experts, that would be good and on a useful topic.

The front page agree disagree thing is soo coool. Great work forum team. 

Toby Tremlett @ 2024-07-01T14:16 (+7)

Thanks Nathan! People seem to like it so we might use it again in the future. If you or anyone else has feedback that might improve the next iteration of it, please let us know! You can comment here or just dm. 

Ozzie Gooen @ 2024-07-01T21:16 (+6)

I think it's neat! 

But I think there's work to do on the display of the aggregate.

1. I imagine there should probably be a table somewhere at least (a list of each person and what they say). 
2. This might show a distribution, above.
3. There must be some way to just not have the icons overlap with each other like this. Like, use a second dimension, just to list them. Maybe use a wheat plot? I think strip plots and swarm plots could also be options. 
   
    

JP Addison @ 2024-07-01T23:21 (+6)

I'm excited that we exceeded our goals enough to have the issue :)

Lorenzo Buonanno @ 2024-07-01T22:03 (+4)

I would personally go for a beeswarm plot.

But even just adding some random y and some transparency seems to improve things


document.querySelectorAll('.ForumEventPoll-userVote').forEach(e => e.style.top = `${Math.random()*100-50}px`);
document.querySelectorAll('.ForumEventPoll-userVote').forEach(e => e.style.opacity = `0.7`);
 

Sarah Cheng @ 2024-07-01T23:44 (+2)

Really appreciate all the feedback and suggestions! This is definitely more votes than we expected. 😅

I implemented a hover-over based on @Agnes Stenlund's designs in this PR, though our deployment is currently blocked (by something unrelated), so I'm not sure how long it will take to make it to the live site.

I may not have time to make further changes to the poll results UI this week, but please keep the comments coming - if we decide to run another debate or poll event, then we will iterate on the UI and take your feedback into account.

Lorenzo Buonanno @ 2024-07-02T01:37 (+17)

Looks great!

I tried to make it into a beeswarm, and while IMHO it does look nice it also needs a bunch more vertical space (and/or smaller circles)

Nathan Young @ 2024-07-02T15:07 (+4)

Also adding a little force works too, eg here. There are pretty easy libraries for this. 

Lorenzo Buonanno @ 2024-07-04T15:08 (+4)

The orange line above the circles makes it look like there's a similar number of people at the extreme left and the extreme right, which doesn't seem to be the case

Jason @ 2024-07-02T16:45 (+5)

I don't think it would help much for this question, but I could imagine using this feature for future questions in which the ability to answer anonymously would be important. (One might limit this to users with a certain amount of karma to prevent brigading.)

Brad West @ 2024-07-01T15:22 (+2)

I note some of my confusion that might have been shared by others. I initially had thought that the option from users was between binary "agree" and "disagree" and thought the method by which a user could choose was by dragging to one side or another. I see now that this would signify maximal agreement/disagreement, although maybe users like me might have done so in error. Perhaps something that could indicate this more clearly would be helpful to others.

Toby Tremlett @ 2024-07-01T15:29 (+2)

Thanks Brad, I didn't foresee that! (Agree react Brad's comment if you experienced the same thing).
Would it have helped if we had marked increments along the slider? Like the below but prettier? (our designer is on holiday)
 

Brad West @ 2024-07-01T15:39 (+2)

Yeah, if there were markers like "neutral", "slightly agree", "moderately agree", "strongly agree", etc. that might make it clearer.

After the decision by the user registers, a visual display that states something like "you've indicated that you strongly agree with the statement X.  Redrag if this does not reflect your view or if something changes your mind and check out where the rest of the community falls on this question by clicking here." 

Ozzie Gooen @ 2024-07-01T21:18 (+6)

Another idea could be to ask, "How many EA resources should go do this, per year, for the next 10 years?" 

Options could be things like, 
"$0", "$100k", "1M", "100M", etc.

Also, maybe there could be a second question for, "How sure are you about this?" 

Toby Tremlett @ 2024-07-02T08:09 (+2)

Interesting. Certainty could also be a Y-axis, but I think that trades off against simplicity for a banner. 

Toby Tremlett @ 2024-07-02T08:23 (+2)

I'd love to hear more from the disagree reactors. They should feel very free to dm. 
I'm excited to experiment more with interactive features in the future, so critiques are especially useful now!

I am not confident that another FTX level crisis is less likely to happen, other than that we might all say "oh this feels a bit like FTX".

Changes:

• Board swaps. Yeah maybe good, though many of the people who left were very experienced. And it's not clear whether there are due diligence people (which seems to be what was missing).
• Orgs being spun out of EV and EV being shuttered. I mean, maybe good though feels like it's swung too far. Many mature orgs should run on their own, but small orgs do have many replicable features.
• More talking about honesty. Not really sure this was the problem. The issue wasn't the median EA it was in the tails. Are the tails of EA more honest? Hard to say
• We have now had a big crisis so it's less costly to say "this might be like that big crisis". Though notably this might also be too cheap - we could flinch away from doing ambitious things
• Large orgs seem slightly more beholden to comms/legal to avoid saying or doing the wrong thing.
• OpenPhil is hiring more internally

Non-changes:

• Still very centralised. I'm pretty pro-elite, so I'm not sure this is a problem in and of itself, though I have come to think that elites in general are less competent than I thought before (see FTX and OpenAI crisis)
• Little discussion of why or how the affiliation with SBF happened despite many well connected EAs having a low opinion of him
• Little discussion of what led us to ignore the base rate of scamminess in crypto and how we'll avoid that in future

The Scout Mindset deserved 1/10th of the marketing campaign of WWOTF. Galef is a great figurehead for rational thinking and it would have been worth it to try and make her a public figure.

Dear reader,

You are an EA, if you want to be. Reading this forum is enough. Giving a little of your salary effectively is enough. Trying to get an impactful job is enough. If you are trying even with a fraction of your resources to make the world better and chatting with other EAs about it, you are one too.

Post I spent 4 hours writing on a topic I care deeply about: 30 karma

Post I spent 40 minutes writing on a topic that the community vibes with: 120 karma

I guess this is fine - iys just people being interested but it can feel weird at times.

Lab grown meat -> no-kill meat

This tweet recommends changing the words we use to discuss lab-grown meat. Seems right.

The OpenAI stuff has hit me pretty hard. If that's you also, look after yourself. 

I don't really know what accurate thought looks like here.

I am really not the person to do it, but I still think there needs to be some community therapy here. Like a truth and reconciliation committee. Working together requires trust and I'm not sure we have it. 

Poll: https://viewpoints.xyz/polls/ftx-impact-on-ea

Results: https://viewpoints.xyz/polls/ftx-impact-on-ea/results

I think the strategy fortnight worked really well. I suggest that another one is put in the calendar (for say 3 months time) and then rather than dripfeeding comment we sort of wait and then burst it out again. 

It felt better to me, anyway to be like "for these two weeks I will engage"

I want to once again congratulate the forum team on this voting tool. I think by doing this, the EA forum is at the forefront of internal community discussions. No communities do this well and it's surprising how powerful it is. 

I hope Will MacAskill is doing well. I find it hard to predict how he's doing as a person. While there have been lots of criticisms (and I've made some) I think it's tremendously hard to be the Shelling person for a movement. There is a seperate axis however, and I hope in himself he's doing well and I imagine many feel that way. I hope he has an accurate picture here.

I note that in some sense I have lost trust that the EA community gives me a clear prioritisation of where to donate.

Some clearer statements:

• I still think GiveWell does great work
• I still generally respect the funding decisions of Open Philanthropy
• I still think this forum has a higher standard than most place
• It is hard to know exactly how high impact animal welfare funding opportunities interact with x-risk ones
• I don't know what the general consensus on the most impactful x-risk funding opportunities are
• I don't really know what orgs do all-considered work on this topic. I guess the LTFF?
• I am more confused/inattentive and this community is covering a larger set of possible choices so it's harder to track what consensus is

I notice some people (including myself) reevaluating their relationship with EA. 

This seems healthy. 

When I was a Christian it was extremely costly for me to reduce my identification and resulted in a delayed and much more final break than perhaps I would have wished^[1]. My general view is that people should update quickly, and so if I feel like moving away from EA, I do it when I feel that, rather than inevitably delaying and feeling ick.

Notably, reducing one's identification with the EA community need not change one's poise towards effective work/donations/earn to give. I doubt it will change mine. I just feel a little less close to the EA community than once I did, and that's okay.

I don't think I can give others good advice here, because we are all so different. But the advice I would want to hear is "be part of things you enjoy being part of, choose an amount of effort to give to effectiveness and try to be a bit more effective with that each month, treat yourself kindly because you too are a person worthy of love" 

1. ^{^}

   I think a slow move away from Christianity would have been healthier for me. Strangely I find it possible to imagine still being a Christian, had things gone differently, even while I wouldn't switch now.

The vibe at EAG was chill, maybe a little downbeat, but fine. I can get myself riled up over the forum, but it's not representative! Most EAs are just getting on with stuff. 

(This isn't to say that forum stuff isn't important, its just as important as it is rather than what should define my mood)

@Toby Tremlett🔹 @Will Howard🔹 

Where can i see the debate week diagram if I want to look back at it?

Will Howard🔹 @ 2024-10-17T12:13 (+17)

Here's a screenshot (open in new tab to see it in slightly higher resolution). I've also made a spreadsheet with the individual voting results, which gives all the info that was on the banner just in a slightly more annoying format.

We are also planning to add native way to look back at past events as they appeared on the site :), although this isn't a super high priority atm.

NickLaing @ 2024-10-20T10:40 (+2)

Nice one - even the tab to bring up the posts isn't super easy to access (or I'm just a bit of a tech fail lol.) 

It surprises me a bit (and I'm even impressed in a way) that so many EAs are all in on one side there.

Feels like there should be a "comment anonymously" feature. Would save everyone having to manage all these logins.

I strongly dislike the following sentence on effectivealtruism.org:

"Rather than just doing what feels right, we use evidence and careful analysis to find the very best causes to work on."

It reads to me as arrogant, and epitomises the worst caracatures my friends do of EAs. Read it in a snarky voice (such as one might if they struggled with the movement and were looking to do research) "Rather that just doing what feels right..."

I suggest it gets changed to one of the following:

• "We use evidence and careful analysis to find the very best causes to work on."
• "It's great when anyone does a kind action no matter how small or effective. We have found value in using evidence and careful analysis to find the very best causes to work on."

I am genuinely sure whoever wrote it meant well, so thank you for your hard work.

Several journalists (including those we were happy to have write pieces about WWOTF) have contacted me but I think if I talk to them, even carefully, my EA friends will be upset with me. And to be honest that upsets me.

We are in the middle of a mess of our own making. We deserve scrutiny. Ugh, I feel dirty and ashamed and frustrated.

Richard Ngo just gave a talk at EAG berlin about errors in AI governance. One being a lack of concrete policy suggestions.

Matt Yglesias said this a year ago. He was even the main speaker at EAG DC https://www.slowboring.com/p/at-last-an-ai-existential-risk-policy?utm_source=%2Fsearch%2Fai&utm_medium=reader2 

Seems worth asking why we didn't listen to top policy writers when they warned that we didn't have good proposals.

I talked to someone outside EA the other day who said that in a competive tender they wouldn't apply to EA funders because they thought the process would likely to go to someone with connections to OpenPhil. 

Seems bad.

EAs please post your job posting to twitter

Please post your jobs to Twitter and reply with @effective_jobs. Takes 5 minutes. and the jobs I've posted and then tweeted have got 1000s of impressions. 

Or just DM me on twitter (@nathanpmyoung) and I'll do it. I think it's a really cheap way of getting EAs to look at your jobs. This applies to impactful roles in and outside EA.

Here is an example of some text:

-tweet 1

Founder's Pledge Growth Director

@FoundersPledge are looking for someone to lead their efforts in growing the amount that tech entrepreneurs give to effective charities when they IPO. 

Salary: $135 - $150k 
Location: San Francisco

https://founders-pledge.jobs.personio.de/job/378212

-tweet 2, in reply

@effective_jobs

-end

I suggest it should be automated but that's for a different post.

Confusion

I get why I and other give to Givewell rather than catastrophic risk - sometimes it's good to know your "Impact account" is positive even if all the catastrophic risk work was useless. 

But why do people not give to animal welfare in this case? Seems higher impact?

And if it's just that we prefer humans to animals that seems like something we should be clear to ourselves about.

Also I don't know if I like my mental model of an "impact account". Seems like my giving has maybe once again become about me rather than impact. 

ht @Aaron Bergman for surfacing this

If you type "#" follwed by the title of a post and press enter it will link that post.

Example:
Examples of Successful Selective Disclosure in the Life Sciences 

This is wild

I continue to think that a community this large needs mediation functions to avoid lots of harm with each subsequent scandal.

People asked for more details. so I wrote the below. 

Let's look at some recent scandals and I'll try and point out some different groups that existed.

• FTX - longtermists and non-lontermists, those with greater risk tolerance and less
• Bostrom - rationalists and progressives
• Owen Cotton-Barrett - looser norms vs more robust, weird vs normie
• Nonlinear - loyalty vs kindness, consent vs duty of care

In each case, the community disagrees on who we should be and what we should be. People write comments to signal that they are good and want good things and shouldn't be attacked. Other people see these and feel scared that they aren't what the community wants.

This is tiring and anxiety inducing for all parties. In all cases here there are well intentioned, hard working people who have given a lot to try and make the world better who are scared they cannot trust their community to support them if push comes to shove. There are people horrified at the behaviour of others, scared that this behaviour will repeat itself, with all the costs attached. I feel this way, and I don't think I am alone. 

I think we need the community equivalent of therapy and mediation. We have now got to the stage where national media articles get written about our scandals and people threaten litigation. I just don't think that a community of 3000 apes can survive this without serious psychological costs which in turn affect work and our lives. We all don't want to be chucked out of a community which is safety and food and community for us. We all don't want that community to become a hellhole. I don't, SBF doesn't, the woman hurt by OCB doesn't, Kat and Emerson and Chloe and Alice don't. 

That's not to say that all behaviour is equal, but that I think the frame here is empathy, boundary setting and safety, not conflict, auto-immune responses and exile. 

What do I suggest?

After each scandal we have spaces to talk about our feelings, then we discuss what we think the norms of the community should be. Initially there will be disagreement but in time as we listen to those we disagree with we may realise how we differ. Then we can try and reintegrate this understanding to avoid it happening again. That's what trust is - the confidence that something won't happen above tolerance.

A concrete example

After the Bostrom stuff we had rationalist and progressive EAs in disagreement. Some thought he'd responded well, others badly. I think there was room for a discussion, to hear how unsafe his behaviour had left people feeling "do people judge my competence based on the colour of my skin?" "will my friends be safe here?".  I don't think these feelings can be dismissed as wokery gone mad. But I think the other group had worries too "Will I be judged for things I said years ago?" "Seemingly even an apology isn't enough". I find I can empathise with both groups.

And I suggest what we want is some norms around this. Norms about things we do and don't do. The aim should be to reduce community stress through there being bright lines and costs for behaviour we deem bad. And ways for those who do unacceptable things to come back to the community. I think there could be mutually agreeable ones, but I think the process would be tough.

We'd have to wrestle with how Bostrom and Hanson's productivity seems related to their ability to think weird or ugly thoughts. We'd have to think about if mailing lists 20 years ago were public or private. We'd have to think about what value we put on safety. And we'd have to be willing not to pick up the sword if it didn't go our way. 

But I think there are acceptable positions here. Where people acknowledge harmful patterns of behaviour, perhaps even voluntarily leave for a time. Where people talk about the harm and the benefit created by those they disagree with. Where others see that some value weirdness/creativity more/less than they do. Where we rejoice in what we have achieved and mourn over how we have hurt one another. Where we grow to be a kinder, more mature community.

Intermission

This stuff breaks my heart. Not because I am good, but because I have predictably hurt people and been hurt by people in the past. And I'd like the cycle to stop. In my own life, conflict has never been the way out of this. Either I should leave people I cannot work with, or share and listen to those I can. And it is so hard and I fail often, but it's better than becoming jaded and cruel or self-hating and perfectionist. I am broken, I am enough, I can be better. EA is flawed, EA is good, EA can improve. The world is awful, the world is better that it used to be, the world can improve. 

As it is

Currently, I think we aren't doing this work, so every subsequent scandal adds another grievance to the pile. And I guess people are leaving the community. If we spend millions a year trying to get graduates, isn't it worth spending the same to keep long time members? I don't know if there is a way to keep Kat and Emerson, Alice and Chloe, the concerned global healthy worker and the person who thinks SBF did nothing wrong, and me and you, but currently I don't see us spending nearly the appropriate amount of mental effort or resources.

Oh and I'm really not angling to do this work. I have suggestions, sure, but I think the person should be widely trusted by the community as neutral and mature. 

A previous partner and I did a sex and consent course together online I think it's helped me be kinder in relationships. 

Useful in general. 

More useful if, you: 

- have sex casually 
- see harm in your relationships and want to grow
- are poly

As I've said elsewhere I think a very small proportion of people in EA are responsible for most of the relationship harms. Some of bad actors, who need to be removed, some are malefactors, who have either lots of interactions or engage in high risk behaviours and accidentally cause harm. I would guess I have more traits of the second category than almost all of you. So people like me should do the most work to change.

So most of you probably don't need this, but if you are in some of the above groups, I'd recommend a course like this. Save yourself the heartache of upsetting people you care about. 

Happy to DM.

https://dandelion.events/e/pd0zr?fbclid=IwAR0cIXFowU7R4dHZ4ptfpqsnnhdnLIJOfM_DjmS_5HR-rgQTnUzBdtQEnjE 
 

Can we have some people doing AI Safety podcast/news interviews as well as Yud?

 I am concerned that he's gonna end up being the figurehead here. I assume someone is thinking of this, but I'm posting here to ensure that it is said. I am pretty sure that people are working on this, but I think it's good to say this anyway.

We aren't a community who says "I guess he deserves it" we say "who is the best person for the job?". Yudkowsky, while he is an expert isn't a median voice. His estimates of P(doom) are on the far tail of EA experts here. So if I could pick 1 person I wouldn't pick him and frankly I wouldn't pick just one person.

Some other voices I'd like to see on podcasts/ interviews:

• Toby Ord
• Paul Christiano
• Ajeya Cotra
• Amanda Askell
• Will MacAskill
• Joe Carlsmith*
• Katja Grace*
• Matthew Barnett*
• Buck Schlegeris
• Luke Meulhauser

Again, I'm not saying noone has thought of this (80%) they have. But I'd like to be 97% sure, so I'm flagging it.

*I am personally fond of this person so am biased

I notice I am pretty skeptical of much longtermist work and the idea that we can make progress on this stuff just by thinking about it.

I think future people matter, but I will be surprised if, after x-risk reduction work, we can find 10s of billions of dollars of work that isn't busywork and shouldn't be spent attempting to learn how to get eg nations out of poverty.

I have heard one anecdote of an EA saying that they would be less likely to hire someone on the basis of their religion because it would imply they were less good at their job less intelligent/epistemically rigorous. I don't think they were involved in hiring, but I don't think anyone should hold this view.

Here is why:

• As soon as you are in a hiring situation, you have much more information than priors. Even if it were true that, say, ADHD^[1] were less rational then the interview process should provide much more information than such a prior. If that's not the case, get a better interview process, don't start being prejudiced!
• People don't mind meritocracy, but they want a fair shake. If I heard that people had a prior that ADHD folks were less likely to be hard working, regardless of my actual performance in job tests, I would be less likely to want to be part of this community. You might lose my contributions. It seems likely to me that we come out ahead by ignoring small differences in groups so people don't have to worry about this. People are very sensitive to this. Let's agree not to defect. We judge on our best guess of your performance, not on appearances. 
• I would be unsurprised if this kind of thinking cut only one way. Is anyone suggesting they wouldn't hire poly people because of the increased drama or men because of the increased likelihood of sexual scandal? No! We already think some information is irrelevant/inadmissible as a prior in hiring. Because we are glad of people's right to be different or themselves. To me, race and religion clearly fall in this space. I want people to feel they can be human and still have a chance of a job. 
• I wouldn't be surprised if this cashed out to "I hire people like me". In this example was the individual really hiring on the basis of merit or did they just find certain religious people hard to deal with. We are not a social club, we are trying to do the most good. We want the best, not the people who are like us. 
• This pattern matches to actual racism/sexism. Like "sometimes I don't get hired because people think Xs are worse at jobs". How is that not racism? Seems bad.

Counterpoints: 

• Sometime gut does play a play a role. We think someone would get better on our team. Some might argue that it's fine to use this as a tiebreaker. Or that its better to be honest that this is what's going on.

Personally I think they points outweigh the counterpoints.

Hiring processes should hire the person who seems most likely to do the best job. And candidates should be confident this is happening. But for both predictive reasons, community welfare reasons and avoiding obvious pitfalls reasons I think small priors around race, religion, sexuality, gender, sexual practice should be discounted^[2]. If you think the candidate is better or worse, it should show in the interview process. And yes, I get that gut plays a role, but I'd be really wary of gut that feeds clear biases. I think a community where we don't do that comes out ahead and does more good.

1. ^{^}

   I have a diagnosis so feel comfortable using this example.

2. ^{^}

   And I think large priors are incorrect

I think EAs have a bit of an entitlement problem. 

Sometimes we think that since we are good we can ignore the rules. Seems bad

I sense that it's good to publicly name serial harassers who have been kicked out of the community, even if the accuser doesn't want them to be. Other people's feeling matter too and I sense many people would like to know who they are. 

I think there is a difference between different outcomes, but if you've been banned from EA events then you are almost certainly someone I don't want to invite to parties etc.

I would appreciate being able to vote forum articles as both agree disagree and upvote downvote. 

Lots of things where I think they are false but interesting or true but boring.

Relative Value Widget

It gives you sets of donations and you have to choose which you prefer. If you want you can add more at the bottom.

https://allourideas.org/manifund-relative-value 

so far:

Unbalanced karma is good actually. it means that the moderators have to do less. I like the takes of the top users more than the median user and I want them to have more but not total influence. 

Appeals to fairness don't interest me - why should voting be fair?

I have more time for transparency.

A friend asked about effective places to give. He wanted to donate through his payroll in the UK. He was enthusiastic about it, but that process was not easy.

1.  It wasn't particularly clear whether GiveWell or EA Development Fund was better and each seemed to direct to the other in a way that felt at times sketchy.
2. It wasn't clear if payroll giving was an option
3. He found it hard to find GiveWell's spreadsheet of effectiveness
    

Feels like making donations easy should be a core concern of both GiveWell and EA Funds and my experience made me a little embarrassed to be honest.

EA short story competition?

Has anyone ever run a competition for EA related short stories?

Why would this be a good idea?
* Narratives resonate with people and have been used to convey ideas for 1000s of years
* It would be low cost and fun
* Using voting on this forum there is the same risk of "bad posts" as for any other post

How could it work?
* Stories submitted under a tag on the EA forum.
* Rated by upvotes
* Max 5000 words (I made this up, dispute it in the comments)
* If someone wants to give a reward, then there could be a prize for the highest rated
* If there is a lot of interest/quality they could be collated and even published
* Since it would be measured by upvotes it seems unlikely a destructive story would be highly rated (or as likely as any other destructive post on the forum)

Upvote if you think it's a good idea. If it gets more than 40 karma I'll write one. 
 

I intend to strong downvote any article about EA that someone posts on here that they themselves have no positive takes on. 

If I post an article, I have some reason I liked it. Even a single line. Being critical isn't enough on it's own. If someone posts an article, without a single quote they like, with the implication it's a bad article, I am minded to strong downvote so that noone else has to waste their time on it. 

Being able to agree and disagreevote on posts feels like it might be great. Props to the forum team.

I guess African, Indian and Chinese voices are underrepresented in the AI Governance discussion. And in the unlikely case we die, we all die and it think it's weird that half the people who will die have noone loyal to them in the discussion.

We want AI that works for everyone and it seems likely you want people who can represent billions who aren't currently with a loyal representative.

I notice we are great at discussing stuff but not great at coming to conclusions. 

I wish the forum had a better setting for "I wrote this post and maybe people will find it interesting but I don't want it on the front page unless they do because that feels pretenious"

edited

Give Directly has a President (Rory Stewart) paid $600k,  and is hiring a Managing Director. I originally thought they had several other similar roles (because I looked on the website) but I talked to them an seemingly that is not the case. Below is the tweet that tipped me off but I think it is just mistaken.

Once could still take issue with the $600k (though I don't really)

https://twitter.com/carolinefiennes/status/1600067781226950656?s=20&t=wlF4gg_MsdIKX59Qqdvm1w 

I dislike the framing of "considerable" and "high engagement" on the EA survey.

This copied from the survey:

• No engagement: I’ve heard of effective altruism, but do not engage with effective altruism content or ideas at all
• Mild engagement: I’ve engaged with a few articles, videos, podcasts, discussions, events on effective altruism (e.g. reading Doing Good Better or spending ~5 hours on the website of 80,000 Hours)
• Moderate engagement: I’ve engaged with multiple articles, videos, podcasts, discussions, or events on effective altruism (e.g. subscribing to the 80,000 Hours podcast or attending regular events at a local group). I sometimes consider the principles of effective altruism when I make decisions about my career or charitable donations.
• Considerable engagement: I’ve engaged extensively with effective altruism content (e.g. attending an EA Global conference, applying for career coaching, or organizing an EA meetup). I often consider the principles of effective altruism when I make decisions about my career or charitable donations.
• High engagement: I am heavily involved in the effective altruism community, perhaps helping to lead an EA group or working at an EA-aligned organization. I make heavy use of the principles of effective altruism when I make decisions about my career or charitable donations.

To me "considerably engaged" EA people are doing a lot. Their median donation is $1000. They have "engaged extensively" and "often consider the principles of effective altruism" To me, they seem "highly engaged" in EA. 
 

I've met people who are giving quite a lot of money, who have perhaps tried applied to EA jobs and not succeeded. And yet they are not allowed to consider themselves "highly engaged". I guess this leads to them feeling disillusioned. It risks creating a privileged class of those who can get jobs at EA orgs and those who can't.  What about those who think they are doing an EA job but it's not at an EA-aligned organisation? It seems wrong to me that they can't consider themselves highly engaged.

I would prefer:

• "Considerable engagement" -> "high engagement"
• "High engagement" -> "maximum engagement" 

And I would prefer the text read as follows:

• High (previously considerable) engagement: I’ve engaged extensively with effective altruism content (e.g. attending an EA Global conference, applying for career coaching, or organizing an EA meetup). I often consider the principles of effective altruism when I make decisions about my career or charitable donations, but they are not the biggest factor to me.
• Maximum (previously high) engagement:  I am deeply involved in the effective altruism community. Perhaps I have chosen my career using the principles of effective altruism. I might earn to give or helping to lead an EA group or working at an EA-aligned organization. Maybe I tried for several years to gain such a career but have since moved to a plan B or Z. Regardless, I make my career or resource decisions on a primarily effective altruist basis.

It's a bit rough, but I think it allows for people who are earning to give or deeply involved with the community to say they are maximally engaged and that those who are highly engaged to put a 4 without shame. Feel free to put your own drafts in the comments.

Currently, the idea that someone could be earning to give, donating $10,000s per year and perhaps still not consider themself highly engaged in EA seems like a flaw. 

I've said that people voting anonymously is good, and I still think so, but when I have people downvoting me for appreciating little jokes that other people most on my shortform, I think we've become grumpy. 

Does anyone understand the bottlenecks to a rapid malaria vaccine rollout? Feels underrated.

Seems worth considering that

A) EA has a number of characteristic of a "High Demand Group" (cult). This is a red flag and you should wrestle with it yourself.

B) Many of the "Sort of"s are peer pressure. You don't have to do these things. And if you don't want to, don't!

Nuclear risk is in the news. I hope:
-  if you are an expert on nuclear risk, you are shopping around for interviews and comment
- if you are an EA org that talks about nuclear risk, you are going to publish at least one article on how the current crisis relates to nuclear risk or find an article that you like and share it
- if you are an EA aligned journalist, you are looking to write an article on nuclear risk and concrete actions we can take to reduce it

Factional infighting

[epistemic status - low, probably some element are wrong]

tl;dr
- communities have a range of dispute resolution mechanisms, whether voting to public conflict to some kind of civil war
- some of these are much better than others
- EA has disputes and resources and it seems likely that there will be a high profile conflict at some point
- What mechanisms could we put in place to handle that conflict constructively and in a positive sum way?

When a community grows as powerful as EA is, there can be disagreements about resource allocation.  In EA these are likely to be significant.

There are EAs who think that the most effective cause area is AI safety. There are EAs who think it's global dev. These people do not agree, though there can be ways to coordinate between them.

The spat between GiveWell and GiveDirectly is the beginning of this. Once there are disagreements on the scale of $10millions then some of that is gonna be sorted out over twitter. People may badmouth each other and damage the reputation of EA as a whole.

The way around this is to make solving problems easier than creating them. As in a political coalition, people need to have more benefits being inside the movement than outside it.

The EA forum already does good work here, allowing everyone to upvote posts they like. 

Here are some other power sharing mechanisms:
- a fund where people can either vote on cause areas, expected value, or moral weights, so that it moves based on the community's values as a whole
- a focus on "we disagree, but we respect" looking at how different parts of the community disagree but respect the effort of others
- a clear mechanism of bargains, where animal EAs donate to longtermist charities in exchange for longtermists to go vegan and vice versa
- some videos from key figures from different parts discussing their disagreements in a kind and human way
- "I would change if" a series of posts from people saying what would make them work on different cause areas. How cheap would chicken welfare have to be before Yudkowsky moved to work on it? How cheap would AI safety had to be before it became Singer's key talking point

Call me a pessimist, but I can't see how a community managing $50Bn across deeply dividided prioritites will stay chummy without proper dispute resolution systems. And I suggest we should start building them now.
 

EA infrastructure idea: Best Public Forecaster Award

1. Gather all public forecasting track records
2.  Present them in an easily navigable form
3.  Award prizes one for best brier score of forecasts resolving in the last year

If this gets more than 20 karma, I'll write a full post on it. This is rough.

Questions that come to mind

Where would we find these forecasts

To begin with I would look at those with public records:

• Scott Alexander 
• Bryan Caplan
• Matthew Yglesias
• Many such cases

Beyond these, one could build a community around finding forecasts of public figures. Alternatively, I guess GPT-3 has a good shot of being able to turn verbal forecasts into data which could then be checked.

What's the impact

I'm only gonna sketch my argument here. As above, if this gets 20 karma I'll write a full post (but only upvote if it's good, let's not waste any of our time).

• We seem to think forecasting improves the accuracy of commentator
•  If we could build a high-status award for forecasting, more commentators would hear about it and it would serve as a nudge for others to make their forecasts more visible
• I am confident this would lead to better commentary (this seems arrogant, but honestly the people I know who forecast more are more epistemically humble - I think celebrities could really benefit from more humility about their predictions)
• Better commentary leads to better outcomes. Effective Altruism implicitly holds that many have priority orderings that don't match reality. The world at large underrates the best charities, the chance of biorisk, etc. Journalism which was more accurate would be more accurate about these things too which would be a massive win

Wouldn't the winners just be superforecasters

Not currently. I don't think it's too hard to make pretty robust boundaries on what a public figure is. Most superforecasters are not well enough known (and sorry to the 5 EAs I can count in metaculus' top 50). But Yglesias is well known enough. Scott Alexander, I'm less sure but I think we could come up with some minimum amount of hits, followers, etc for someone to be eligible. 

How much resource would this take

Depends on a couple of things (I have pulled these numbers out of thin air) please criticise them:

•  Who is giving this award its prestige? If it's a lot of money, fine. If it's an existing org, then it's cheaper ( 0 - $50k)
• How deeply are we looking. I think you could pay someone $50k to find say 100 public sets of forecasts and maybe another $10k to make a nice website. If you want to scrape twitter using GPT3 or crowdsource that's maybe another $50-100k
• Is there an award ceremony? If so I imagine that costs as much as a wedding so maybe $10k

That looks like $60 - $220k

If this failed, why did it fail?

• It got embroiled in controversy over who was included 
• It was attached to some existing EA org and looked badly for them
• It became a niche award that no one changed their behaviour based on

I want to say thanks to people involved in the EA endeavour. I know things can be tough at times, but you didn't have to care about this stuff, but you do. Thank you, it means a lot to me. Let's make the world better!

Joe Rogan (largest podcaster in the world) giving repeated concerned mediocre x-risk explanations suggests that people who have contacts with him should try and get someone on the show to talk about it.

eg listen from 2:40:00 Though there were several bits like this during the show. 

I've been musing about some critiques of EA and one I like is "what's the biggest thing that we are missing"

In general, I don't think we are missing things (lol) but here are my top picks:

• It seems possible that we reach out to sciency tech people because they are most similar to us. While this may genuinely be the cheapest way to get people now there may be costs to the community in terms of diversity of thought (most Sci/tech people are more similar than the general population)
  • I'm glad to see more outreach to people in developing nations
  • It seems obvious that science/tech people have the most to contribute to AI safety, but.. maybe not? 
  • Also science/tech people have a particular racial/gender makeup and there is the hidden assumption that there isn't an effective way to reach a more broader group. (Personally I hope that a load of resources in India, Nigeria, Brazil, etc will go some way here, but I dunno still feels like a legitimate question) 
• People are scared what the future might look like if it is only in the view of MacAskill/Bostrom/SBF. Yeah, in fact my (poor) model of MacAskill is scared of this too. But we can surface more that we wish we had a larger group making these decisions too.
• We could build better ways of outsiders feeding into decisionmaking. I read a piece about the effectiveness of community vegan meals being underrated in EA. Now I'm not saying it should be funded, but I was surprsied to read some of these conferences are 5000+ people (iirc). Maybe that genuinely is oversight. But it's really hard for high signal information to get to decisionmakers. That really is a problem we could work on. If it's hard for people who speak EA-ese, how much much harder is it for those who speak different community languages, whose concepts seem frustrating to us.

I would like to see posts give you more karma than comments (which would hit me hard). Seems like a highly upvtoed post is waaaaay more valuable than 3 upvoted comments on that post, but it's pretty often the latter gives more karma than the former.

There is no EA "scene" on twitter.

For good or ill, while there are posters on twitter who talk about EA, there isn't a "scene" (a space where people use loads of EA jargon and assume everyone is EA) or at least not that I've seen.

This surprised me.

UK government will pay for organisations to hire 18-24 year olds who are currently unemployed, for 6 months. This includes minimum wage and national insurance.

I imagine many EA orgs are people constrained rather than funding constrained but it might be worth it. 

And here is a data science org which will train them as well https://twitter.com/John_Sandall/status/1315702046440534017

Note: applications have to be for 30 jobs, but you can apply over a number of organisations or alongside a local authority etc. 

https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/kickstart-scheme

Is there a way to sort shortform posts?

EA Book discount codes.

tl;dr EA  books have a positive externality. The response should be to subsidise them

If EA thinks that certain books (doing good better, the precipice) have greater benefits than they seem, they could subsidise them.

There could be an EA website which has amazon coupons for EA books so that you can get them more cheaply if buying for a friend, or advertise said coupon to your friends to encourage them to buy the book.

From 5 mins of research the current best way would be for a group to buys EA books and sell them at the list price but provide coupons as here - https://www.passionintopaychecks.com/how-to-create-single-use-amazon-coupons-promo-codes/

Alternatively, you could just sell them at the coupon price.
 

Being open minded and curious is different from holding that as part of my identity. 

Perhaps I never reach it. But it seems to me that "we are open minded people so we probably behave open mindedly" is false.

Or more specifically, I think that it's good that EAs want to be open minded, but I'm not sure that we are purely because we listen graciously, run criticism contests, talk about cruxes.

The problem is the problem. And being open minded requires being open to changing one's mind in difficult or set situations. And I don't have a way that's guaranteed to get us over that line. 

Someone told me they don't bet as a matter of principle. And that this means EA/Rats take their opinions less seriously as a result. Some thoughts

• I respect individual EAs preferences. I regularly tell friends to do things they are excited about, to look after themselves, etc etc. If you don't want to do something but feel you ought to, maybe think about why, but I will support you not doing it. If you have a blanket ban on gambling, fair enough. You are allowed to not do things because you don't want to
• Gambling is addictive, if you have a problem with it, don't do it
• Betting is a useful tool. I just do take opinions a bit less seriously if people don't do the simple thing to put their money where their mouths are. And so a blanket ban is a slight cost. Imagine if I said I had a blanket ban on double cruxxing, or giving to animal welfare charities. It's a thing I am allowed to do, but it does just seem a bit worse
• To me, this seems like something else is actually going on. Perhaps it feels like "will you bet on it" is a way that certain people can twist my arm in a way that makes me feel uncomfortable? Perhaps the people who say this have been cruel to me in the past. I don't know, but I sense there is something else going on. If you don't bet as a blanket policy, could you tell me why?

I think if I knew that I could trade "we all obey some slightly restrictive set of romance norms" for "EA becomes 50% women in the next 5 years" then that's a trade I would advise we take. 

That's a big if. But seems trivially like the right thing to do - women do useful work and we should want more of them involved.

To say the unpopular reverse statement, if I knew that such a set of norms wouldn't improve wellbeing in some average of women in EA and EA as a whole then I wouldn't take the trade. 

Seems worth acknowledging there are right answers here, if only we knew the outcomes of our decisions.

In defence of Will MacAskill and Nick Beckstead staying on the board of EVF

While I've publicly said that on priors they should be removed unless we hear arguments otherwise, I was kind of expecting someone to make those arguments. If noone will, I will.

MacAskill

MacAskill is very clever, personally kind, is a superlative networker and communicator. Imo he oversold SBF, but I guess I'd do much worse in his place. It seems to me that we should want people who have made mistakes and learned from them.  Seems many EA orgs would be glad to have someone like him on the board. If anything, the question is if we don't want too many people duplicated across EA orgs (do we want this?) which board is it most valuable to have MacAskill on? I guess EVF? 

Beckstead 

Beckstead is, I sense, extremely clever (generally I find OpenPhil people to be powerhouses), personally kind. I guess I think that he dropped the ball on running FTXFF well - feels like had they hired more people to manage OPS they might have queried why money was going from strange accounts, but again I don't know the particulars (though I want to give the benefit of the doubt here). But again, it was a complicated project and I guess he sensed that speed of ramp up was the proirity. In many world's he'd have been right.

I guess perhaps the two of them seem to have pretty similar blindspots (kind intelligent academicish EAs who scaled things really fast) so perhaps it is worth only having one on the board. Maybe it's worth having someone who can say "hmm that seems likely too odd or shifty to be worth us doing it". But this isn't as much of a knockdown argument.

Feels like there should be some kind of community discussion and research in the wake of FTX, especially if no leadership is gonna do it. But I don't know how that discussion would have legitimacy. I'm okay at such things, but honestly tend to fuck them up somehow. Any ideas?

If I were king

• Use the ideas from all the varous posts
• Have a big google doc where anyone can add research and also put a comment for each idea and allow people to discuss
• Then hold another post where we have a final vote on what should happen
• then EA orgs can see at least what some kind of community concensus things
• And we can see what each other think

Let's assume that the time article is right about the amount of sexual harassment in EA. How big a problem is this relative to other problems? If we spend $10mn on EAGs (a guess) how much should we spend if we could halve sexual harassment in the community.

I'll sort of publicly flag that I sort of break the karma system. Like the way I like to post comments is little and often and this is just overpowered in getting karma.

eg I recently overtook Julia Wise and I've been on the forum for years less than anyone else.

I don't really know how to solve this - maybe someone should just 1 time nuke my karma? But yeah it's true.

Note that I don't do this deliberately - it's just how I like to post and I think it's honestly better to split up ideas into separate comments. But boy is it good at getting karma. And soooo much easier than writing posts.

https://eaforum.issarice.com/userlist?sort=karma 

Does EA have a clearly denoted place for exit interviews? Like if someone who was previously very involved was leaving, is there a place they could say why?

The amount of content on the forum is pretty overwhelming at the moment and I wonder if there is a better way to sort it. 

Question answers

When answering questions, I recommend people put each separate point as a separate answer. The karma ranking system is useful to see what people like/don't like and having a whole load of answers together muddies the water. 

EA global

1) Why is EA global space constrained? Why not just have a larger venue?

I assume there is a good reason for this which I don't know.

2) It's hard to invite friends to EA global. Is this deliberate?

I have a close friend who finds EA quite compelling. I figured I'd invite them to EA global. They were dissuaded by the fact they had to apply and that it would cost $400.

I know that's not the actual price, but they didn't know that. I reckon they might have turned up for a couple of talks. Now they probably won't apply. 

Is there no way that this event could be more welcoming or is that not the point?

This perception gap site would be a good form for learning and could be used in altruism. It reframes correcting biases as a fun prediction game.

https://perceptiongap.us/

It's a site which gets you to guess what other political groups (republicans and democrats) think about issues.

Why is it good:

1) It gets  people thinking and predicting. They are asked a clear question about other groups and have to answer it.
2) It updates views in a non-patronising way - it turns out dems and repubs are much less polarised than most people think (the stat they give is that people predict 50% of repubs hold extreme views, when actually it's 30).  But rather than yelling this, or an annoying listicle, it gets people's consent and teachest something.
3) It builds consensus. If we are actually closer to those we disagree with than we think, perhaps we could work with them.
4) It gives quick feedback. People learn best when given feedback which is close to the action. In this case, people are rapidly rewarded for thoughts like "probably most of X group" are more similar to me that I first think.

Imagine:

What percentage of neocons want insitutional reform?
What % of libertarians want an end to factory farming?
What % of socialists want an increase in foreign direct aid?

Conlusion

If you want to change people's minds, don't tell them stuff, get them to guess trustworthy values as a cutesy game.

I might start doing some policy BOTEC (Back of the envelope calculation) posts. ie where I suggest an idea and try and figure out how valuable it is. I think that do this faster with a group to bounce ideas off. 

If you'd like to be added to a message chat (on whatsapp probably) to share policy BOTECs then reply here or DM me. 

Is EA as a bait and switch a compelling argument for it being bad?

I don't really think so

1. There are a wide variety of baits and switches, from what I'd call misleading to some pretty normal activities - is it a bait and switch when churches don't discuss their most controversial beliefs at a "bring your friends" service? What about wearing nice clothes to a first date? ^[1]
2. EA is a big movement composed of different groups^[2]. Many describe it differently.
3. EA has done so much global health stuff I am not sure it can be described as a bait and switch. eg https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ip7nXs7l-8sahT6ehvk2pBrlQ6Umy5IMPYStO3taaoc/edit#gid=9418963
4. EA is way more transparent than any comparable movement. If it is a bait and switch then it does so much more to make clear where the money goes eg (https://openbook.fyi/).

On the other hand:

1. I do sometimes see people describing EA too favourably or pushing an inaccurate line.

I think that transparency comes with a feature of allowing anyone to come and say "what's going on there" and that can be very beneficial at avoiding error but also bad criticism can be too cheap. 

Overall I don't find this line that compelling. And that parts that are seem largely in the past when EA was smaller (when perhaps it mattered less). Now that EA is big, it's pretty clear that it cares about many different things. 

Seems fine. 

1. ^{^}

   @Richard Y Chappell created the analogy. 

2. ^{^}

   @Sean_o_h argues that here. 

Clear benefits, diffuse harms

It is worth noting when systems introduce benefits in a few obvious ways but many small harms. An example is blocking housing. It benefits the neighbours a lot - they don't have to have construction nearby - and the people who are harmed are just random marginal people who could have afforded a home but just can't. 

But these harms are real and should be tallied.

Much recent discussion in EA has suggested common sense risk reduction strategies which would stop clear bad behavior. Often we all agree on the clear bad behaviour. 

But the risk reduction strategies would also often set norms against a range of greyer behaviour that the suggestors don't engage in or doesn't seem valuable to them. If you don't work with your coworkers, then suggesting it be normed against, seems fine - it would make it hard for people to end up in weird living situations. But I know people who have loved living with coworkers. That's a diffuse harm.

Mainly I think this involves acknowledging people are a lot weirder than you think. People want things I don't expect them to want, they consent in business, housing and relationships to things I'd never expect them to. People are wild. And I think it's worth there being bright lines against some kinds of behaviour that is bad or nearly always bad - I'd suggest dating your reports is ~ very unwise - but a lot is about human preferences and to understand that we need to elicit both wholesome and illicit preferences or consider harms that are diffuse.

Note that I'm not saying which way the balance of harms falls, but that both types should be counted.

I suggest there is waaaay to much to be on top of in EA and noone knows who is checking what. So some stuff goes unchecked. If there were a narrower set of "core things we study" then it seems more likely that those things would have been gone over by someone in detail and hence fewer errors in core facts.

It is frustrating that I cannot reply to comments from the notification menu. Seems like a natural thing to be able to do.

I think the EA forum wiki should allow longer and more informative articles. I think that it would get 5x traffic. So I've created a market to bet. 

I think the wiki should be about summarising and synthesising articles on this forum. 

- There are lots of great articles which will be rarely reread
- Many could do with more links to eachother and to other key peices
- Many could be better edited, combined etc
- The wiki could take all content and aim to turn it into a minimal viable form of itself

EA criticism

[Epistemic Status: low, I think this is probably wrong, but I would like to debug it publicly]

If I have a criticism of EA along Institutional Decision Making lines, it is this:

For a movement that wants to change how decisions get made, we should make those changes in our own organisations first.

Examples of good progress:
-  prizes - EA orgs have offered prizes for innovation
- voting systems - it's good that the forum is run on upvotes and that often I think EA uses the right tool for the job in terms of voting

Things I would like to see more of:
- an organisation listening to prediction markets/polls. If we believe nations should listen to  forecasting can we make clearer which markets our orgs are looking and and listening to?
- an organisation run by prediction markets. The above but taking it further
- removing siloes in EA. If you have confidence to email random people it's relatively easy to get stuff done, but can we lower the friction to allow good ideas to spread further?
- etc

It's fine if we think these things will never work, but it seems weird to me that we think improvements would work elsewhere but that we don't want them in our orgs. That's like being NIMBY about our own suggested improvements.

Counterarguments
- these aren't solutions people are actually arguing for. Yeah this is an okay point. But I think the seeds of them exist.

- prediction markets work in big orgs not small ones. Maybe, but isn't it worth running one small inefficient organisation to try and learn the failure modes before we suggest this for nation states

EA twitter bots

 A set of EA jobs twitter bots which each retweet a specific set of hashtags eg #AISafety #EAJob, #AnimalSuffering #EAJob, etc etc.  Please don't get hung up on these, we'd actually need to brainstorm the right hashtags.

You follow the bots and hear about the jobs.

Rather than using Facebook as a way to collect EA jobs we should use an airtable form

1) Individuals finding jobs could put all the details in, saving time for whoever would have to do this process at 80k time.

2) Airtable can post directly to facebook, so everyone would still see it https://community.airtable.com/t/posting-to-social-media-automatically/20987

3) Some people would find it quicker. Personally, I'd prefer an airtable form to inputting it to facebook manually every time. 

Ideally we should find websites which often publish useful jobs and then scrape them regularly. 

Does anyone know people working on reforming the academic publishing process?

Coronavirus has caused journalists to look for scientific sources. There are no journal articles because of the lag time. So they have gone to preprint servers like bioRxiv (pronounced bio-archive). These servers are not peer reviewed so some articles are of low quality. So people have gone to twitter asking for experts to review the papers.

https://twitter.com/ryneches/status/1223439143503482880?s=19

This is effectively a new academic publishing paradigm. If there were support for good papers (somehow) you would have the key elements of a new, perhaps better system.

Some thoughts here too: http://physicsbuzz.physicscentral.com/2012/08/risks-and-rewards-of-arxiv-reporting.html?m=1

With Coronavirus providing a lot of impetus for change, those working in this area could find this an important time to increase visibility of their work.

The shifts in forum voting patterns across the EU and US seem worthy of investigation. 

I'm not saying there is some conspiracy, it seems pretty obvious that EU and US EAs have different views and that appears in voting patterns but it seems like we could have more self knowledge here.

I make a quick (and relatively uncontroversial) poll on how people are feeling about EA. I'll share if we get 10+ respondents.

huw @ 2024-05-03T09:00 (+3)

Without reading too much into it, there's a similar amount of negativity about the state of EA as there is a lack of confidence in its future. That suggests to me that there's a lot of people who think EA should be reformed to survive (rather than 'it'll dwindle and that's fine' or 'I'm unhappy with it but it'll be okay')?

Nathan Young @ 2024-05-03T12:33 (+1)

Currently 27-ish^[1] people have responded:

Full results: https://viewpoints.xyz/polls/ea-sense-check/results 

Statements people agree with:

Statements where there is significant conflict:

Statements where people aren't sure or dislike the statement:

1. ^{^}

   The applet makes it harder to track numbers than the full site. 

It has an emotional impact on me to note that FTX claims are now trading at 50%. This means that on expectation, people are gonna get about half of what their assets were worth, had they help them until this time.

I don't really understand whether it should change the way we understand the situation, but I think a lot of people's life savings were wrapped up here and half is a lot better than nothing.

src: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-10-25/ftx-claims-rise-after-potential-bidders-for-shuttered-exchange-emerge 

I am not confident on the reasons why this is, but I think it's because Anthropic and the cryptocurrency Solana are now trading a lot higher. My last memory (bad do not trust) is that FTX has about 11bn in debt against 4bn in assets. I think Anthropic and the Sol they hold have both gone up by about a billion since then. 

I dunno folks, but I hope people get their money back - and I know that includes some of you.

We are good at discussion but bad at finding the new thing to update to.

Look at the recent Happier Lives Institute discussion; https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/g4QWGj3JFLiKRyxZe/the-happier-lives-institute-is-funding-constrained-and-needs

Lots of discussion, a reasonable amount of new information, but what should our final update be:

• Have HLI acted fine or badly?
• Is there a pattern of misquoting and bad scholarship?
• Have global health orgs in general moved towards Self-reported WellBeing (SWB) as a way to measure interventions?
• Has HLI generally done good/cost effective work? 

I think that the forum comments model is very poor at this. After all, if there were widespread agreement (as I think there could be) then I think that would be a load of all our minds. We could have a discussion once and then not need to have it again.

As it is, I'm sure many people have taken away different things from this and I we'll probably discsuss it again the next time the Happier Lives Institute or StrongMinds posts to the forum and I guess there has been some more bad blood created in the meantime.

Consensus is good and we don't even try to reach it after big discussions.

It is just really hard to write comments that challenge without seeming to attack people. Anyone got any tips?

Some thoughts on: https://twitter.com/FreshMangoLassi/status/1628825657261146121?s=20 

I agree that it’s worth saying something about sexual behaviour. Here are my broad thoughts:

• I am sad about women having bad experiences, I think about it a lot
• I want to be accurate in communication
• I think it's easy to reduce harms a lot without reducing benefits

Firstly, I’m sad about the current situation. Seems like too many women in EA have bad experiences. There is a discussion about what happens in other communities or tradeoffs. But first it’s really sad.

More than this, it seems worth dwelling on what it *feels* like. I guess for many it’s fine. But for some it can be exhausting or sad or uncomfortable. Women in EA complain to me about their treatment as women at lot, men much less. Seems notable.

But I don’t know what norms should be. I don’t know what’s best for EA women, for EA in general, for the world in general. In short, I don’t know how to optimise norms. 

But harms seem easier to understand. It does seem to me there are some low cost, high benefit improvements. Particularly in people who have patterns of upsetting women. 

Personally, I have really upset 2 or 3 women in EA around romance. I've said or done things that have left them sad for months. And I don’t think this is okay.

To them, I am sorry. 

How do they feel? Well I sense, really sad. We’re not talking Time magazine stuff here, but I think they felt belittled, disrespected, judged and, briefly, unsafe. I don’t want anyone to feel like this, let alone because of me.

And compared to their suffering, and my sadness at it, it just seems pretty cheap to change my behaviour. To go on dates with a smaller group of people in EA, to create patterns to avoid situations I handle poorly, to spend time imagining women’s lives.

So I’m not gonna give a blanket pronouncement or say we are the worst. But personally, I am pretty flawed and I would prefer to change rather than hurt other people. And if you see that pattern in your life then I suggest taking real, actual steps.

I’d suggest you ask yourself. “Are there any women who, as a result of my actions in the last 2 years are seething or deeply upset.” 

For most people the answer is no. Like seriously, the answer can be “no, you’re fine”. But if it’s yes, women are people right? Do you really believe that there aren’t some improvements possible here?

Some suggestions to yesses:

• Talk to a trusted friend. How do they think you do here?
• Imagine how much you would do to avoid the last woman being upset. Spend at least that much time avoiding the next woman being upset

I dislike the tribal nature of this discussion, that on some level it feels culture war-ey. So again, I don’t think this for everyone, but it is for me

• But I really would recommend going to quality sex and relationship courses. I went to one run by a tantra group and I think it just made me a lot kinder and helped me reduce risks
• Talk to women you’ve dated. How did they feel?
• If you struggle with empathy with women, perhaps start with empathy for me. Trust me, you don’t want to feel like this. It’s horrible to have people who are upset as a result of my actions.
• Most of all, I would recommend building empathy. I wish I had sat down and just written how the women I fancied felt, even for 5 minutes. And talked it over with a friend. 
  
  Take an interest in the mental lives of people you care about.

So I guess, the thing I could say was “If you continue patterns of romantic behaviour that frequently upset women that you could easily make less risky then I’ll be really upset with you and sad” as, if I were to continue I’d be so angry at myself.

Romance is not without risk - I don’t think this is a purely harm reducing question (though I could move to that opinion). But I think it’s possible to just reduce risks a lot while maintaining benefit. And if I have the option to do that and I choose not to, that’s basically my definition of bad.

What is a big open factual non community question in EA. I have a cool discussion tool I want to try out.

Should we want openai to turn off bing for a bit? We should, right? Should we create memes to that effect?

• It is unclear to me that if we chose cause areas again, we would choose global developement
• The lack of a focus on global development would make me sad
• This issue should probably be investigated and mediated to avoid a huge community breakdown - it is naïve to think that we can just swan through this without careful and kind discussion

If I find this forum exhausting to post on some times I can only imagine how many people bounce off entirely.

The forum has a wiki (like wikipedia)

 The "Criticism of EA Community" wiki post is here.

I think it would be better as a summary of criticisms rather than links to documents containing criticisms.

This is a departure from the current wiki style, so after talking to moderators we agreed to draft externally.

Collaborative Draft:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1RetcAA7D94y6v3qxoKi_Ven-xF98FjirokvI-g8cKI4/edit# 

Upvote this post if you think the "Criticism of EA Community" post will be better as a collaboratively-written summary. 

Downvote if you like the current style.

Comments appreciated.

With better wiki features and a way to come to consensus on numbers I reckon this forum can write a career guide good enough to challenge 80k. They do great work, but we are many.

There were too few parties on the last night of EA global in london which led to overcrowding, stressed party hosts and wasting a load of people's time.

I suggest in future that there should be at least n/200 parties where n is the number of people attending the conference. 

I don't think CEA should legislate parties, but I would like to surface in people's minds that if there are fewer than n/200 parties, then you should call up your friend with most amenable housemates and tell them to organise!

Has rethink priorities ever thought of doing a survey of non-EAs? Perhaps paying for a poll? I'd be interested in questions like "What do you think of Effective Altruism? What do you think of Effective Altruists?"

Only asking questions of those who are currently here is survivorship bias. Likewise we could try and find people who left and ask why.

I am not particularly excited to discuss Nonlinear in any way, but I note I'd prefer to discuss it on LessWrong rather than here. 

Why is this?

• I dunno
• Feels like it's gonna be awful discourse
• The thing I actually want to do is go over things point by point but I feel here it's gonna get all fraught and statusy

Why I like the donation election

I have some things I do like and then some clarifications.

I like that we are trying new mechanisms. If we were going to try and be a community that lasts we need to build ways of working that don't have the failure modes that others have had in the past. I'm not particularly optimistic about this specific donation election, but I like that we are doing it. For this reason I've donated a little and voted. 

I don't think this specific donation election mechanism adds a lot. Money already gets allocated on a kind of voting system - you choose how you spend it. Gathering everyone's votes and then reallocating means some people have decided they'd rather spend towards the median, though that data was available anyway. That said, I did spend quite a lot of time thinking about how I was gonna give (it's strange to me that I find voting wrong worse than giving my own money wrong)

That said, perhaps it will codify discussions of impact, which I think are good. I'd like more quantification/ comparison. Are there some nice graphs somewhere of where Giving What We Can gifts go to? 

I don't think that election offers much better decisions. If I want someone I trust to help me decide where to give, I can already do that. 

I don't particularly like the "I donated" "I voted" tags, but I never like that kind of thing. 

On balance I thought it was good and want more stuff like this.

This could have been a wiki

I hold that there could be a well maintained wiki article on top EA orgs and then people could anonymously have added many non-linear stories a while ago. I would happily have added comments about their move fast and break things approach and maybe had a better way to raise it with them.

There would have been edit wars and an earlier investigation.

How much would you pay to have brought this forward 6 months or a year. And likewise for whatever other startling revelations there are. In which case, I suggest a functional wiki is worth 5% - 10% of that amount, per case.

It was pointed out to me that I probably vote a bit wrong on posts.

I generally just up and downvote how I feel, but occasionally if I think a post is very overrated or underrated I will strong upvote or downvote even though I feel less strong than that.

But this is I think the wrong behaviour and a defection. Since if we all did that then we'd all be manipulating the post to where we think it ought to be and we'd lose the information held in the median of where all our votes leave it.

Sorry. 

Confidence 60%

Any EA leadership have my permission to put scandal on the back burner until we have a strategy on bing by the way. feels like a big escalation to have an ML reading it's own past messages and running a search engine.

EA internal issues matter but only if we are alive.

I think the community health team should make decisions on the balance of harms rather than beyond reasonable doubt. If it seems likely someone did something bad they can be punished a bit until we don't think they'll do it again. But we have to actually take all the harms into account.

Should I tweet this? I'm very on the margin. Agree disagreevot (which doesn't change karma)

I did a podcast where we talked about EA, would be great to hear your criticisms of it. https://pca.st/i0rovrat

Should I do more podcasts?

Any time that you read a wiki page that is sparse or has mistakes, consider adding what you were trying to find. I reckon in a few months we could make the wiki really good to use. 

I sense that conquest's law is true -> that organisations that are not specifically right wing move to the left.

I'm not concerned about moving to the left tbh but I am concerned with moving away from truth, so it feels like it would be good to constantly pull back towards saying true things. 

I think the forum should have a retweet function but for the equivalent of github forks. So you can make changes to someone's post and offer them the ability to incorporate them. If they don't, you can just remake the article with the changes and an acknolwedgement that you did.

I don't think people would actually do that that often, because they'd get no karma most of the time, but it would give karma, attribution trail for:
- summaries
- significant corrections/reframings
- and the author could still accept the edits later

My very quick improving institutional decision-making (IIDM) thoughts

Epistemic status: Weak 55% confidence. I may delete. Feel free to call me out or DM me etc etc. 

I am saying these so that someone has said them. I would like them to be better phrased but then I'd probably never share them. Please feel free to criticise them though I might modify them a lot and I'm sorry if they are blunt:

• I don't understand what concrete learnings there are from IIDM, except forecasting (which I am biased on). The EIP produced a report which said that in the institutions you'd expect to matter do. That was cheap falsification so I guess worth it.  Beyond that, I don't know. And I was quite involved for a while and I didn't pick these up by osmosis.  I assume that many people know even less than I do.
• Is forecasting IIDM? Yes. But people know what forecasting is so it's easier to use those words. Are humans primates, yes, but one of those words is easier to understand.
• Does IIDM exist in the wild? Yes?? I know lots of EA-aligned people who work in institutions who to improve them. That seems like IIDM to me.
• What ideas would I brainstorm, low confidence:
  • Connect EA networks across institutions. EAs in different institutions probably know things. Do they pass those around?
  • Try and improve EA knowledge tranfer How can someone get a high signal feed of information via email, WhatsApp, podcast app. If we had this then it would be easier to share to institutional colleagues
  • What has worked in EA orgs? I'm surprised we think we can improve institutions when we haven't solved those problems internally
    • How does an org make forecasting really easy and low friction?
    • How can EA institutions share detailed knowledge in real treal-timeime across institutions?
    • How do EAs avoid duplicating work?

Do we prefer

• impact tractability neglectedness 
• scale solvability neglectedness

I am gonna do a set of polls and get a load of karma for it (70% >750).  I'm currently ~20th overall on the forum despite writing few posts of note. I think polls I write create a lot of value and I like the way it incentivises me to think about questions the community wants to answer.

I am pretty happy with the current karma payment but I'm not sure everyone will be so I thought I'd surface it. I've considered saying that polls delivery half the karma, but that feels kind of messy and I do think polls are currently underrated on the forum.

Any ideas?

https://eaforum.issarice.com/userlist?sort=karma 

EA podcasts and videos

Each EA org should pay $10 bounty to the best twitter thread talking about any episode. If you could generate 100 quality twitter threads on 80,000 hours episodes that for $1000 that would be really cheap. People would quote tweet and discuss and it would make the whole set of knowledge much more legible.

I edited the of wikipedia on Doing Good Better to try and make it more reflective of the book and Will's current views. Let me know how you think I did.

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=William_MacAskill&editintro=Template%3ABLP_editintro#Doing_Good_Better

Plant-based meat. Fun video from a youtuber which makes a strong case. Very sharable. https://youtu.be/-k-V3ESHcfA

A friend in canada wants to give 10k to a UK global health charity but wants it to be tax neutral. does anyone giving to a big charity want to swap (so he gives to your charity in canada and gets the tax back) and you give to this global health one?

Top Forecaster Podcast

I talked to Peter Wildeford, who is a top forecaster and Head of Rethink Priorities, about the US 2024 General Election.

We try to pin down specific probabilities.

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7jJxPfOdAo

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/4xJw9af9SMSmX5N2UZTpRD?si=Dh9RqPwqSDuHj7VpEx_nwg&nd=1 

Pocketcasts: https://pca.st/ytt7guj0 

Space in my brain.

I was reading this article about Nuclear winter a couple of days ago and I struggled. It's a good article but there isn't an easy slot in my worldview for it. The main thrust was something like "maybe nuclear winter is worse than other people think". But I don't really know how bad other people think it is. 

Compare this to community articles, I know how the community functions and I have opinions on things. Each article fits neatly into my brain.
 
If a had a globe my worldview the EA community section is like very well mapped out. And so when I hear oh, you know, Adelaide is near Sydney or something, I know where those places are, and I can make some sort of judgment on the comment. But my views on nuclear winter are like if I learn that the mountains near Drachmore are taller than people think. Where is drachmore? Which mountains? How tall do people think they are.

My suggestion here is better wikis, but mainly I think the problem is an interesting one. I think often the community section is well supported because we all have some prior structure. I think it's hard to comment on air purity, AI minutiae or nuclear winter because I don't have that prior space. 

That seems notable. 

I wouldn't recommend people tweet about the nonlinear stuff a lot. 

There is an appropriate level of publicity for things and right now I think the forum is the right level for this. Seems like there is room for people to walk back and apologise. Posting more widely and I'm not sure there will be.

If you think that appropriate actions haven't been taken in say a couple months then I get tweeting a bit more.

I am so impressed at the speed with which Sage builds forecasting tools.

Props @Adam Binks and co.

Fatebook: the fastest way to make and track predictions looks great. 

I still don't really like the idea of CEA being democratically elected but I like it more than I once did. 

89 people responded to my strategy poll so far. 

Here are the areas of biggest uncertainty.

Seems we could try and understand these better.

Poll link: https://viewpoints.xyz/polls/ea-strategy-1 

Analytics like: https://viewpoints.xyz/polls/ea-strategy-1/analytics 

I imagine that it has cost and does cost 80k to push for AI safety stuff even when it was wierd and now it seems mainstream.

Like, I think an interesting metric is when people say something which shifts some kind of group vibe. And sure, catastrophic risk folks are into it, but many EAs aren't and would have liked a more holistic approach (I guess). 

So it seems a notable tradeoff.

I would quite like Will MacAskill back right about now. I think he was generally a great voice in the discourse. 

I am frustrated and hurt when I take flack for criticism.

It seems to me that people think I'm just stirring shit by asking polls or criticising people in power.

1. Maybe I am a bit. I can't deny I take some pleasure in it. 
2. But there are a reasonable amount of personal costs too. There is a reason why 1-5 others I've talked to have said they don't want to crticise because they are concerned about their careers.
3. I more or less entirely criticise on the forum. Believe me, if I wanted to actually stir shit, I could do it a lot more effectively than shortform comments.

I'm relatively pro casual sex as a person, but I will say that EA isn't about being a sex-positive community - it's about effectively doing good. And if one gets in the way of the other, I know what I'm choosing (doing good). 

I think there is a positive sum compromise possible, but it seems acknowledging how I will trade off if it comes to it.

In general I want to empower experts who rarely take risks to take more (eg the forum is better if the team make changes a lot)

How come some people have access to inline comments and others don't?

Lorenzo Buonanno @ 2023-02-09T20:40 (+2)

What do you mean by inline comments?

Nathan Young @ 2023-02-10T09:43 (+2)

when you can comment on an article and it shows as a little speech bubble to the side of the text. I've opted into experimental features but I still can't.

Lorenzo Buonanno @ 2023-02-10T10:50 (+2)

You can enable it on a per-post basis, by clicking on the ... below the title

Nathan Young @ 2023-02-10T16:52 (+10)

But how does one write them? feels like something should appear when I highlight text.

Lorenzo Buonanno @ 2023-02-10T16:59 (+4)

I think you just normally quote a section of the article, clicking "Block quote"

Some people use hypothes.is , which in theory gives the same functionality on any web page, but we're very few and only people that have installed it can see the comments or add new ones

Nathan Young @ 2023-02-10T17:10 (+2)

Do you have any idea why my shortform doesn't have disagree and agreevotes?

Lorenzo Buonanno @ 2023-02-10T17:13 (+10)

Because it's from before disagree and agreevotes were a thing, not sure if there's a way to make a new one, I would file a feature request https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/NhSBgYq55BFs7t2cA/ea-forum-feature-suggestion-thread 

Nathan Young @ 2023-02-10T17:15 (+2)

As in all old shortforms don't have them?

Lorenzo Buonanno @ 2023-02-10T17:58 (+10)

Yes, I think that's currently the case (speaking as a user)

Nathan Young @ 2023-02-11T01:48 (+1)

wild.

Why do some shortforms have agree voting and others don't?

Some thoughts
- Utilitiarianism but being cautious around the weird/unilateral stuff is still good
- We shouldn't be surprised that we didn't figure out SBF was fraudulent quicker than billions of dollars of cryto money... and Michael Lewis
- Scandal prediction markets are the solution here and one day they will be normal. But not today. Don't boo me, I'm right
- Everyone wants whistleblowing, no one wants the correctly incentivised decentralised form of whistleblowing.
- Gotta say, I feel for many random individual people who knew or interacted closely with SBF but weren't at FTX who are gonna get caught up in that
- We were fundamentally unserious about avoiding reputational risk from crypto. I hope we are more serious about not dying from AI
- I like you all a lot
- I don't mind taking the money of some retired non-EA oil baron, but I think not returning FTX's money perhaps incentivises future pro-crime EAs. I would like a credible signal
- The community does not need democratised funding (though I'd happily test it at a small scale) though we aren't getting enough whistleblowing so we should work on that
- We deserve to be scrutinised and mocked, we messed up. We should own that
- X-risk is still extremely compelling
- I am uncertain how impactful my work is
- Our critics are usually very low signal but have a few key things of value to say. It is hard to listen to find those things without wasting loads of time, but missing them is bad too
- People knew SBF was a bully who broke promises. That that information didn't flow to where it needed/ was ignored was a problem 
- I think we shouldn't say we want criticism, because we don't. We didn't want it about FTX and we don't in any other places. We want very specific criticism. Everyone does, because the world is big and we have limited time. So how do we get the criticism that's most useful to us
- The community should seek to make the best funding decisions it can over time. I think that's with orgs doing it and prediction markets to remove bad apples, but you can think what you want. But democratisation isn't a goal in and of itself - good sustainable decisionmaking is. Perhaps there should be a jury of randomly chosen community member, perhaps we should have elections. I don't know, but I do feel we haven't been taking governance seriously enough

I notice that sometimes I want to post on something that's on both the EA forum and lesswrong. And ideally, clicking "see lesswrong comments" would just show them on the current forum page and if I responded, it would calculate EA forum karma for the forum and LessWrong karma for lessWrong.

Probably not worth building, but still.

Someone being recommended to learn about EA by listening to 10 hours of podcasts in the wild

Maximise useful feedback, minimise rudeness

When someone says of your organisation "I want you to do X" do not say "You are wrong to want X"

This rudely discourages them from giving you feedback in future. Instead, there are a number of options:

• If you want their feedback "Why do you want X?" "How does a lack of X affect you?"
• If you don't want their feedback "Sorry, we're not taking feedback on that right now" or "Doing X isn't a priority for us"
• If you think they fundamentally misunderstand something "Can I ask you a question relating to X?"

None of these options tell them they are wrong. 

I do a lot of user testing. Sometimes a user tells me something I disagree with. But they are the user. They know what they want. If I disagree, it's either because they aren't actually a user I want to support, they misunderstand how hard something is, or they don't know how to solve their own problems.

None of these are solved by telling them they are wrong. 

Often I see people responding to feedback with correction. I often do it myself. I think it has the wrong incentives. Rather than trying to tell someone they are wrong, now I try to either react with curiosity or to explain that I'm not taking feedback right now. That's about me rather than them. 

Other than my karma, this post got negative karma. Why?

I understand that sometimes I post controversial stuff, but this one is just straightforwardly valuable. 

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/GshpbrBaCQjxmAKJG/cause-prioritsation-contest-who-bettors-think-will-win

I sense new stuff on the forum is probably overrated. Surely we should assume that most of the most valuable things for most people to read have already been written? 

Have you seen the new features google docs has added recently?

• Tick boxes
• Project trackers
• New types of tables

Feels like they are gunning for Notion. 

The difference between the criticism contest and openphil's cause prioritisation contest is pretty interesting. 60% I'm gonna think OpenPhil's created more value in terms of changes in a 10 years time.

1 minute video summaries of  my EA Criticism contest articles:

Summaries are underrated - https://www.loom.com/share/4781668372694c83a4e9feffe249469b - full text

Improving Karma - https://www.loom.com/share/6d0decef2bd14efc9b22e14d43693002 - full text

Common misconception I see:

Longtermists causes are not:

• Causes which are much more pressing under longtermism than other belief systems

Longtermist causes are:

• Those which are a high priority for marginal resources, whether they are under other belief systems or not.
• The fact that biorisk and AI risk are high priority without longtermism doesn't make them not "longtermist causes" just as it doesn't make the not "causes that affect people alive today"

How much value is there in combining two EA slacks which discuss the same topic?

Probably $1,000s right? 

Or maybe we should assume it will be a natural process that one will subsume the other?

Effective altruism and politics

Here is an app that lets you vote on other people's comments (I'd like to see it installed in the forum so there is a lower barrier to entry) 

You can add thoughts and try and make arguments that get broad agreement. 

What are the different parties of opinion on EA and politics.

https://pol.is/283be3mcmj
 

EA Wiki

I've decided I'm going to just edit the wiki to be like the wiki I want.

Currently the wiki feels meticulously referenced but lacking in detail. I'd much prefer it to have more synthesised content which is occasionally just someone's opinion. If you dislike this approach, let me know.

Why do posts get more upvotes than questions with the same info?

I wrote this question: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ckcoSe3CS2n3BW3aT/what-ea-projects-could-grow-to-become-megaprojects

Some others wrote this post summarising it:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/faezoENQwSTyw9iop/ea-megaprojects-continued

Why do you think the summary got more upvotes. I'm not upset, I like a summary too, but in my mind, a question that anyone can submit answers to or upvote current answers is much more useful. So I am confused. Can any suggest why?

 

At what size of the EA movement should there be an independent EA whistleblowing organisation, which investigates allegations of corruption?

I've been getting more spam mail on the forum recently. 

I realise you can report users, which I think is quicker than figuring out who to mail and then copying the nameove.

I really like saved posts. 

I think if I save them and then read mainly from my saved feed, that's a better, less addictive, more informative experience.

Norms are useful so let's have useful norms.

"I don't think drinking is bad, but we have a low-alcohol culture so the fact you host parties with alcohol is bad"

Often the easiest mark of bad behaviour is that it breaks a norm we've agreed. Is it harmful in a specific case to be shoplift? Depends on what was happening to the things you stole. But it seems easier just to appeal to our general norm that shoplifting is bad. On average it is harmful and so even if it wasn't in this specific case, being willing to shoplift is a bad sign. Even if you're stealing meds to give to your gran, it may be good to have a general norm against this behaviour.

But if the norm is bad that weakens norms in general. Lots of people in the UK speed in their cars. But this teaches many people that twice a day, the laws aren't actually laws. It encourages them that many government rules are stupid and needless as opposed to wise and reasonable

But how broadly should this norm apply? 99% of cases, 95%? I don't know.

But it's clear to me that if a norm only applies in 50% of cases it's a bad norm. It's gonna leave everyone trusting the values of the community less, because half the time it will punish or reward people incorrectly.

Sorry, how do I tag users or posts? I've forgotten and can't find a shortcuts section on the forum

I strongly dislike the "further reading" sections of the forum wiki/forum tags. 

They imply that the right way to know more about things is to read a load of articles. It seems clear to me that instead we should sythesise these points and then link them where relevant. Then if you wanted more context you could read the links. 

Clubhouse Invite Thread

1) Clubhouse is a new social media platform, but you need an invite to join
2) It allows chat in rooms, and networking
3) Seems some people could deliver sooner value by having a clubhouse invite
4) People who are on clubhouse have invites to give
5) If you think an invite would be valuable or heck you'd just like one, comment below and then if anyone has invites to give they can see EAs who want them.
6) I have some invites to give away.
 

Fun UK innovative policy competition:

https://heywoodfoundation.com/contest/

Mailing list for the new UK Conservative Party group on China.

Will probably be worth signing up to if that's your area of interest.

https://chinaresearchgroup.substack.com/p/coming-soon

Please comment any other places people could find mailing lists or good content for EA related areas.