All of DM's Comments + Replies

As a caveat, there are some nuances to Wikipedia editing to make sure you're following community standards, which I've tried to lay out in my post. In particular, before investing a lot of time writing a new article, you should check if someone else tried that before and/or if the same content is already covered elsewhere. For example, there have been previous unsuccessful efforts to create an 'Existential risk' Wikipedia article. Those attempts failed in part because relevant content is already covered on the 'Global catastrophic risks' article.

I broadly agree with this and have also previously made a case for Wikipedia editing on the Forum: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/FebKgHaAymjiETvXd/wikipedia-editing-is-important-tractable-and-neglected

One other relevant resource I'd recommend is Will and Toby's joint keynote speech at the 2016 EA Global conference in San Francisco. It discusses some of the history of EA (focusing on the Oxford community in particular) and some historical precursors: https://youtu.be/VH2LhSod1M4

I enjoyed reading this and would love to see more upbeat and celebratory posts like this. The EA community is very self-critical (which is good!) but we shouldn't lose sight of all the awesome things community members accomplish.

I recently had to make an important and urgent career decision and found it tremendously valuable to speak with several dozen wonderful people about this at EA Global SF. I'm immensely grateful both to the people giving me advice and to CEA for organizing my favorite EA Global yet.

Going very broad, I'd recommend going through the EA Forum Topics Wiki and considering the concepts included there. Similarly, you may look at the posts that make up the EA Handbook and look for suitable concepts there.

See also this recent post: What happens on the average day?

For inspiration, here are some other examples of TEDx talks given by EAs: 
1. Beth Barnes (2015): "Effective Altruism"
2. Gabriella Overödder (2019): "How Using Science Can Radically Increase Your Social Impact"
3. Linh Chi Nguyen (2020): "5 Lessons for choosing an impactful career"

Feel free to add others below that I'm not aware of.

At the risk of self-promotion, I wrote a motivational essay on EA a few years ago, Framing Effective Altruism as Overcoming Indifference. 

Well done! The article receives about 50,000 page views each year, so there are a lot of people out there who benefit from your contribution.

Great video, I was very happy seeing Kurzgesagt promote this frame! Also relevant: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ckPSrWeghc4gNsShK/good-news-on-climate-change

Great post! While I agree with your main claims, I believe the numbers for the multipliers (especially in aggregate and for ex ante impact evaluations) are nowhere near as extreme in reality as your article suggests for the reasons that Brian Tomasik elaborates on in these two articles:

(i) Charity Cost-Effectiveness in an Uncertain World 

(ii) Why Charities Usually Don't Differ Astronomically in Expected Cost-Effectiveness  

I'm very excited about this development!

Excellent post! I really appreciate your proposal and framing for a book on utilitarianism. In line with your point, William MacAskill and Richard Yetter Chappell also perceived a lack of accessible, modern, and high-quality resources on utilitarianism (and related ideas), motivating the creation of utilitarianism.net, an online textbook on utilitarianism. The website has been getting a lot of traction over the past year, and it's still under development (including plans to experiment with non-text media and translations into other languages).

Strong upvote! I found reading this very interesting and the results seem potentially quite useful to inform EA community building efforts.

Hi Timothy, it's great that you found your way here! There's a vibrant German EA community (including an upcoming conference in Berlin in September/October that you may want to join). 

Regarding your university studies, I essentially agree with Ryan's comment. However, while studying in the UK and US can be great, I appreciate that doing so may be daunting and financially infeasible for many young Germans. If you decide to study in Germany and are more interested in the social sciences than in the natural sciences, I would encourage you (like Ryan) to ... (read more)

Time to up your game, Linch! 😉

I want to express my deep gratitude to you, Patrick, for running EA Radio for all these years! 🙏 Early in my EA involvement (2015-16), I listened to all the EA Radio talks available at the time and found them very valuable. 

Excellent! A well-deserved second prize in the Creative Writing Contest.

Utilitarianism.net has also recently published an article on Arguments for Utilitarianism, written by Richard Yetter Chappell. (I'm sharing this article since it may interest readers of this post)

Thanks, it's valuable to hear your more skeptical view on this point! I've included it after several reviewers of my post brought it up and still think it was probably worth including as one of several potential self-interested benefits of Wikipedia editing. 

I was mainly trying to draw attention to the fact that it is possible to link a Wikipedia user account to a real person and that it is worth considering whether to include it in certain applications (something I've done in previous applications). I still think Wikipedia editing is a decent signal ... (read more)

Thanks for this comment, Michael! I agree with all the points you make and should have been more careful to compare Wikipedia editing against the alternatives (I began doing this in an earlier draft of this post and then cut it because it became unwieldy). 

In my experience, few EAs I've talked to have ever seriously considered Wikipedia editing. Therefore, my main objective with this post was to get more people to recognize it as one option of something valuable they might do with a part of their time; I wasn't trying to argue that Wikipedia editing i... (read more)

I strongly agree that we should learn our lessons from this incident and seriously try to avoid any repetition of something similar. In my view, the key lessons are something like:

1. It's probably best to avoid paid Wikipedia editing
2. It's crucial to respect the Wikipedia community's rules and norms (I've really tried to emphasize this heavily in this post)
3. It's best to really approach Wikipedia editing with a mindset of "let's look for actual gaps in quality and coverage of important articles" and avoid anything that looks like promotional editing

I think it wou... (read more)

As an example, look at this overview of the Wikipedia pages that Brian Tomasik has created and their associated pageview numbers (screenshot of the top 10 pages below). The pages created by Brian mostly cover very important (though fringe) topics and attract ~ 100,000 pageviews every year.  (Note that this overview ignores all the pages that Brian has edited but didn't create himself.)

Someone (who is not me) just started a proposal for a WikiProject on Effective Altruism! To be accepted, this proposal will need to be supported by at least 6-12 active Wikipedia editors. If you're interested in contributing to such a WikiProject, please express "support" for the proposal on the proposal page.  

This is the best tool I know of to get an overview of Wikipedia article pageview counts (as mentioned in the post); the only limitation with it is that pageview data "only" goes back to 2015.

For many people interested in but not yet fully committed to biosecurity, it may make more sense to choose a more general master's program in international affairs/security and then concentrate on biosecurity/biodefense to the extent possible within their program.

Some of the best master's programs to consider to this end:

1. Georgetown University: MA in Security Studies (Washington, DC; 2 years) 
2. Johns Hopkins University: MA in International Relations (Washington, DC; 2 years)
3. Stanford University: Master's in International Policy (2 years)
4. King's College Lon

The GMU Biodefense Master's is also offered as an online-only degree. 

Website traffic was initially low (i.e. 21k pageviews by 9k unique visitors from March to December 2020) but has since been gaining steam (i.e. 40k pageviews by 20k unique visitors in 2021 to date) as the website's search performance has improved. We expect traffic to continue growing significantly as we add more content, gather more backlinks and rise up the search  rank. For comparison, the Wikipedia article on utilitarianism has received ~ 480k pageviews in 2021 to date, which suggests substantial room for growth for utilitarianism.net.

I'm not sure what counts as 'astronomically' more cost effective, but if it means ~1000x more important/cost-effective I might agree with (ii).

This may be the crux - I would not count a ~ 1000x multiplier as anywhere near "astronomical" and should probably have made this clearer in my original comment. 

Claim (i), that the value of the long-term (in terms of lives, experiences, etc.) is astronomically larger than the value of the near-term,  refers to differences in value of something like 10³⁰ x.

All my comment was meant to say is that it seems hi... (read more)

I'd like to point to the essay Multiplicative Factors in Games and Cause Prioritization as a relevant resource for the question of how we should apportion the community's resources across (longtermist and neartermist) causes:

TL;DR: If the impacts of two causes add together, it might make sense to heavily prioritize the one with the higher expected value per dollar.  If they multiply, on the other hand, it makes sense to more evenly distribute effort across the causes.  I think that many causes in the effective altruism sphere interact more multip

Please see my above response to jackmalde's comment. While I understand and respect your argument, I don't think we are justified in placing high confidence in this  model of the long-term flowthrough effects of near-term targeted interventions. There are many similar more-or-less plausible models of such long-term flowthrough effects, some of which would suggest a positive net effect of near-term targeted interventions on the long-term future, while others would suggest a negative net effect. Lacking strong evidence that would allow us to accurately ... (read more)

No, we probably don’t. All of our actions plausibly affect the long-term future in some way, and it is difficult to (be justified to) achieve very high levels of confidence about the expected long-term impacts of specific actions. We would require an exceptional  degree of confidence to claim that the long-term effects of our specific longtermist intervention are astronomically (i.e. by many orders of magnitude) larger than the long-term effects of some random neartermist interventions (or even doing nothing at all). Of course, this claim is perfectly... (read more)

Agreed, I'd love this feature! I also frequently rely on pageview statistics to prioritize which Wikipedia articles to improve.

There is a big difference between (i) the very plausible claim that the value of the long-term (in terms of lives, experiences, etc.) is astronomically larger than the value of the near-term, and (ii) the rather implausible claim that interventions targeted at improving the long-term are astronomically more important/cost-effective than those targeted at improving the near-term. It seems to me that many longtermists believe (i) but that almost no-one believes (ii).

Basically, in this context the same points apply that Brian Tomasik made in his essay "Why Ch... (read more)

I really appreciated the many useful links you included in this post and would like to encourage others to strive to do the same when writing EA Forum articles.

Happy to have you here, Linda! It sounds like you have some really important skills to offer and I wish you will find great opportunities to apply them.

The listed application documents include a "Short essay (≤500 words)" without further details. Can you say more about what this entails and what you are looking for?

Are non-US citizens who hold a US work authorization disadvantaged in the application process even if they seek to enter a US policy career (and perhaps aim to become naturalized eventually)?

Great initiative! Unfortunately, I cannot seem to find the podcast on either of my two podcast apps (BeyondPod and Podcast Addict). Do you plan to make the podcast available across all major platforms?

Strongly agree! I'm currently writing an EA Forum post making the case for Wikipedia editing.

Awesome episode! I really enjoyed listening to it when it came out and was excited for Sam's large audiences across Waking Up and Making Sense to learn about EA in this way.