You can now import posts directly from Google docs

Plus, internal links to headers^[1] will now be mapped over correctly. To import a doc, make sure it is public or shared with "eaforum.posts@gmail.com"^[2], then use the widget on the new/edit post page:

Importing a doc will create a new (permanently saved) version of the post, but will not publish it, so it's safe to import updates into posts that are already published. You will need to click the "Publish Changes" button to update the live post.

Everything that previously worked on copy-paste^[3] will also work when importing, with the addition of internal links to headers (which only work when importing).

There are still a few things that are known not to work:

• Nested bullet points (these are working now)
• Cropped images get uncropped (also working now)
• Bullet points in footnotes (these will become separate un-bulleted lines)
• Blockquotes (there isn't a direct analog of this in Google docs unfortunately)

There might be other issues that we don't know about. Please report any bugs or give any other feedback by replying to this quick take, you can also contact us in the usual ways.

Appendix: Version history

There are some minor improvements to the version history editor^[4] that come along with this update:

• You can load a version into the post editor without updating the live post, previously you could only hard-restore versions
• The version that is live^[5] on the post is shown in bold

Here's what it would look like just after you import a Google doc, but before you publish the changes. Note that the latest version isn't bold, indicating that it is not showing publicly:

1. ^{^}

   Previously the link would take you back to the original doc, now it will take you to the header within the Forum post as you would expect. Internal links to bookmarks (where you link to a specific text selection) are also partially supported, although the link will only go to the paragraph the text selection is in

2. ^{^}

   Sharing with this email address means that anyone can access the contents of your doc if they have the url, because they could go to the new post page and import it. It does mean they can't access the comments at least

3. ^{^}

   I'm not sure how widespread this knowledge is, but previously the best way to copy from a Google doc was to first "Publish to the web" and then copy-paste from this published version. In particular this handles footnotes and tables, whereas pasting directly from a regular doc doesn't. The new importing feature should be equal to this publish-to-web copy-pasting, so will handle footnotes, tables, images etc. And then it additionally supports internal links

4. ^{^}

   Accessed via the "Version history" button in the post editor

5. ^{^}

   For most intents and purposes you can think of "live" as meaning "showing publicly". There is a bit of a sharp corner in this definition, in that the post as a whole can still be a draft.
   
   To spell this out: There can be many different versions of a post body, only one of these is attached to the post, this is the "live" version. This live version is what shows on the non-editing view of the post. Independently of this, the post as a whole can be a draft or published.

PSA: You can now add buttons to posts and comments:

We would love it if people started adding these to job opportunities to nudge people to apply. To add a button, select some text to make the toolbar appear and then click the "Insert button" icon (see below)

As always, feedback on the design/implementation is very welcome.

Breakdown of Open Philanthropy grants to date

I came across this spreadsheet buried in a comment thread. I don't know who made it (maybe @MarcusAbramovitch knows) but, it's great. It shows a breakdown of all OP grants by cause area and organisation, updated automatically every day:

We're thinking of moving the Forum digest, and probably eventually the EA Newsletter to Substack. We're at least planning to try this out, hopefully starting with the next digest issue on the 23rd. Here's an internal doc with our reasoning behind this (not tailored for public consumption, but you should be able to follow the thread).

I'm interested in any takes people have on this. I'm not super familiar with Substack from an author perspective so if you have any crucial considerations about how the platform works that would be very helpful. General takes and agree/disagree (with the decision to move the digest to Substack) votes are also appreciated.

I'd be interested in any feedback people have about the analytics page we added recently. You can get to it via "Post stats" in the user menu.

Specific areas of feedback that would be helpful:

• Are the stats displayed useful to you and easy to understand, are there other stats that you think would be more useful?
• Feedback on the design/layout
• Do you endorse it as a concept (i.e. you might think this incentivises engagement bait or something, if you notice that motivation in yourself that would be useful to know)?
• Is it broken in any way? Is it annoyingly slow?

We also updated the analytics page for individual posts at the same time so feedback on that would be helpful as well (you can get to this via the three dot menu on posts you have published, or via the "Post stats" page).

Vasco Grilo @ 2024-02-07T16:34 (+5)

Thanks for doing this, Will (and EA Forum team), and for asking for feedback!

Are the stats displayed useful to you and easy to understand, are there other stats that you think would be more useful?

Yes, I think the displayed stats are useful. I would also be happy to see:

• The bounce rate and mean reading time in the general analytics page too, as opposed to just in the analytics page of each post.
• Some metrics related to the distribution of the reading time. For example, the 10th and 90th percentile reading time. It would also be good to have these in the general page, and that of each post.

Feedback on the design/layout

I like it.

Do you endorse it as a concept (i.e. you might think this incentivises engagement bait or something, if you notice that motivation in yourself that would be useful to know)?

I endorse it, but I think it would be worth adding a warning about people being mindful about what they are optimising for. Something like the following. "Note karma and reads may not correlate well with impact, and maximising the impact of your EA Forum posts may not be your best strategy to maximise the overall impact of your life/career". Alternatively, you can publish a post on the dangers of non-ideal incentives in the context of EA Forum engagement, and then just link to it in the analytics page.

Is it broken in any way? Is it annoyingly slow?

It looks good to me.

AI Law @ 2024-02-05T12:08 (+5)

I would like to see how many people read to the end. I have an 18 min read post, and I can see that many people read for 1m 30s so probably read the tl;dr or summary, but it does tell me that a number of people did read for much longer. I'd like to know how many read it to the end so I can tell if maybe posts need to be much shorter. 

May not be possible, but wishlist idea would be to know a bit more about who these users are in terms of interest demographic. If my post is AI Safety but most of those who click away fast have animal welfare listed as their primary interest then that's not an issue. But if my post is AI Safety and lots of AI Safety people didn't read or engage, then that's an issue I need to fix. This may not be feasible to implement however.

All in all I like it, and it feels like it gives insight into developing better engagement habits rather than encouraging clickbait.

Will Howard @ 2024-02-06T10:58 (+3)

wishlist idea would be to know a bit more about who these users are in terms of interest demographic

Interesting, I hadn't thought of that. It would be possible to implement something like this, one issue would be that a lot of people don't fill out the topics they are interested in, but it could be possible to get round this by basing it on the other posts they read rather than their stated interests.

The thing about reading to the end is something I was planning to add, I have been envisioning a graph like this on the post analytics page (see below, random example from google), would that fit what you're looking for?

AI Law @ 2024-02-07T12:52 (+2)

Perhaps having a forum option to add tags to your profile, if you're interested in this data being collected?

For the reading to end, yes that would be fantastic. Obviously it can't tell what people were looking at when they left, but based on average reading time it would help pinpoint just how long certain topics should be.

Great to see the stuff you guys are up to with the forum though!

We've just shipped an update to the debate week banner, so you can expand the columns to see more of the distribution, as it's getting a bit squashed. You just have to click on one of the "+N" circles.

(Feel free to downvote this quick take if it hangs around on the Frontpage for too long)

Lorenzo Buonanno🔸 @ 2024-10-11T01:12 (+6)

Thanks! Here's what the full distribution looks like right now:

Edit: here is what it looks like at the end of the week

Reminds me of xkcd.com/1162

I'm really surprised by the distribution. I think many voters might be too optimistic about the actual impact of marginal funding to animal welfare projects.

Most deaths in war aren’t from gunshots

This is an edited version of a memo I shared within the online team at CEA. It’s about the forum, but you could also make it about other stuff. (Note: this is just my personal opinion)

There's this stylised fact about war that almost none of the deaths are caused by gunshots, which is surprising given that for the average soldier war consists of walking around with a gun and occasionally pointing it at people. Whether or not this is actually true, the lesson that quoters of this fact are trying to teach is that the possibility of something happening can have a big impact on the course of events, even if it very rarely actually happens.

[warning: analogy abuse incoming]

I think a similar thing can happen on the forum, and trying to understand what’s going on in a very data driven way will tend to lead us astray in cases like this.

A concrete example of this is people being apprehensive about posting on the forum, and saying this is because they are afraid of criticism. But if you go and look through all the comments there aren’t actually that many examples of well intentioned posts being torn apart. At this point if you’re being very data minded you would say “well I guess people are wrong, posts don’t actually get torn apart in the comments; so we should just encourage people to overcome their fear of posting (or something)”.

I think this is probably wrong because something like this happens: users correctly identify that people would tear their post apart if it was bad, so they either don’t write the post at all, or they put a lot of effort into making it good. The result of this is that the amount of realised harsh criticism on the forum is low, and the quality of posts is generally high (compared to other forums, facebook, etc).

I would guess that criticising actually-bad posts even more harshly would in fact lower the total amount of criticism, for the same reason that hanging people for stealing bread probably lowered the theft rate among victorian street urchins (this would probably also be bad for the same reason)

In the spirit of Funding Strategy Week, I'm resharing this post from @Austin last week:

The neutral point of wellbeing is often associated with a state of not much going on in terms of sensory stimulus, e.g. the Parfit “muzak and potatoes” vision of lives barely worth living. This seems natural, because it matches up zero (valenced) sensory input with zero net wellbeing. But there is actually no reason for these two to exactly coincide, it’s allowed for the mere lack of stimulation to feel mildly pleasant or unpleasant.

If the mere lack of stimulation feels pleasant, then the neutral point of wellbeing would correspond to what common sense might recognise as experiencing mild suffering, such as sitting on an uncomfortable chair but otherwise having all your needs attended to (and not sitting for long enough to become bored). And vice versa if the lack of stimulation feels unpleasant by default.

For me, recognising these two types of neutralness aren’t coupled together pushes in the direction of thinking of the neutral point of wellbeing as mild suffering, rather than “true neutralness” or mild pleasure. If I imagine a situation that is maximally neutral, like walking around a bland city not thinking of anything in particular, that feels comfortably inside life-worth-living territory (at least to do for a short time). If I try to imagine a situation that is borderline not worth experiencing, I find it hard to do without including some fairly bad suffering. Sitting in an aeroplane is the thing that springs to mind for this, but that is actively very uncomfortable.

Equating stimulation-neutralness and wellbeing-neutralness leads to being quick to declare lives as net negative, helped along by the fact that the extremes of suffering seem more intense than the extremes of pleasure.

You look at a gazelle and say “Well, it spends 80% of its time just wandering around grazing on grass (0 wellbeing points), 10% starving, being chased by predators, or being diseased in some way (-1000 wellbeing points), and 10% doing whatever gazelles do for fun (+500 wellbeing points)”, so it’s life is net negative overall. But it could be that the large amount of time animals spend doing fairly lowkey activities is quite positive, and I find this to be more intuitive than the other way around (where neutral activities are slightly negative).

A complaint about using average Brier scores

Comparing average Brier scores between people only makes sense if they have made predictions on exactly the same questions, because making predictions on more certain questions (such as "will there be a 9.0 earthquake in the next year?") will tend to give you a much better Brier score than making predictions on more uncertain questions (such as "will this coin come up head or tails?"). This is one of those things that lots of people know but then everyone (including me) keeps using them anyway because it's a nice simple number to look at.

To explain:

The Brier score for a binary prediction is the squared difference between the predicted probability and the actual outcome $(O-p{)}^2$. For a given forecast, predicting the correct probability will give you the minimum possible Brier score (which is what you want). But this minimum possible score varies depending on the true probability of the event happening.

For the coin flip the true probability is 0.5, so if you make a perfect prediction you will get a Brier score of 0.25 ($=0.5\ast (1-0.5{)}^2+0.5\ast (0-0.5{)}^2$). For the earthquake question maybe the correct probability is 0.1, so the best expected Brier score you can get is 0.09 ($=0.1\ast (1-0.1{)}^2+0.9\ast (0-0.9{)}^2$), and it's only if you are really badly wrong (you think $p>0.5$) that you can get a score higher than the best score you can get for the coin flip.

So if forecasters have a choice of questions to make predictions on, someone who mainly goes for things that are pretty certain will end up with a (much!) better average Brier score than someone who predicts things that are genuinely more 50/50. This also acts as a disincentive for predicting more uncertain things which seems bad.

We've just added Fatebook (which is great!) to our slack and I've noticed this putting me off making forecasts for things that are highly uncertain. I'm interested in if there is some lore around dealing with this among people who use Metaculus or other platforms where Brier scores are an important metric. I only really use prediction markets, which don't suffer from this problem.

Note: this also applies to log scores etc

I think it's a shame the Nucleic Acid Observatory are getting so few votes.

They are relatively cheap (~$2M/year) and are working on a unique intervention that on the face of it seems like it would be very important if successful. At least as far as I'm aware there is no other (EA) org that explicitly has the goal of creating a global early warning system for pandemics.

By the logic of it being valuable to put the first few dollars into something unique/neglected I think it looks very good (although I would want to do more research if it got close to winning).

Tyler Cowen has this criticism of prediction markets which is like (paraphrased, plus slightly made up and mixed with my own opinions): "The whole concept is based on people individually trying to maximise their wealth, and this resulting in wealth accruing to the better predictors over time. But then in real life people just bet these token amounts that add up to way less than the money they get from their salary or normal investments. This completely defeats the point! You may as well just take the average probability at that point rather than introducing this overcomplicated mechanism".

Play money can fix this specific problem, because you can make it so everyone starts with the same amount, whereas real money is constantly streaming in and out for reasons other than your ability to predict esoteric world events. I think this is an underrated property of play money markets, as opposed to the usual arguments about risk aversion. (Of course if you can buy play money with real money this muddies the waters quite a bit)