All of Dewi's Comments + Replies

Thank you for making this thread Clifford, and we're really grateful for all feedback! We're working hard as a team to improve the course and the infrastructure we have for hosting other courses, and everyone's feedback has been incredibly valuable on our journey thus far :) 

Here's the video, in case people would like to engage with this that way. Thanks for the post Akash! 

I really enjoyed and appreciated reading this, and it resonates a lot with me. Thank you for writing it :) 

We don't currently believe the name collision will cause significant issues, and we're taking steps to mitigate any potential confusions that do arise. 

We also discussed the name collision with the other BlueDot in August and September of this year to evaluate how much of an issue it would pose to them and to us, and we ultimately decided to move forward with this name choice. 

Some other things: 

• We consulted with other advisors within and outside the biosecurity community to evaluate how much of an issue this might pose 
• We emphasize tha

Cool, thanks Lizka and the Forum team! 

If you click "New Post" in the subforum, does that post also appear on the Frontpage? My assumption is yes, but just wanted to clarify. 

Surprised to see Anthropic mentioned there, I hadn't realised that SBF led their recent funding round. I wonder what this implies for them. 

+1, I'd also recommend using colours that are accessible for people with colour vision deficiency. 

This is incredibly exciting, thanks for the update! 

I'm very surprised to hear that this work is funding constrained. Why do you currently think this has received less interest from funders?

Thanks for this post, I knew nothing about Effective Philanthropy and this was very informative.

The following section resonated a lot with me: 

I appreciate the presence of philosophers in effective altruism- a lot. Looking back at history, we can see philosophers and thinkers who had huge long-term influence. Peter Singer is hugely influential in global development and animal welfare. I admire other EA philosophers who take seriously issues like evidential decision theory, the longterm future, and infinite ethics.

But I don’t think such concepts

Great post, thanks for writing it! 

I'm really excited for more people in the EA community to ask questions like "what would the world look like if we've solved X problem? How can we make that world a reality? What team do we need to build to achieve this goal over a decade-long time horizon?" as opposed to focusing predominantly on what's best to do given a certain set of resources or capabilities one currently has, doing independent projects, and doing projects for short periods of time.

Why do you think it's less important for the x-risk/longtermism parts of the EA movement to have good PR and epistemics?

Accessibility point (relevant for all Forum posts): 

I have deuteranopia (a common form of red-green colour-blindness), and can't really see the different colours in your "limited to very strong" graphs, which makes evaluating them a bit harder and more cognitive effort (I basically have to rely entirely on the text). It's also quite distracting to have what looks to me like subtly different shades of the same colour. 

~5% of the population have some form of colour-blindness (~1/12 men, ~1/200 women). I would really appreciate if the colours could ... (read more)

Thanks for this, I've found this very helpful for consuming more EA Forum content. Are there ways to only have EA Forum posts on our podcast provider's "subscriber" feed, as opposed to LW and AF posts too? Eg I find that if I have a lot of podcast episodes in my podcast feed, I am less likely to listen to any of them, as it's harder to find the podcasts that I really want to listen to. 

I suspect this could look like different podcast "feed"/profile with only EA Forum posts (and maybe similarly for AF and LW posts, eg they could have their own feed/profile with only podcast episodes for posts on those platforms). 

Ah awesome, thank you!

Airtable (free plan) doesn't allow the sending of confirmation emails. I've now updated the plan to the pro plan, and will send out confirmation emails to all those who have already applied. 

The programme is by default virtual, we've made this clearer in the application form

AGI Safety Fundamentals curriculum, by Richard Ngo

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1mTm_sT2YQx3mRXQD6J2xD2QJG1c3kHyvX8kQc_IQ0ns/edit?usp=sharing

Updated link for the LSE Effective Philanthropy course: https://www.lse.ac.uk/resources/calendar2019-2020/courseGuides/PH/2019_PH332.htm 

Thank you for this! We've been considering starting up some kind of "intro to biosecurity" reading group at our local EA group and these are really excellent resources for us, and is likely to save us many hours of work trawlling through the literature. 

Overall I think this sounds really cool. There are a few things I would be cautious of though. One thing I would worry about is artificially creating a sense of two distinct "sides" on an issue, when there is likely much more complexity and many more perspectives than is being presented in the debate. I think there's a recognition when only one person is being interviewed that there are many other perspectives on the issue, however, when it's a debate people seem to feel that the perspectives presented encompass the whole space.

The ten... (read more)

How important do you think it is that your or others' forecasts are more well-understood or valued among policy-makers? And if you think they should listen to forecasts more often, how do you think we should go about making them more aware?