It looks like we had a pretty massive bot attack last night, with over 600 accounts logging in and messaging users about an iPad scam. Please don't click on any of their links. The scam looks like this:

We'll remove the accounts, and karma-gate messaging to 10 karma so that this cannot happen again. Sorry everyone - and thanks so much to everyone who reported this. I can't respond to all of you, but thank you. 

Podcast episode with @Fran and @NickLaing is here! Turns out Nick's a great guy in real life as well as on the Forum. 

We talked about how One Day Health manages to set up a clinic for $4000, how AI might help One Day's nurses diagnose better (correct diagnosis rates were surprisingly low, even for a limited list of conditions), and much more. Transcript is here if you prefer to skim. 

PS- if you listened, I'm personally keen on getting feedback (Not speaking for Frances here, so via Forum DM please). Also, suggestions for guests are always welcome. 

Me and @Fran are co-hosting a podcast, The World Can Be Better! (hosted on Substack, also on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube)

In our first co-hosted episode we interview @finm about better futures, the intelligence explosion, and Fin's underrated post 'No ghost in the machine'. 

We'll be recording more episodes soon. We're aiming to a) keep it accessible to an interested but non-specialist audience, and b) to talk to cool people who are working on making the world better. This is on top of full time jobs for both of us, so we're not promising weekly uploads or anything too fancy. 

LMK in the comments or dm if there is someone you'd love to be a guest on our podcast! The ideal guest is a) doing good effectively in an interesting way and b) is down to joke around a bit. 

Just a reminder that anyone can set off a Forum debate! I'd love to see more of these. 

Man, I was just re-reading the 'why I donate' posts while compiling the Digest. Some really beautiful sentiments in there. 

I grew up in a deeply ironic and uncaring culture (i.e. I went to an all boys school). I didn't like it! It means a lot to me to be in a community now where people can write such heartfelt and authentic posts. 

Some of my favourites:

• Lorenzo's post, for a great articulation of money considered as a vote: "€1.70 votes to be allocated into a slice of pizza for Lorenzo" or "$5.85 votes for an insecticide-treated bednet for a family in DRC"
• Aaron's post: this one made me emotional, which surprised me given the Pokemon-rap context. I think it was the picture Aaron made of the world conspiring to create something he loved.
• Bentham's Bulldog: The title alone is wonderful "A Life That Cannot Be A Failure"
  
   

FYI, next week we will be highlighting the first batch of articles from In Development, @Lauren Gilbert's new global development magazine. 

Lauren and most of the authors will be on the Forum to answer your questions throughout the week. More info to come on Monday, but I figured I'd mention in case anyone wanted to read the articles in advance (they are here, and all authors apart from Paul Niehaus will be around to answer questions). 

I'm looking forward to the discussion. 

If you work in an office with other EAs/ interesting and interested people, consider putting the debate slider from our upcoming debate on a big whiteboard. It can lead to some interesting conversations, and even better, some counterfactual forum posts. 
 

PS- I'm aware this looks a bit 'people selling mirrors'

There have been a lot of posts over the last couple of weeks, and when I've been putting together the Digests, I've seen several which seem criminally underrated. 

I'm quick-taking to remind you of the 'customize feed' feature. The link is at the top of the frontpage - click it to decide how your frontpage weights posts on different topics. If Forum readers used this more, there would be less underrated posts (I think!). 

The RSPCA is holding a "big conversation", culminating in a citizens' assembly. If you have opinions about how animals in the UK are treated (which you probably do), you can contribute your takes here.
A lot of the contributions are very low quality, so I think EA voices have a good chance of standing out and having their opinions shared with a broader audience. 

[edit: Tonight], me and @Fran will be recording with @NickLaing for The World Can Be Better. 

What would you like us to ask him? 

Londoners!
@Gemma 🔸 is hosting a co-writing session this Sunday, for people who would like to write "Why I Donate" posts. The plan is to work in poms, and publish something during the session. 

We (especially @Agnes Stenlund 🔸, @Ollie Etherington and @Will Howard🔹 ) have made a fancy page to showcase the Marginal Funding posts. 

Check it out, and please also consider sharing it (on social media, or with friends/ family). We've designed it to make more sense/ be more navigable to readers who aren't used to the Forum. I.e. we hope it's the page you can send to your Mum. 

Let me know if it successfully leads to any donations! It'll stay live throughout giving season. 

Reminder: if you represent an organisation and you'd like to take part in marginal funding week on the Forum - let me know and I'll send you the details. 

Anyone know any Earn-To-Givers who might be interested in participating in an AMA during Giving Season? If a few are interested, it might be fun to experiment with an AMA panel, where Forum users ask questions, and any of the AMA co-authors can respond/ co-authors can disagree.

Why? Giving Season is, in my opinion, a really great time to highlight the earn-to-give work which is ongoing all year, but is generally under-celebrated by the EA community. + Earn-to-givers might have good insights on how to pick donation targets during the donation election, and Giving Season more generally. 
 

Thanks to everyone who voted for our next debate week topic! Final votes were locked in at 9am this morning. 

We can’t announce a winner immediately, because the highest karma topic (and perhaps some of the others) touches on issues related to our politics on the EA Forum policy. Once we’ve clarified which topics we would be able to run, we’ll be able to announce a winner. 

Once we have, I’ll work on honing the exact wording. I’ll write a post with a few options, so that you can have input into the exact version we end up discussing. 

PS: Apologies for the delay here — in retrospect, I should have checked on adherence to our policy before allowing voting. In the now very likely event that we cannot have the highest karma discussion on the EA Forum, I’d remind you that this is not the only place for EA-related discussions on the internet — Substack and Twitter do not have our politics policy. 

I'm writing a retro for the AGI & Animals debate week. Do you have any feedback, positive or negative?
I'll use it to improve the next debate week, and I don't get that much feedback, so the chances of me actually changing how I run the event based on your comment are relatively high. 

Just wanted to publicly thank @Sudhanshu Kasewa, @Matt Beard, @Simon27, @Rockwell, @Lorenzo Fruscella, @Tom Rowlands 🔸, @Conor Barnes 🔶 , as well as other users who chipped in on the Ask Career Advisors Anything event. A lot of thought and time went into those answers, and I felt very grateful reading them. The careers week would have reached (and helped) far less people without this aspect of the event. Thank you all!

You guys overused the button... so we're putting Bulby on bed rest for a bit. 

Look at the poor guy:

I'd love it if someone wrote a thoughtful review of Rethink Priorities' new moral parliament tools (see Hayley Clatterbuck's last 4 posts). For example, I can imagine someone using one of the tools on a decision they need to make, and writing up the result. 

I'm running a session on 'writing on the EA Forum' at EAG London at this moment, and participants are going to reply to this quick take with ideas for Forum posts. 
Please encourage any ideas you'd like to see written up as full posts!

[edit: the forum went down halfway through the activity, there were many more great ideas in the session]

FAQ: “Ways the world is getting better” banner

The banner will only be visible on desktop. If you can't see it, try expanding your window. It'll be up for a week. 

How do I use the banner?

1. Click on an empty space to add an emoji, 
2. Choose your emoji, 
3. Write a one-sentence description of the good news you want to share, 
4. Link an article or forum post that gives more information. 

If you’d like to delete your entry, click the cross that appears when you hover over it. It will be deleted for everyone.

What kind of stuff should I write?

Anything that qualifies as good news relevant to the world's most important problems. 

For example, Ben West’s recent quick takes (1, 2, 3).

Avoid posting partisan political news, but the passage of relevant bills and policies is on topic. 

Will my entry be anonymous?

All submissions are displayed without your Forum name, so they are ~anonymous to users, however, usual moderation norms still apply (additionally, we may remove duplicates or borderline trollish submissions. This is an experiment, so we reserve the right to moderate heavily if necessary).

Ask any other questions you have in the comments below. Feel free to dm me with feedback or comments.

Reminder that if we reach $15K, we'll run a debate week of the Forum's choice. 
 

Why should you donate to the Forum’s Donation Election Fund?

• It could change the way you donate, for the better: We all have limited information to decide how we should donate. Giving via the Donation Election Fund let’s you benefit from the collectively held information of the Forum’s users, as well as up to date facts from the marginal funding posts from organisations. If enough users take part in the voting, you won’t have to read all of the marginal funding posts to benefit from the information they contain. 
• It could boost engagement in the election, which leads to:

  • More funding for charities: Last year, the donation election and surrounding events moved a lot of money. In our squiggle model, we get this distribution:

    

  • The headline “$30k raised through the election” does not represent all of the money raised because of the Forum’s events. But giving money to the election fund will likely increase the attention on the Forum, the amount of effort that organisations and individuals put into posts etc… in a way which will increase the amount raised overall. 
  • Influencing other’s donations for the better: In the EA survey (post coming soon) we saw that the donation election had influenced people’s donation choices. We also saw in the comments on last years votes that specific posts had influenced donations, especially, shifting people towards animal welfare organisations, and increasing donations to rethink priorities. 

Also, maybe you just want to get these sweet sweet rewards. 

I've had a couple of organisations ask me to clarify the Donation Election's vote-brigading rules. Understandably, they want to promote the donation election amongst their supporters, but they aren't sure to what extent this is vote-brigading. The answer is- it depends. 

We want to avoid the Donation Election being a popularity contest/ favouring the candidates with bigger networks. Neither popularity, nor size of network, is perfectly correlated with impact. 

If you'd like to reach out to your audience, feel free, but please don't tell them to vote for you. You can explain the event, and mention that you are a candidate, but we want the votes to inform us of the Forum audience's opinions of marginal impact of money donated to these charities, not to the strength of their networks. 

I'm aware this exortation won't do all the work- we will also be looking into voting patterns, and new accounts (made after October 22, when the election was announced) won't be eligible to vote. 

Mini EA Forum Update

You can now save comments, as well as posts, to your Saved & read page. 

If you want to save a comment, just click the three dots on the top right of a comment, select save, and you’ll find the comment at the bottom of your Saved & read page.

Thanks to the LessWrong team for adding this to the codebase!

FYI - I'm excited to be adding @kuhanj as a judge for the 'Essays on Longtermism' competition. 

Little bit of a bio: Kuhan researches and implements cost-effective ways to safeguard democracy at Movement Labs. Previously he founded two non-profits focused on AI and existential risk mitigation research, advocacy and university student engagement - the Stanford Existential Risks Initiative, which incubated MATS and EA Virtual Programs, and the Cambridge Boston Alignment Initiative. He's also worked with CEA's events and groups teams, helping to grow the effective altruism community. Kuhan has a Masters in Computer Science, and Bachelors in Applied Mathematics from Stanford University.

For those among us who want to get straight back to business - I've tagged (I think) all the april fools posts, so you can now filter them out of your frontpage if you prefer by adding the "April Fools' Day" tag under the "Customize feed" button at the top of the frontpage, and changing the filter to hidden. 

We've passed the deadline for the essays on longtermism competition! Thanks to everyone who took part. I'm getting to work with the judges now, and we should have the results in a couple of weeks. If you were drafting something and missed the deadline, please do consider posting regardless, with the competition tag. You won't be eligible for a prize or judging, but you might be included in summaries/ a best-of sequence (and I'd very much like to read your essay). 

SummaryBotV2 didn't seem to get more agree reacts than V1, so I'm shutting it down. Apologies for any inconvenience. 

I've just given $1000 to the Donation Election Fund. 
I'm really excited about the quality of the organisations and the discussion this year, and I think a larger fund will raise the stakes for the donation election. If you feel the same, please consider donating!
Also, it feels a bit lame to draw myself a bad animal. Would anyone like to volunteer to draw one? I'd like a monkey on a computer. 

I'm starting to put together plans for this year's Giving Season events (roughly, start of November to end of December). If you remember the events last year, it'd be cool to know:
1- What was memorable to you from that period?
2- Was anything in particular valuable for you or for your donation decisions?
3- Is there anything you would expect to see this year?
4- What would you hope to see this year?
Thanks!

I've added this sentence to the top-level description of the Essays on Longtermism competition: "Your essay must show deep engagement with the book, or one particular chapter"

I've seen a few early submissions which don't seem particularly related to the contents of the book. This is to be expected, but I wanted to make this extra clear just in case someone was putting serious time into an essay which is an 'essay on longtermism' but isn't responding to 'Essays on Longtermism'.

As described in the announcement post - I'll only send plausible winners along to our judging panel. 

I've made a public Forum Events calendar, which you can add to your Gcal. Hopefully, this will give people longer to think about and write for events like Debate Weeks or Theme Weeks. Let me know if you have any issues adding the calendar, or have suggestions for other ways to track Forum events. 
 

In late June, the Forum will be holding a debate week (almost definitely) on the topic of digital minds. Like the AI pause debate week, I’ll encourage specific authors who have thoughts on this issue to post, but all interested Forum users are also encouraged to take part. Also, we will have an interactive banner to track Forum user’s opinions and how they change throughout the week. 

I’m still formulating the exact debate statement, so I’m very open for input here! I’d like to see people discuss: whether digital minds should be an EA cause area, how bad putting too much or too little effort into digital minds could be, and whether there are any promising avenues for further work in the domain. I’d like a statement which is fairly clear, so that the majority of debate doesn’t end up being semantic. 

The debate statement will be a value statement of the form ‘X is the case’ rather than a prediction 'X will happen before Y'. For example, we could discuss how much we agree with the statement ‘Digital minds should be a top 5 EA cause area’-- but this is specific suggestion is uncomfortably vague. 

Do you have any suggestions for alternative statements? I’m also open to feedback on the general topic. Feel free to dm rather than comment if you prefer. 

We've decided to add another $5000 match for the last stretch of the Donation Election (you can see how much of it is left on the banner). This is in addition to the first $5000, which we already matched. I know that the word shouldn't be used loosely, but this match seems genuinely counter-factual to me- based on the pace of donations so far, I put low odds (20%) on the full match amount being reached. That is, unless potential donors suddenly see the value of Bulbys exploding from Forum buttons. 

The Marginal Funding posts were really valuable this year, and it's been great to have so many candidates, and see so much effort going into them. We had some money left in our 2024 events budget, and we wanted to make sure that the event is worthwhile to our candidates, and that they are excited to take part next year. 

Thanks to those who have donated, voted, and commented so far!

The Donation Election will end, at a specific yet undisclosed time, on December 3rd. 
 

If you're at EAG BA this weekend, me and @Sarah Cheng are doing:

• A talk on why you should write on the EA Forum (less useful for people who already have).
• Office hours/ a Forum writing and ideation activity.
• And an extremely online meetup. If you see this, you're in the target audience. 

I've also got some 1:1 slots left, and it'd be great to talk to anyone with feedback on the forum experience/ forum events or the EA Newsletter. 
 

I mentioned in the Essays on Longtermism competition announcement that we would hopefully expect the winners to the competition to be announced on November 4th. In fact it now looks like I'll be announcing them during the week of 10-16 November. 

Apologies for the delay. It isn't the judges' fault, they're doing great. I'll be on a CEA wide retreat next week and I want to make sure I have time to write a proper post to celebrate the winners. 

There is still plenty of time to vote in the Donation Election. The group donation pot currently stands at around $30,000. You can nudge that towards the projects you think are most worthwhile (plus, the voting system is fun and might teach you something about your preferences). 

Also- you should donate to the Donation Election fund if: 
a) You want to encourage thinking about effective donations on the Forum.
b) You want to commit to donating in line with the Forum's preferences. 
c) You'd like me to draw you one of these bad animals (or earn one of our other rewards): 

NB: I can also draw these animals holding objects of your choice. Or wearing clothes. Anything is possible. 

Linking this from @Andy Masley's blog:
Consider applying to the Berggruen Prize Essay Competition on the philosophy of consciousness, and donating a portion of your winnings to effective charities

TLDR:

• The prize is $50,000 

• The theme is 'consciousness' and the criteria are very vague. Peter Singer won before. 

  More details on the berggruen website here. 

  
   

Reminder that you can check out your post stats (for individual posts and overall). I personally find this very cool - I get a lot more readers on the Forum than I do on Substack. 
 

PS- LMK if there are stats you'd like to see that you can't currently access. Can't promise to add anything in particular, but we'll consider. 

Rob Wiblin is interviewing Will MacAskill for the 80K podcast - this time on the better futures series. You can leave your questions for the interview in the response to this tweet. 

I'll take this post off the frontpage later today. This is just a quick note to say that you can always message me (or use the intercom feature - chat symbol on the bottom right of your desktop screen) if you'd like to make suggestions or give feedback about the EA Forum.

Heads up! I'm planning a Draft Amnesty event (like this one). I think the last one went really well, and I'm pretty excited to run this. 

The Draft Amnesty event will probably be a week long, around mid-march. 

I'll likely post some question threads such as "What posts would you like to see someone write?" (like this one) and "What posts are you thinking of writing?" (like this one), and set up some gather.town co-working/ social opportunities for polishing posts/ writing up drafts in the build up. 

I'm also brainstorming ways to make draft amnesty posts appear as a different genre to Forum users (such as a different font for the title, a different page for draft posts, or a visible "draft amnesty" tag that can be seen from the frontpage list view), and let them opt out of seeing them. This should ameliorate concerns about the frontpage being full of lower-standard content (though fwiw I think this is unlikely because of the karma system), and also to take some more pressure off the posters (I don't want people to not post because they worry their draft isn't polished enough!)

I'll put up a proper announcement soon, with more of a plan, but feel free to use the comments of this quick take to share any things you would be excited to see, ideas, concerns, or questions. 

A bit of a change for next week's debate week... When you vote on the banner and leave a comment, that comment will appear in a discussion thread. When it does, it'll display your vote, so that readers can put your comment in context, like so:
 

Let me know if you have any questions - and see you for debate week next week!

I'm at EAG NYC right now, and as part of our Forum writing session, we're asking participants to respond to this quick take with their Forum post ideas. 
Encourage ideas you'd like to see! It's Draft Amnesty next week...