Every time I come across an old post in the EA forum I wonder if the karma score is low because people did not get any value from it or if people really liked it and it only got a lower score because fewer people were around to upvote it at that time. Fortunately, you can send queries to the EA Forum API to get the data that could answer this question. In the following post I will describe how karma and post controversy (measured by the amount of votes a post got and the relation of downvotes to upvotes, more detailed explanation below) developed over time in the EA forum and provide a list of the best rated posts relative to the amount of activity in the forum. Before you read the post, take a moment to think about the following questions:

• What is your best guess for the most

Epistemic Status: I feel pretty confident that the core viewpoint expressed in this post is correct, though I'm less confident in some specific claims. I have not shared a draft of this post with ACE, and so it’s possible I’ve missed important context from their perspective.

EDIT: ACE board member Eric Herboso has responded with his personal take on this situation. He believes some points in this post are wrong or misleading. For example, he disputes my claim that ACE (as an organization) attempted to cancel a conference speaker.

EDIT: Jakub Stencel from Anima International has posted a response. He clarifies a few points and offers some context regarding the CARE conference situation.

Background

In the past year, there has been some concern in EA surrounding the negative impact of “cancel culture”^[1] and worsening discourse norms. Back in October, Larks wrote a post criticizing EA Munich's decision to de-platform Robin Hanson.The post was generally well-received,...

This update covers CEA's work in the first quarter of 2021.

Background

Our mission is to build a community of students and professionals acting on EA principles, by creating and sustaining high-quality discussion spaces.

In 2019, we focused on stabilizing the organization and improving execution. In 2020, we clarified and narrowed our scope (by setting strategy and spinning off Funds and GWWC).

In 2021, we are focused on working towards our annual goals, as well as growing our team.

Program progress

These are brief summaries; you can find more details for each program further down in this post.

Groups

• Support
  • We had around 100 calls and 120 in-depth email / Slack exchanges with group leaders. We received positive feedback on the calls (average likelihood to recommend >9/10). We increased 1:1 support for highly-ranked university groups, and helped to seed a group at Georgetown University.
• Fellowships
  • We worked with Emma Abele (a contractor and CBG recipient) and EA groups at Oxford and

Today we're launching a new podcast feed that might be useful to you or someone you know.

It's called Effective Altruism: An Introduction, and it's a carefully chosen selection of ten episodes of The 80,000 Hours Podcast, with various new intros and outros to guide folks through them.

We think that it fills a gap in the introductory resources about effective altruism that are already out there. It's a particularly good fit for people:

• prefer listening over reading, or conversations over essays
• have read about the big central ideas, but want to see how we actually think and talk
• want to get a more nuanced understanding of how the community applies EA principles in real life — as an art rather than science.

The reason we put this together now, is that as the number of episodes of The 80,000 Hours Podcast show has grown, it has become less and less practical to suggest that new...

i.e. surprising, interesting, engaging, mind-changing etc...

Can be specific to cause areas or other subsections of effective altruism.

As an experiment, I'm combining the "Open and Welcome" and "Progress" threads this month, with the goal of clearing a bit more space on the frontpage.

If you have something to share that doesn't feel like a full post, add it here! 

(You can also create a Shortform post.)

If you're new to the EA Forum, consider using this thread to introduce yourself! 

You could talk about how you found effective altruism, what causes you work on and care about, or personal details that aren't EA-related at all. 

(You can also put this info into your Forum bio.)

Open threads are also a place to share good news, big or small. See this post for ideas.