This is a special post for quick takes by Jan_Kulveit. Only they can create top-level comments. Comments here also appear on the Quick Takes page and All Posts page.
Curated and popular this week
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[Edits on March 10th for clarity, two sub-sections added]
Watching what is happening in the world -- with lots of renegotiation of institutional norms within Western democracies and a parallel fracturing of the post-WW2 institutional order -- I do think we, as a community, should more seriously question our priors on the relative value of surgical/targeted and broad system-level interventions.
Speaking somewhat roughly, with EA as a movement coming of age in an era where democratic institutions and the rule-based international order were not fundamentally questioned, it seems easy to underestimate how much the world is currently changing and how much riskier a world of stronger institutional and democratic backsliding and weakened international norms might be.
Of course, working on these issues might be intractable and possibly there's nothing highly effective for EAs to do on the margin given much attention to these issues from society at large. So, I am not here to confidently state we should be working on these issues more.
But I do think in a situation of more downside risk with regards to broad system-level changes and significantly more fluidity, it seems at least worth rigorously asking whether we should shift more attention to work that is less surgical (working on specific risks) and more systemic (working on institutional quality, indirect risk factors, etc.).
While there have been many posts along those lines over the past months and there are of course some EA organizations working on these issues, it stil appears like a niche focus in the community and none of the major EA and EA-adjacent orgs (including the one I work for, though I am writing this in a personal capacity) seem to have taken it up as a serious focus and I worry it might be due to baked-in assumptions about the relative value of such work that are outdated in a time where the importance of systemic work has changed in the face of greater threat and fluidity.
When the world seems to
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Forethought[1] is a new AI macrostrategy research group cofounded by Max Dalton, Will MacAskill, Tom Davidson, and Amrit Sidhu-Brar.
We are trying to figure out how to navigate the (potentially rapid) transition to a world with superintelligent AI systems. We aim to tackle the most important questions we can find, unrestricted by the current Overton window.
More details on our website.
Why we exist
We think that AGI might come soon (say, modal timelines to mostly-automated AI R&D in the next 2-8 years), and might significantly accelerate technological progress, leading to many different challenges. We don’t yet have a good understanding of what this change might look like or how to navigate it. Society is not prepared.
Moreover, we want the world to not just avoid catastrophe: we want to reach a really great future. We think about what this might be like (incorporating moral uncertainty), and what we can do, now, to build towards a good future.
Like all projects, this started out with a plethora of Google docs. We ran a series of seminars to explore the ideas further, and that cascaded into an organization.
This area of work feels to us like the early days of EA: we’re exploring unusual, neglected ideas, and finding research progress surprisingly tractable. And while we start out with (literally) galaxy-brained schemes, they often ground out into fairly specific and concrete ideas about what should happen next. Of course, we’re bringing principles like scope sensitivity, impartiality, etc to our thinking, and we think that these issues urgently need more morally dedicated and thoughtful people working on them.
Research
Research agendas
We are currently pursuing the following perspectives:
* Preparing for the intelligence explosion: If AI drives explosive growth there will be an enormous number of challenges we have to face. In addition to misalignment risk and biorisk, this potentially includes: how to govern the development of new weapons of mass destr
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*Disclaimer* I am writing this post in a personal capacity; the opinions I express are my own and do not represent my employer.
I think that more people and orgs (especially nonprofits) should consider negotiating the cost of sizable expenses. In my experience, there is usually nothing to lose by respectfully asking to pay less, and doing so can sometimes save thousands or tens of thousands of dollars per hour. This is because negotiating doesn’t take very much time[1], savings can persist across multiple years, and counterparties can be surprisingly generous with discounts. Here are a few examples of expenses that may be negotiable:
For organizations
* Software or news subscriptions
* Of 35 corporate software and news providers I’ve negotiated with, 30 have been willing to provide discounts. These discounts range from 10% to 80%, with an average of around 40%.
* Leases
* A friend was able to negotiate a 22% reduction in the price per square foot on a corporate lease and secured a couple months of free rent. This led to >$480,000 in savings for their nonprofit. Other negotiable parameters include:
* Square footage counted towards rent costs
* Lease length
* A tenant improvement allowance
* Certain physical goods (e.g., smart TVs)
* Buying in bulk can be a great lever for negotiating smaller items like covid tests, and can reduce costs by 50% or more.
* Event/retreat venues (both venue price and smaller items like food and AV)
* Hotel blocks
* A quick email with the rates of comparable but more affordable hotel blocks can often save ~10%.
* Professional service contracts with large for-profit firms (e.g., IT contracts, office internet coverage)
* Insurance premiums (though I am less confident that this is negotiable)
For many products and services, a nonprofit can qualify for a discount simply by providing their IRS determination letter or getting verified on platforms like TechSoup.
In my experience, most vendors and companies
I wrote a post on “Charity” as a conflationary alliance term. You can read it on LessWrong, but I'm also happy to discuss it here.
If wondering why not post it here: Originally posted it here with a LW cross-post. It was immediately slapped with the "Community" tag, despite not being about community, but about different ways people try to do good, talk about charity & ensuing confusions. It is about the space of ideas, not about the actual people or orgs.
With posts like OP announcements about details of EA group funding or EAG admissions bar not being marked as community, I find it increasingly hard to believe the "Community" tag is driven by the stated principe marking "Posts about the EA community and projects that focus on the EA community" and not by other motives, like e.g. forum mods expressing the view "we want people to think less about this / this may be controversial / we prefer someone new to not read this".
My impression this moves substantial debates about ideas to the side, which is a state I don't want to cooperate on by just leaving it as it is -> moved the post on LessWrong and replaced by this comment.
Hi Jan, my apologies for the frustrating experience. The Forum team has reduced both our FTEs and moderation/facilitator capacity over the past year — in particular, currently the categorization of "Community" posts is done mostly by LLM judgement with a bit of human oversight. I personally think that this system makes too many mistakes, but I have not found time to prioritize fixing it.
In the meantime, if you ever encounter any issues (such as miscategorized posts) or if you have any questions for the Forum team, I encourage you to contact us, or you can message myself or @Toby Tremlett🔹 directly via the Forum. We're happy to work with you to resolve any issues.
For what it's worth, here is my (lightly-held) opinion based on the current definition[1] of "Community" posts:
I agree that the two posts about uni group funding are "Community" posts because they are "irrelevant to someone who was interested in doing good effectively, but NOT interested in the effective altruism community". I've tagged them as such.
I would say that the EAG application bar post is a borderline case[2], but I lean towards agreeing that it's "Community" because it's mostly addressed towards people in the community. I've tagged it as such.
I skimmed your post on LW and I think it was categorized as "Community" because it arguably "concerns an ongoing conversation, scandal or discourse that would not be relevant to someone who doesn't care about the EA community" (as the post references past criticisms of EA, which someone who wasn't involved in the community wouldn't have context on). I think this is not a clear cut case. Often the "Community" tag requires some judgement calls. If you wanted to post it on the Forum again, I could read it more carefully and make a decision on it myself — let me know if so.
To be clear, I haven't put enough thought into this definition to feel confident agreeing or disagreeing with it. I'm just going to apply it as written for now. I expect that our team will revisit this within the next few months.
Partly because I believe the intended audience is people who are not really involved with the EA community but would be valuable additions to an EA Global conference (and also I think you don't need to know anything about the EA community to find that post valuable), and so the post doesn't 100% fit any of the four criteria.
First, I want to say thanks for this explanation. It was both timely and insightful (I had no idea about the LLM screening, for instance). So wanted to give that a big 👍
I think something Jan is pointing to (and correct me if I'm wrong @Jan_Kulveit) is that because the default Community tag does downweight the visibility and coverage of a post, it could be implicitly used to deter engagement from certain posts. Indeed, my understanding was that this was pretty much exactly the case, and was driven by a desire to reduce Forum engagement on 'Community' issues in the wake of FTX. See for example:
Now, it is also true that I think the Forum was broadly supportive about this at the time. People were exhausted by FTX, and there seemed like there was a new devasting EA scandal every week, and being able to downweight these discussions and focus on 'real' EA causes was understandably very popular.[1] So it wasn't even necessarily a nefarious change, it was responding to user demand.
Nevertheless I think, especially since criticisms of EA also come with the 'Community' tag attached,[2] it has also had the effect of somewhat reducing criticism and community sense-making. In retrospect, I still feel like the damage wrought by FTX hasn't had a full accounting, and the change to down-weight Community posts was trying to solve the 'symptoms' rather than the underling issues.
I think reading the most popular comments on the linked posts supports this.
Willing to change my mind on this is there's much less of an overlap between the two than other major categories, for instance
This seems not straightforwardly true to me - or at least it shouldn't be? Criticisms of the EA community should be community-tagged, but criticisms of EA ideas should not be.
Yeah I could have worded this better. What I mean to say is that I expect that the tags 'Criticism of EA' and 'Community' probably co-occur in posts a lot more than two randomly drawn tags, and probably rank quite high on the pairwise ranking. I don't mean to say that it's a necessary connection or should always be the case, but it does mean that downweighting Community posts will disproportionately downweight Criticism posts.
If I'm right, that is! I can probably scrape the data from 23-24 on the Forum to actually answer this question.
Interesting- for what it's worth, I often make frontpage vs community decisions and I don't think of community as relegating content. Often, there is less community content each day, so community posts stick around for longer than frontpage posts. In some cases, I'd assume it would be better for engagement to be tagged community. I haven't looked at the stats on this, so I don't know for sure if my impression is correct.
I agree that I don't think it's in-practice relegating content. Many of the highest karma posts are still "Community" posts. I've heard a user tell me that they just scroll down to the "Community" section when they come to the Forum (possibly a joke but this feels like a joke that has some truth to it). I think it does mean that newcomers to the site will be less likely to see those posts, but that is intentional (we think those posts are less relevant to newcomers).
I also agree that the intention was to essentially "correct" how much attention these kinds of posts were getting, because using only karma (plus recency) for sorting meant that they were overweighted. I believe the "Community" section is still valuable for essentially the same reasons as before (for example, I think it would be a mistake to assume that there will not be major drama/scandals discussed here in the future, and I think that would be worse without a "Community" section).
However, I don't have a strong opinion about the definition of "Community", nor even if this section should remain "Community" or if it should have some totally different criteria. I'm quite supportive of criticism so I could see the case for updating this system to put more criticism of EA in the Frontpage. It's likely our team will revisit this in the next few months.
Thanks for explanation. My guess is this decision should not be delegated to LLMs but mostly to authors (possibly with some emphasis on correct classification in the UI).
I think the "the post concerns an ongoing conversation, scandal or discourse that would not be relevant to someone who doesn't care about the EA community" should not be interpreted extensively, otherwise it can easily mean "any controversy or criticism". I will repost it without the links to current discussions - these are non-central, similar points are raised repeatedly over the years and it is easy to find dozens of texts making them.
Quick update: I read your post more closely and I actually still feel undecided, so I let my colleague break the tie and they voted not community, so I've removed the tag. :)
To clarify: I tried hard to apply the current definition. I expect we will revisit this definition and system in the near future.