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Charles He3
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I read this exchange a few times, but I'm still a novice to this exchange or the headspace of this argument, and my understanding is limited. I feel like that relatively few people will engage or give comment, so I am commenting.

My quick read is that Pablo has a substantive viewpoint, that "abuse" is vague. "Abuse" pretty much boils down to "malign behavior by human beings", which is incredibly broad and hard to define. 

Pablo talks about it here:

I think it's fine to have broad tags that encompass other, more specific tags. My concern about "abuse" isn't merely that it is broad, but that it doesn't seem to capture a "natural kind" of special interest to EA: compare with "global health and development", which despite being broad, it singles out a particularly promising focus area (from a neartermist, human-centric perspective).

Things like "domestic violence", "child abuse", etc. are in principle appropriate candidates for a Wiki entry, I think, though whether they are in practice depends on whether these are topics that have attracted sufficient EA attention. There are all sorts of serious issues in the world that the Wiki doesn't cover, because the EA community hasn't devoted enough attention to them.

As for abuse within the EA community, perhaps this would warrant a "community health" entry (which we don't have at the moment). Would you be in favor of creating such an entry?
 

To sum up, the lack of clarity about what "abuse" means, and that it's purportedly a general class of interventions to help the world, yet somehow also going to absorb community health (which would just help EAs) or criticism of EA, seems dubious. 

Your immediate comment to the above comment is friendly, but goes sort of off topic and is hard to follow or engage with. At some point, you throw in "criticism of EA" into this for unclear reasons, and then you post up this comment exchange, which to quick pattern matching, seems to look really unpromising.

 

In these arguments or situations, it's really hard and unrewarding for "outsiders" to the argument to get into the headspace and gain understanding or be productive in these disputes.

The substance here is about a system of knowledge or a wiki, a vision or system for which the would-be "abuse" tags needs to slot in. 

My ideology is that this benefits from a "single vision or owner" and Pablo's role and views overall seem correct?

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See in context
by MichaelA🔸
3 min read 55

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CommunityBuilding effective altruismCommunity infrastructureEffective Altruism ForumWikis
Frontpage

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.

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Ozzie Gooen10
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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.

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MaxRa4
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[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!

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Azure5
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Windfall Clause (under Global Catastrophic Risk (AI))

Justification:

  1. Important as a wiki topic to give short description of this policy proposal  and relevant links/papers/discussion- as it seems like an important output of AI Governance literature/studies.
  2. Tag as potential future posts may discuss/critique the idea(e.g. second post below) 

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

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Pablo6
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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.

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Azure3
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Thanks Pablo! Looks great!  I really appreciate your work on the wiki.

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MichaelA🔸4
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[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

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Azure4
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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

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Pablo2
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Oh, yes. I hadn't realized we were missing this entry. Here.

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Pablo4
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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.

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Lizka4
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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! 

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Charles He2
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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?

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MichaelA🔸2
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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. 

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mlc4
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Productivity

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MichaelA🔸2
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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.
 

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mlc3
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"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.

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Pablo2
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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.

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mlc4
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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

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MichaelA🔸4
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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

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Pablo4
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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?

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MichaelA🔸2
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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.

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MichaelA🔸4
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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 

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Pablo4
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I was just thinking about this earlier today. Tag is here; will add some content later.

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Pablo4
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Yeah, seems reasonable. Although there are few posts on compute governance, the scope of that field is well defined.

Stub here.

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MichaelA🔸4
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[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.)

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MichaelA🔸6
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Oh, we do have https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/topics/marketing So it's probably not worth adding a new tag for just Digital marketing.

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Will Aldred2
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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.)

  1. ^

    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.

  2. ^

    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.

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Pablo2
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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?

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Will Aldred2
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@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]

  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".

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Lizka2
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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! 

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MichaelA🔸2
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(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]

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MichaelA🔸2
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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. 

  • There are several posts focused on or touching on each of these things, and it seems nice to have a way to collect them. 
  • But maybe if we had entries for each piece of policy that's roughly this important, according to each major EA cause area, that'd be dozens and would be too many?
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MichaelA🔸2
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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: 

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Nathan Young2
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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 

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MichaelA🔸2
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[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 
 

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Vaidehi Agarwalla 🔸2
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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. 

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Joel Tan🔸1
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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.

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Goran Haden1
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How about a tag for environmental problems? Now it's only climate change. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_boundaries

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Pablo2
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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?

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Goran Haden1
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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.

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Pablo3
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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.

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Goran Haden1
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Yes, the first one "environment" seems to be expressed in the same way as other tags. 

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Pablo3
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Okay, created an entry here. I'll try to add some brief content soon.

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Bob Jacobs-1
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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

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Pablo5
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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 it's fine to have broad tags that encompass other, more specific tags. My concern about "abuse" isn't merely that it is broad, but that it doesn't seem to capture a "natural kind" of special interest to EA: compare with "global health and development", which despite being broad, it singles out a particularly promising focus area (from a neartermist, human-centric perspective).

Things like "domestic violence", "child abuse", etc. are in principle appropriate candidates for a Wiki entry, I think, though whether they are in practice depends on whether these are topics that have attracted sufficient EA attention. There are all sorts of serious issues in the world that the Wiki doesn't cover, because the EA community hasn't devoted enough attention to them.

As for abuse within the EA community, perhaps this would warrant a "community health" entry (which we don't have at the moment).

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.

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Bob Jacobs-10
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For context, here is the discussion:

Pablo

Hi,

Thanks for your contributions to the EA Wiki. This is to let you know that I left a comment here.

Bob Jacobs

Would physical abuse be better? People downvoted me for writing this entry so feel free to change it, I'm not touching it anymore.

Pablo

Sorry about the downvotes. (My guess is that they were meant to signal disapproval of 'abuse' as an adequate subject for a Wiki entry rather than express a negative opinion about the article's quality; FWIW, I didn't downvote you.)

I guess I still feel that "physical abuse" is too vague. Do you have examples of physical abuse in mind that would be of special interest to EA not already covered elsewhere in the Wiki?

Bob Jacobs

I also don't think it's an expression of the article's quality, I think EAs (or at least it's forum users) are uncomfortable with abuse. The likes/upvotes of posts and comments that mention it are often polarized and I think that acknowledging that abused happened in the EA-community  probably (and understandably) made people defensive. I wasn't trying to smear EA by including a Kathy Forth post, I was trying to be open and honest.

You could split physical abuse up into things like; Domestic violence, child abuse, workplace aggression, sexual abuse... However, this would make the number of posts for each tag very sparse and many tags can be seen as subsections of other tags, e.g Global health and development ->Global health and wellbeing -> Burden of disease -> Medicine -> Malaria -> Mass distribution of long-lasting insecticide-treated nets ->Against Malaria Foundation
so having a broader tag isn't really out of the ordinary.

Pablo

Hi,

I think it's fine to have broad tags that encompass other, more specific tags. My concern about "abuse" isn't merely that it is broad, but that it doesn't seem to capture a "natural kind" of special interest to EA: compare with "global health and development", which despite being broad, it singles out a particularly promising focus area (from a neartermist, human-centric perspective).

Things like "domestic violence", "child abuse", etc. are in principle appropriate candidates for a Wiki entry, I think, though whether they are in practice depends on whether these are topics that have attracted sufficient EA attention. There are all sorts of serious issues in the world that the Wiki doesn't cover, because the EA community hasn't devoted enough attention to them.

As for abuse within the EA community, perhaps this would warrant a "community health" entry (which we don't have at the moment). Would you be in favor of creating such an entry?
 

Bob Jacobs

Don't you think physical abuse captures a natural kind? If I start asking people on the street to picture physical abuse and picture global health and development, I think that basically everyone will have a clearer picture of what physical abuse entails than global health and development.

I have just proven myself to be bad at writing about sensitive topics, so you should probably ask someone who speaks English as a native language and who is more integrated in the wider EA-community (there are hardly any EA-organizations/projects where I live, so the small group I run is pretty isolated from the larger EA-community). Otherwise the Community experiences / Diversity and inclusion / Criticism of effective altruist organizations might be enough to cover it.

Pablo

Would you be happy for me to post this conversation here? This would allow others to chime in.

Bob Jacobs

Yeah, go right ahead

Bob Jacobs

Hi Pablo,

I saw that some tags now have banners (and icons). Since I made card images and banners for a bunch of sequences, shall I make some for the tags too? I can't add them via the edit function, so if you want me to add them I would need some other mechanism.

Cheers,
Bob

Pablo

Hi Bob,

I think the image option is available only for "core" tags (which have a white  rather than a grey background), although I'm not entirely sure since this was done by the tech team. I believe all the core tags already have images associated with them, but if that isn't the case, or if you think you can produce better images, it may be worth exploring this further. Would you mind messaging JP Addison, who is leading this? Thanks.

Bob Jacobs

Will do!

Pablo

Hi Bob,

I created a poll to decide what to do about the 'Abuse' article and it looks like people are not in favor of keeping it. Just wanted to let you know that I'll probably delete it if the vote doesn't substantially change by the end of today.

Thanks again for contributing to the EA Wiki, and I hope this doesn't dissuade you from contributing more in the future!

Bob Jacobs

The first tag to get nominated for deletion is one which included a criticism of the EA-community? Interesting coincidence.

Pablo

I don't appreciate the sarcasm. Lots of tags have been deleted in the past. This was the first tag deleted after trying out a democratic process of decision-making, that doesn't rely on my judgment alone.

Bob Jacobs

The conversation had ended with my argument. No one had refuted it, no one provided a counterargument, no one left a request for the deletion of the tag. It's also not democratic if some people get more votes than others. If there was any need for a poll at all, it would be about whether the name should be changed to "physical abuse". Should I just upload the same article but under the name "physical abuse" (but this time without mentioning the EA-community and without adding a post by Kathy Forth)?

Pablo

If you want to nominate an article, you can do so here.

EDIT:  Pablo's response is fair so I will upvote it, I didn't think of it because most of it was already released and none contained personal info, but I should have asked. I do think the context is important since Pablo's comment is misleading, the objections were addressed and the deletion process started without request. The fact that my tag proposal stood a day without getting downvoted, but did get a downvote immediately after this comment mentioned the EA-community and Kathy Forth again, is evidence that these factors were indeed what caused the downvote of the original tag. I do think some of the posts I linked in the proposal worked better than others, which is why I used the word 'potentially'. Currently 48 tags have only 1 article and 55 tags only have 2 articles. I feared that if I only linked a few the tag would be dismissed with the response that the EA-community doesn't engage with this topic (which is demonstrably not true). Feel free to not include the articles you think are irrelevant, but there are definitely more than two that remain.

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Pablo20
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While I'm happy for our exchange to be made public, I note that you didn't ask for permission to post it. In general, I think you should get people's consent before releasing a private communication (as I did before sharing our initial exchange).

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Charles He3
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I read this exchange a few times, but I'm still a novice to this exchange or the headspace of this argument, and my understanding is limited. I feel like that relatively few people will engage or give comment, so I am commenting.

My quick read is that Pablo has a substantive viewpoint, that "abuse" is vague. "Abuse" pretty much boils down to "malign behavior by human beings", which is incredibly broad and hard to define. 

Pablo talks about it here:

I think it's fine to have broad tags that encompass other, more specific tags. My concern about "abuse" isn't merely that it is broad, but that it doesn't seem to capture a "natural kind" of special interest to EA: compare with "global health and development", which despite being broad, it singles out a particularly promising focus area (from a neartermist, human-centric perspective).

Things like "domestic violence", "child abuse", etc. are in principle appropriate candidates for a Wiki entry, I think, though whether they are in practice depends on whether these are topics that have attracted sufficient EA attention. There are all sorts of serious issues in the world that the Wiki doesn't cover, because the EA community hasn't devoted enough attention to them.

As for abuse within the EA community, perhaps this would warrant a "community health" entry (which we don't have at the moment). Would you be in favor of creating such an entry?
 

To sum up, the lack of clarity about what "abuse" means, and that it's purportedly a general class of interventions to help the world, yet somehow also going to absorb community health (which would just help EAs) or criticism of EA, seems dubious. 

Your immediate comment to the above comment is friendly, but goes sort of off topic and is hard to follow or engage with. At some point, you throw in "criticism of EA" into this for unclear reasons, and then you post up this comment exchange, which to quick pattern matching, seems to look really unpromising.

 

In these arguments or situations, it's really hard and unrewarding for "outsiders" to the argument to get into the headspace and gain understanding or be productive in these disputes.

The substance here is about a system of knowledge or a wiki, a vision or system for which the would-be "abuse" tags needs to slot in. 

My ideology is that this benefits from a "single vision or owner" and Pablo's role and views overall seem correct?

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