Looking to advance businesses with charities in the vast majority shareholder position. Check out my TEDx talk for why I believe Profit for Good businesses could be a profound force for good in the world.
There seems to be a problem with who is willing to pay the search costs to read and evaluate EA forum posts in the time that they would naturally be on the front page. People are naturally incentivized to free-ride on the efforts of previous readers who upvote or comment on the posts. But the initial evaluators would be spending time on less interesting/valuable posts on average. When you have a high enough readership population, you will probably get enough people who are interested to occasionally evaluate new posts, which provides enough signal to the rest of the readership to provide further evaluation, and creates virtuous cycles. But without sufficient readership, there likely will not be enough people engaging with posts that are not easily legible (and accessible and popular). Potential writers of EA forum posts then notice that it is unlikely that their forum posts will be read during the time that they are generally viewable (on the first page or two), and then either may decline to generate the writings or share it on the forum.
I notice that I have been less incentivized on the margin to do EA forum posts, simply because I find it unlikely that people will read it during the front page period where it would be generally viewable.
One solution would be to have people dedicated to performing that initial evaluation of posts function, either in a paid or volunteer capacity. That initial signal could facilitate follow on reading and engagement from the community by paying the initial discovery costs that are not adequately incentivized with our current level of readership.
Strongly upvoted because I agree that often the highest leverage opportunities may not be about taking the world as it is for granted, but rather looking for levers to change even large systems within our world.
But I wonder if Julia would agree with your characterization of the scout mindset ossifying the current state of being. I think a good scout might look for latent qualities in the world which might be expressed upon certain conditions.
This seems deeply confused. You are discussing more consciousnesses going into an extreme state of disvalue (hell). You say that there is no multiplicity of minds, but this is creating more negatively valenced experience, which is what utilitarianism seeks to prevent.
Whatever faults utilitarianism has, it does not endorse creating enormous disvalue, at least without creating more enormous value or reduction of disvalue elsewhere. Your dollar to charity comes no where close to offsetting the immense suffering of option B per utilitarianism.
Your response identifies these as AI generated, but does not explain why they lack merit. I skimmed the articles and it is not clear to me why these articles like these should be discouraged, let alone purged from the forum.
Beyond literalism explains the problem of narrow rewards and the need to design systems that internalize second order effects.
From AI Tool to Being discusses the role of memory and existing across time as something that brings about selfhood and indicates consciousness, rather than just intelligence.
The Widow Opportunity Map proposes a way to disseminate information such that resources can be directed to a vulnerable population.
With 50 karma to your post, it bothers me considerably how popular your position seems to be. I have been deterred, on the margin, from generating posts sharing my ideas. With a job at the moment that takes over 60h/week and not being a fast writer, for me it's often between doing a series of iterations with Claude/Chatgpt on an idea, or it not being done at all. I feel increasingly alienated from this community, which I have identified with for like 6 years or more, due to this ascendant view I find rather censorious and prejudiced.
I guess I just would ask that people read stuff and evaluate it before condemning it. If something seems to be AI and you don't want to read further, fine. But going on to condemn it simply on that basis seems very wrong to me. It seems very strange that in this community I am in a small minority thinking this.
Seems there might be something of a negative reinforcement cycle. Less posts/engagement > people less incentivized to visit forum > less posts/engagement > etc.
I'm probably saying something obvious, but it's worth thinking about what might break and reverse this cycle.
Could you please give examples of these posts you seem to be saying are wholly without merit? Scrolling through my feed, it isn't evident to me to what you are referring.
Normal businesses pay at least 25% tax in Australia, whereas Profit for Good businesses (Humanitix, Give Industries, Thankyou) pay no tax, leading to about a 33% yield advantage (1 / 0.75 = 1.333). It is strange that philanthropy more generally does not utilize Australia as an investment opportunity for foundations/ other philanthropic investors.
Re someone with a private equity background. Yes, they would be potentially a very good fit, with the understanding that their primary job would be securing funds for these acquisitions in exchange for bonds on the acquired businesses from philanthropists/income investors.
I actually wonder whether there were more people who opened up to the idea of harm reduction by being an insider within the factory farming system than there were people who were persuaded of the clear foolishness of joining AI companies to try to make a difference (as I think was the satirical point of this post).
I agree that EA Forum seems to be declining.
There seems to be a problem with who is willing to pay the search costs to read and evaluate EA forum posts in the time that they would naturally be on the front page. People are naturally incentivized to free-ride on the efforts of previous readers who upvote or comment on the posts. But the initial evaluators would be spending time on less interesting/valuable posts on average. When you have a high enough readership population, you will probably get enough people who are interested to occasionally evaluate new posts, which provides enough signal to the rest of the readership to provide further evaluation, and creates virtuous cycles. But without sufficient readership, there likely will not be enough people engaging with posts that are not easily legible (and accessible and popular). Potential writers of EA forum posts then notice that it is unlikely that their forum posts will be read during the time that they are generally viewable (on the first page or two), and then either may decline to generate the writings or share it on the forum.
I notice that I have been less incentivized on the margin to do EA forum posts, simply because I find it unlikely that people will read it during the front page period where it would be generally viewable.
One solution would be to have people dedicated to performing that initial evaluation of posts function, either in a paid or volunteer capacity. That initial signal could facilitate follow on reading and engagement from the community by paying the initial discovery costs that are not adequately incentivized with our current level of readership.
Strongly upvoted because I agree that often the highest leverage opportunities may not be about taking the world as it is for granted, but rather looking for levers to change even large systems within our world.
But I wonder if Julia would agree with your characterization of the scout mindset ossifying the current state of being. I think a good scout might look for latent qualities in the world which might be expressed upon certain conditions.
This seems deeply confused. You are discussing more consciousnesses going into an extreme state of disvalue (hell). You say that there is no multiplicity of minds, but this is creating more negatively valenced experience, which is what utilitarianism seeks to prevent.
Whatever faults utilitarianism has, it does not endorse creating enormous disvalue, at least without creating more enormous value or reduction of disvalue elsewhere. Your dollar to charity comes no where close to offsetting the immense suffering of option B per utilitarianism.
For what it's worth, I appreciate you reading the posts of new users.
Your response identifies these as AI generated, but does not explain why they lack merit. I skimmed the articles and it is not clear to me why these articles like these should be discouraged, let alone purged from the forum.
Beyond literalism explains the problem of narrow rewards and the need to design systems that internalize second order effects.
From AI Tool to Being discusses the role of memory and existing across time as something that brings about selfhood and indicates consciousness, rather than just intelligence.
The Widow Opportunity Map proposes a way to disseminate information such that resources can be directed to a vulnerable population.
With 50 karma to your post, it bothers me considerably how popular your position seems to be. I have been deterred, on the margin, from generating posts sharing my ideas. With a job at the moment that takes over 60h/week and not being a fast writer, for me it's often between doing a series of iterations with Claude/Chatgpt on an idea, or it not being done at all. I feel increasingly alienated from this community, which I have identified with for like 6 years or more, due to this ascendant view I find rather censorious and prejudiced.
I guess I just would ask that people read stuff and evaluate it before condemning it. If something seems to be AI and you don't want to read further, fine. But going on to condemn it simply on that basis seems very wrong to me. It seems very strange that in this community I am in a small minority thinking this.
Seems there might be something of a negative reinforcement cycle. Less posts/engagement > people less incentivized to visit forum > less posts/engagement > etc.
I'm probably saying something obvious, but it's worth thinking about what might break and reverse this cycle.
Could you please give examples of these posts you seem to be saying are wholly without merit? Scrolling through my feed, it isn't evident to me to what you are referring.
Hi Jake,
Normal businesses pay at least 25% tax in Australia, whereas Profit for Good businesses (Humanitix, Give Industries, Thankyou) pay no tax, leading to about a 33% yield advantage (1 / 0.75 = 1.333). It is strange that philanthropy more generally does not utilize Australia as an investment opportunity for foundations/ other philanthropic investors.
Re someone with a private equity background. Yes, they would be potentially a very good fit, with the understanding that their primary job would be securing funds for these acquisitions in exchange for bonds on the acquired businesses from philanthropists/income investors.
I actually wonder whether there were more people who opened up to the idea of harm reduction by being an insider within the factory farming system than there were people who were persuaded of the clear foolishness of joining AI companies to try to make a difference (as I think was the satirical point of this post).
This is actually a quite apt summary.