The EA Forum has wiki articles that typically double as tags, and users can propose or make new articles/tags (i.e., "entries") themselves. I think this is quite useful, and I've now made a bunch of entries. This post exists so that people can comment with an article/tag idea that they're somewhat unsure about, and then other people can upvote it or downvote it based on whether they think it should indeed be its own tag.
As the EA Wiki FAQ says:
The Wiki is missing an entry on a topic I would like to see covered. Can I create it?
First, check that the topic is not already covered by an entry with a different name.
Once you have confirmed that the Wiki is missing an article for this topic, you can propose it here [the older version of this post] and receive feedback. We recommend this option for most new entries, since it gives experienced users the chance to make useful suggestions.
[But] Alternatively, you can also create the entry without asking for feedback. This approach may be appropriate if you think the entry is clearly worth adding (e.g. an entry for GiveWell's newest top charity). However, the entry may be removed if the admins decide that it fails to meet our criteria for inclusion.
Some further info:
- Please make a separate comment for each entry idea.
- I suggest upvoting or downvoting entry proposals just based on the entry idea itself; to address any additional ideas in the entry proposal comment (e.g., the proposed description), leave a reply.
- I suggest having a low bar for commenting here, such as "this is just a thought that occurred to me" or "5% chance this entry should exist".
- It's often good to be open to raising all sorts of ideas when brainstorming, and apply most of the screening pressure after the ideas are raised.
- In line with this, the entry ideas I have myself proposed are often "just spitballing".
- Feel free to also propose alternative entry labels, propose a rough entry description, note what other entries are related to this one, note what you see as the arguments for and against that entry, and/or list some posts that would be included in this tag. But also feel free to simply suggest a tag label.
- In line with this, I have myself often provided all of this info, often provided some, and often simply suggested a tag label.
- Feel free to comment on other people's ideas in order to do any of the above things (propose alternative labels, etc.).
- Please try to be as willing to downvote as to upvote, rather than having a higher bar for negativity (i.e., be willing to downvote even if your view is just a quick hot take, just as you would with upvotes).
- This post exists specifically to allow people to get honest input on entry ideas before creating them.
- And people commenting here are not necessarily claiming that they thin their entry ideas are definitely good, just that they're worth at least brief thought, so the downvote isn't really disagreeing with them.
Also feel free to use this as a thread to discuss (and upvote or downvote suggestions regarding) existing entries that might not be worth having, or might be worth renaming or tweaking the scope of, or what-have-you. (For example, I created the tag Political Polarisation, but I also left a comment here about whether it should be changed or removed.)
This is a repeat of an earlier open thread, since the earlier thread had so many comments that it started taking a while to load. The Forum team and Pablo (who does a lot of the work for the EA Wiki) are both in favour of this thread and I think have subscribed to get notified of new comments.
I think it would be neat to have tags for using different kinds of tools. This would help people quickly find "all public databases", for example, to either get useful data, or to better understand how to make new [databases]. We already have a "Models" tag, but I don't think that's specific enough.
Monte Carlo Estimation
Any Monte Carlo estimation, particularly ones not in Guesstimate/Squiggle (as they are already done)
Guesstimate
A post that heavily features a Guesstimate model
Squiggle
A post that heavily features a Squiggle model
Public Database
A post that prominently features a Google Sheets or other kind of public database.
Calculator
A post that prominently features a publicly accessible calculator.
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/XBZRAFXKZ9z3Pb8GZ/the-great-calculator
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/yiTmzDg6yC6hHTfJr/the-impact-calculator
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Grv5x5bzvTpbwiJck/universal-cost-effectiveness-calculator
Note: There's admittingly a clear conflict of interest here; as I've made Guesstimate and Squiggle; though I am making them primarily for EAs, and using this to make them more useful for EAs.
Low and middle income countries or LMICs
This would be for EA work being done in LMICs. I anticipate some more posts in this area soon.
This could apply to posts like:
Thanks—I'll create this soon.
[Update: I've now made this entry]
Tabletop exercises or wargaming or maybe some other related term (scenario planning? I think that's too distant a concept, but I guess maybe it independently deserves an entry?)
I think the former name is better because it seems best to not have highly militaristic/adversarial framings in some contexts, including with respect to some/many existential risks.
Some posts this could apply to:
Some related entries:
Windfall Clause (under Global Catastrophic Risk (AI))
Justification:
Posts that it could apply to:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/iYCAoP3JgXxGAvMrr/fhi-report-the-windfall-clause-distributing-the-benefits-of
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/wBzfLyfJFfocmdrwL/the-windfall-clause-has-a-remedies-problem
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/eCihFiTmg748Mnoac/cullen-o-keefe-the-windfall-clause-sharing-the-benefits-of
Thanks for the suggestion. I don't personally have views either way (probably because I'm not very familiar with the proposal), but since you think it's a good idea, I went ahead and created it. I'll try to add a brief description later today.
Thanks Pablo! Looks great! I really appreciate your work on the wiki.
[Update: I've now created this entry]
Export controls
Some relevant posts:
Related entries:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/topics/semiconductors | AI governance | https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/topics/international-relations
This is just to let you know that I'm no longer working on the Wiki, and believe there is currently no designated person to process comments proposing new entries. So perhaps you should go ahead and create these posts directly? I'll ask Lizka to comment.
I am in fact subscribed to comments on this post, but I'll be much slower than Pablo was to process things (in the near future, at least) — apologies in advance, and thanks for proposing this!
I think you like to make these lists. Are you manually constructing the content in these comments? Does this take a lot of time?
This seems precise and well structured.
Would it be interesting to have a minor service/script that does this for you?
I'm manually writing the content.
It's probably like 1-15 mins per comment, depending on how much thinking/searching I do.
I'd guess that fixing the formatting could probably be automated somehow. But I'd guess that actually getting the content together can't be automated, though someone like a volunteer/RA/PA could probably look at a bunch of the past ones I've done and then replicate similar things fairly well as and when I give them rough ideas.
I'm definitely happy for you to try to help these things things happen faster/better if you want (though I don't want to actively claim that's the best use of your time). I've also got a doc of "Writing, editing, or collection tasks Michael would be keen for someone to do" which I could send you.
[Very quick comment] In another thread I just wanted to link to a "Scout Mindset" tag and was surprised the tag doesn't exist. This seems a relatively central idea in EA and I'd appreciate someone creating a tag for it!
[Update: I've now created this entry]
Antitrust law or Competition law
I think the main way this intersects with EA is via its relevance to AI governance. I also think that that intersection is large and important enough to warrant an entry.
Related entries
governance of artificial intelligence | law | Windfall Clause
Signaling and reputation (or some version thereof; could include PR as well) potential tag; unless it already exists. Example articles may include:
And probably many more that I've missed.
Human Challenge Trials as a wiki entry(less so as a tag)
An idea I think a sizeable portion of people here are sympathetic to and the entry could act as a good companion to entries like 1Day Sooner and COVID-19 pandemic
Oh, yes. I hadn't realized we were missing this entry. Here.
Productivity
Thanks for the suggestion. I created the entry here; it's currently empty.
I basically share Michael's views and will try to think about what to do with personal development.
Thanks, Pablo! I replied to Michael's message underneath with some examples of how personal development could be structured.
empty tag: now I feel inclined to write a post on productivity :p
I think this would be a subset of Personal development, so in some sense is "covered" by that, but really that tag is probably too broad and not very intuitively named. So I think I'm in favour of adding subsidiary tags or dividing that tag up or refactoring it or something. Not sure precisely what the best move is, though.
Productivity would also overlap with Coaching and Time-money tradeoffs, but that seems ok.
"Productivity" is indeed included in the description of the personal development tag. However, I do believe/agree that this is a really big and important category that could be broken down.
Spending a couple of seconds thinking about this, I'd come up with the following suggestions:
-productivity
-mental health
-physical health
-systems
-meditation
-learning
-self-help
-PD services
-PD experiments
-spirituality.
Personal assistance or Personal assistant or PA or Personal/executive assistant or something like that
E.g. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/bzXBZyMrnMiWu2DeF/to-pa-or-not-to-pa
Overlaps with Operations and https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/tag/pineapple-operations but seems sufficiently distinct and important to warrant its own tag
Cool, yes, this was on my list. Done. Probably worth making the scope broad enough to also cover virtual assistants, research assistants, and other kinds of assistants. On reflection, perhaps it should just be called assistants?
My initial feeling is that research assistants is a pretty different kind of thing and is closer to "research" than to "PA & similar", but that PAs, virtual assistant, and executive assistants do form a natural cluster.
But I'm not sure if that's right. And even if it is, it seems fine to call it "assistants" anyway, and just still have RA-related things often get other tags too and have this tag mostly be about things other than RA things.
Coworking spaces
Do we already have a similar tag? If not, I feel fairly confident we should have this; there are at least three people / groups I know of who might find it useful to have all relevant posts collected in one place.
There are a bunch of recent relevant posts I won't bother collecting, but one is https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/MBDHjwDvhDnqisyW2/awards-for-the-future-fund-s-project-ideas-competition
I was just thinking about this earlier today. Tag is here; will add some content later.
Compute governance
Maybe this overlaps too much with https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/tag/semiconductors ?
Relevant posts:
Yeah, seems reasonable. Although there are few posts on compute governance, the scope of that field is well defined.
Stub here.
[Update: Suggestion retracted - see below]
Digital marketing or maybe just Marketing
Do we already have a tag quite like this? If not, I think we should almost certainly have it.
I know at least a few posts would warrant this tag and that several funders and I think entrepreneur-types and incubators are interested in the topic, so having a tag to collect posts on the topic seems good. (E.g., then we can send that tag page to people who are at an early stage of considering doing work on this.)
Oh, we do have https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/topics/marketing So it's probably not worth adding a new tag for just Digital marketing.
I propose "International cooperation" (which would go under the Policy parent topic).
Background: I just tried tagging this post, but there doesn't appear to be a tag in the vicinity of international cooperation. "Global governance" feels too strong.[1] Other existing tags also don't feel close enough.[2] I think international cooperation is an important and frequently-invoked enough topic to warrant its own tag / topic page.
Edited to add (~30 mins later): Since this is currently on my mind, I've gone ahead and created an "International cooperation" topic page. I won't be offended if admins decide to take it down.
Edited to add (a few days later): I now realise that there's an "International relations" tag. I'm not sure how I missed this when I looked through the existing tags a few days ago. This changes my view—I expect that tagging a post both "Global governance", which is like international cooperation but stronger, and "International relations", which is like international cooperation but without the cooperation, renders a new "International cooperation" tag redundant. Therefore, I now suggest that admins take down the topic page I created. (I would do this myself, but I don't appear to have the power.) Apologies for any confusion caused. (I suppose the silver lining here was the follow-on about the FAQ page link.)
To me, global governance is almost synonymous with "world government", and in fact the "Global governance" tag has the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's "World Governance" entry as further reading.
Someone—not the author, I don't think—tagged the post I reference under "Altruistic coordination". I can see where they're coming from, but to me this tag doesn't feel right overall: the coordination outlined in the post, and also most examples of state-level coordination/cooperation I can think of, are driven by self-interest to a (significantly) greater degree than by altruistic concern for the other party.
Thanks for the suggestion. I'm no longer working on the Wiki and I'm not sure there's currently someone designated to approve or provide feedback on the proposals. Maybe @Lizka can comment?
@Lizka sorry to compound upon my above suggestion, but if, as Pablo says may be the case, no-one is currently approving or providing feedback on proposals here, perhaps this post/thread should no longer be linked to from the "EA Wiki: FAQ" page?[1]
Just in case this helps you find it more quickly: within that FAQ page, it's linked toward the bottom at "you can propose it here and receive feedback".
No need to apologize, and thanks for making the topic page, Will! I batch-approve and remove new Wiki entries sometimes (and reorganize the Wiki more generally), but I'm not prioritizing this right now. I do hope that we'll get more attention on the Wiki soon, though (in the next couple of months). I've added a note to the Wiki FAQ — thanks for that suggestion!
[Update: I've now created this entry.]
benchmarks or AI benchmarks or something like that
Relevant posts include:
Related entries
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/topics/ai-safety
I think it would be worth making city / country tags for events and other relevant things (e.g. job opportunities), curious if people have thoughts.
[Update: I've now made this entry]
Regulation and/or Standards
Related entries
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/topics/corporate-governance | governance of artificial intelligence | law | policy
(Update: I've now made this entry.)
Publication norms
I haven't checked how many relevant posts there are, but I'd guess 2-10 quite relevant and somewhat notable posts?
Related entries
proliferation | AI governance | AI forecasting | [probably some other things]
EU AI Act and/or NIST AI Risk Management Framework
These are quite separate, but I mention them together because they're both specific pieces of upcoming AI policy that I think many experts think are pretty important. It's pretty unclear to me whether we should have entries for these two specific things and for things like this in general.
[Update: I've now made this entry]
Something about quantum computing or quantum mechanics?
I'm more interested in the former, but maybe we should have the latter tag and then in practice it'll also work as the former tag, since it won't be hugely populated anyway?
Relevant posts include:
Market testing or message testing or polling something like that
I'm pretty unsure if we should make this entry. Also maybe these topics are too different to all be lumped together? Maybe market testing should just be covered by a tag on Digital marketing or Marketing (proposed elsewhere) and then message testing and polling should be covered by a different tag?
By message testing I mean this what this page talks about: https://publicinterest.org.uk/TestingGuide.pdf
Some relevant posts:
Related entries include:
As I argue here I think we should allow infinite wiki articles and they should be able to gain karma. I think wikis are useful not just for summary but for breaking discussions.
Another reason for new wiki articles to be able to be created whenever is that for the current articles they are (as far as I've seen) introduction paragraphs, where the "meat" of the article is in the linked forum posts. This is not good. Instead I want people to summarise those forum posts to give one canonical article. I don't think that can happen until poeple can create wiki pages on whatever they want.
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/NxWssGagWoQWErRer/wiki-posts-a-new-forum-post-type-unofficial-pr-faq
Would suggest creating a "Fungal Diseases" tag.
(a) There are a number of posts that would be tagged by it. Two posts are entirely about fungal diseases, including CEARCH's 4.5k word cause prioritization research report on the matter.
And three other touch upon the matter as well:
(b) 5 taggable articles would meet the threshold of content sufficiency, based on existing standards (e.g. Evidence Action has 5 posts, Giving Multiplier has 4, Fund for Alignment Research (FAR) has 2).
(c) In terms of broader significance of the topic/its notability, it's a topic listed in Nuno's big list of cause prioritization research, and the evidence suggests that it is potentially a cost-effective cause area - it would be valuable, from this perspective, to have a tag that allows people interested in funding/working on this issue to learn more about it as they browse the forum.
How about a tag for environmental problems? Now it's only climate change. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_boundaries
Someone recently created an entry for biodiversity loss, though it's currently empty. Personally, I think it's preferable to have entries for specific environmental problems, insofar as they are considered to pose a global catastrophic risk, rather than a general tag for environmental problems. But I haven't thought about this much. Do you think there are specific environmental problems we should cover, or were you thinking that a catch-all entry for all such problems would be generally useful?
Ok, I was not searching for biodiversity, so I was not aware of that tag. I guess more people are searching for environment. I do not think there would be too many tags if we also have one for environmental problems, and I do not think we need more environmental tags than these three: climate, biodiversity and the environment.
The combination of environmental problems can be a global catastrophic risk, even the combination of exceeded planetary boundaries and other huge problems.
Thanks. Do you have thoughts on how to call the tag? E.g. environment, environmental problems, planetary boundaries. I think I prefer the first of these.
Yes, the first one "environment" seems to be expressed in the same way as other tags.
Okay, created an entry here. I'll try to add some brief content soon.
A physical abuse tag. I've already written something that could be used as the article:
The physical abuse tag covers posts that discuss the prevention of physical abuse as a cause area.
For posts about animal abuse see: Animal Welfare
For posts about the abuse of statistics see: Statistical methods
For posts about the effects of abuse see: Pain and suffering and Mental health
Further reading
Macpherson, Michael Colin (1985) The psychology of abuse, R & E Publishers.
McCluskey, Una; Hooper, Carol-Ann (2000) Psychodynamic Perspectives on Abuse: The Cost of Fear, Jessica Kingsley Publishers.
Related entries
Pain and suffering | Mental health
Posts it could potentially apply to:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/C5diBK7sJmoYWdrCs/is-preventing-child-abuse-a-plausible-cause-x
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/o4HX48yMGjCrcRqwC/what-helped-the-voiceless-historical-case-studies
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/qv5dRAGkTjxs9vrv9/small-and-vulnerable
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/pW7w5mcbKaWGi9vez/victim-coordination-website
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Xjo23zhn6CPoijLSo/a-love-letter-to-civilian-osint-and-possibilities-as-a-tool
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/nqgE6cR72kyyfwZNL/making-discussions-in-ea-groups-inclusive
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/hYh6jKBsKXH8mWwtc/a-contact-person-for-the-ea-community
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/oXLoevuopqE3hdeis/link-cutting-through-spiritual-colonialism
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/j9toMRy2LAsHfwHN5/improving-local-governance-in-fragile-states-practical-1
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ME4zE34KBSYnt6hGp/new-cause-proposal-international-supply-chain-accountability
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/bqvanr9qz6dg2f5Tw/why-is-the-amount-of-child-porn-growing
To copy comments I left previously about the entry abuse, which was deleted after the objections were not addressed and a poll overwhelmingly favored deletion:
I think the same arguments roughly apply to physical abuse. A quick look at the list of suggested articles confirms my impression that there is no crisp, natural common denominator underlying this heterogeneous collection of posts. I continue to believe that it makes more sense to rely on multiple other entries, including other articles we could create such as community health (as proposed above), to collect this material.