The new EA Forum frontpage layout is unserious. My concern is simple: where is the list of the latest posts? The screen is so overwhelmed by "featured posts" and "comments" and "quick takes" that the centerpiece of the whole thing is completely gone. Now I can't see what is going on in EA, or whether there is something that I want to read, which defeats the point of visiting the website. And moreover, hiding such key information gives the appearance of a forum that doesn't care about supporting serious discussion, it sets the wrong tone for the community.

You can see a comparison to LessWrong and Hacker News below.

Current EA forum

Current Lesswrong

Current Hacker News

I think so much of the PR problem EA has just comes down to people hating EA for the same reason people hate philosophers:

1. people want clarity in a chaotic world, but philosophers often poses more questions than answers (like how EA itself is an open question)
2. populism is really popular right now, but philosophers are technocrats in ivory towers (like the memetic associations EA has with ivy league educations, silicon valley, etc.)
3. there's a lot more noise about what EA thinks rather than what EA does, aligning with the stereotype that philosophers don't do anything to apply their ideas in the real world. 

I think the solution here is to just keep hammering in what EA has done, rather than engaging on what EA thinks. Most people's only knowledge of what EA has done is SBF, because that's all that gets talked about. Anecdotally, my friends' impressions of EA were most improved by learning that:

1. EA did a lot of pandemic risk preparation before COVID, and is part of the reason why the COVID vaccine came out as quickly as it did (Also really good if people start asking about why EA is investing in AI safety)
2. EA has gotten people to donate >2 billion to save >300k lives through GiveWell alone
3. (for leftist friends) EA supports a lot of direct money transfers to people in the global south, allowing for local entrepreneurship
4. (depends on the audience) EA is one of the reasons why so many countries are now emphasizing cage-free eggs, so chickens don't die in their own feces

Quick reflections from EAG NYC:

1. People in econ academia are worried about the lack of urgency and adaptability amongst peers who hopped on the econ of AI bandwagon, and think there is an overemphasis of empirical work and causal inference on marginal problems (like productivity gains) to impress other economists. Economists aren't rewarded for trying to answer ill defined but important / ambitious / longterm questions about AI e.g. gradual disempowerment, post-labour.
2. Some technical AI safety people are disillusioned with mech interp and are trying to work in AI policy because they think this is the going to move the needle most now.
3. 1-1 system using the new Swapcard matcher is great, very low friction way to meet specific people where you know there's a high chance the conversation will be very fruitful.
4. The number and quality of my match requests were starkly higher from EAG London a few months ago, almost certainly due to MATS being on my profile.
5. I've gotten to the stage where now undergrads match with me for advice (I'm no longer the student!), and they're confused about what to do. I tell them is to remain relentlessly curious but I have no good advice for what the world looks like in 3 years.
6. People are increasingly supportive of when I say I put off PhD plans partially due to shorter timelines.
7. People don't have a good pitch to explain gradual disempowerment risks to their non AGI-pilled friends, as it's fuzzier/less obvious than misuse and misalignment. They seemed to like the cattle analogy I overuse.
8. Fellowship hopping beyond 2 fellowships is seen as an anti-signal in the AI safety space.

I've noticed a couple of times in workshops, retreats and conferences that folks quite new to their jobs in EA orgs find themselves in a position where they are talking about their org's work and mission statement and get questioned on their theory of change, and while the first two make complete sense, the last one often gets met with "I've just started my role" or "I've only been at X for Y weeks".

This is perfectly reasonable, but I wonder if this has been noticed by other people, and this overall makes me feel we need to see more experienced members of an org dedicate more time to being public-facing in said events!

Thanks for sharing this opportunity!

I found a few more EA-aligned animal welfare organizations that appear eligible based on Every.org's official criteria:

• EA Animal Welfare Fund
• The Humane League
• Wild Animal Initiative
• Fish Welfare Initiative
• Animal Ethics
• Mercy For Animals

I've started a living literature review on the relationship between wealth and wellbeing.

Things I've done some work on that I plan to publish more on that seem relevant to some EA conversations in global health and wellbeing :

• Does each doubling have the same return to wellbeing? The convention (outside of time discounts) is to assume that going from $500 to $1000 is the same return on wellbeing as $500k to $1,000k. I think that's probably not true. This affects how we think about improving incomes in high versus low income countries.
• How effective are cash transfers in high income countries? So far, it seems like cash transfers that improve annual income by 10-30% in the USA have pretty much no effect on wellbeing. Weird. Not sure why yet. Seems bearish for UBI, but I'm not quite sure what's a better idea yet.
• Does economic growth make countries happier? Richer countries are happier, richer people are happier, and people getting richer are happier, but countries getting richer has reportedly been a more mixed blessing for people. I expect to find something like growth is probably good but less good than you would expect based on looking at country cross sections. However, it's possible there's some weird scale use stuff that'd make growth look growth look like a miracle for human wellbeing.
• If not growth in incomes, then what? I'll look at what if any reliable predictors there are of increases to national wellbeing -- an area I feel like we know surprisingly little about. There's some work suggesting that increases to social capital and social spending are better predictors than economic growth. Something like social capital seems plausible but social spending seems likelier to be confounded by the requirement that you need to make money to spend money (on welfare systems). But there's some evidence that trust and social capital is increased in societies that experience high growth, so it's all a bit messy. 

Some less relevant things I'll work on: what does the causal evidence say about social media and mental wellbeing? -- it's somewhat bad, probably. How happy were our ancestors? -- Either about as happy as we are or, or as happy as people are in Afghanistan -- Which is to say teetering on the cusp of having negative wellbeing on average. Not sure which yet. Is it the psychology, stupid? I'm also curious to understand the psychology of populism, and if a non-material lens gives us a better sense of how to predict and maybe prevent populist driven destablization to the institutions we'll need to preserve to have any chance at governing during these wacky next few decades.