All of electroswing's Comments + Replies

On the EA forum redesign: new EAs versus seasoned EAs

In the recent Design changes announcement, many commenters reacted negatively to the design changes. 

One comment from somebody on the forum team said in response: (bolded emphasis mine)

One of our goals on the Forum team is to make the Forum accessible to people who are getting more engaged with the ideas of EA, but haven’t yet been part of the community for a long time.. Without getting into a full theory of change here, I think we’ve neglected designing for this user group a bit over the last sever

Question about timing of program: This program is during the school year rather than during summer break. It is also meant for EU/UK students, who may not have slack during the school year because EU/UK university admissions often specifically require very high grades with little room for error. Do you think your application pool would be stronger if this were a summer program instead? 

(pointed) Questions about "puzzle quiz": 

1. These synonym questions (and to a lesser extent the analogy questions) are dramatically easier for native English speakers

https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.20141734 Gender Differences in Accepting and Receiving Requests for Tasks with Low Promotability "

"We examine the allocation of a task that everyone prefers be completed by someone else (writing a report, serving on a committee, etc.) and find evidence that women, more than men, volunteer, are asked to volunteer, and accept requests to volunteer for such tasks."

Promotability isn't exactly the word that applies to EA. Instead here I mean a more nebulous term like "low promotability = grunt work, lack of prestig... (read more)

There is a relevant Rob Miles Computerphile video. It does not have a demo component like you are planning, but it does seem to click with laypeople (1M views, top comments generally engaged). 

Two more organizations which try to get a narrow group of people (athletes / founders) to give to effective causes: 

• High Impact Athletes
• Founders Pledge

One more organization trying to get the everyday person to give 1%: 

• One for the World

Perhaps one source of downvotes is that the main idea of this post is unoriginal. Anyone putting on an intro fellowship has put some amount of thought into: 

• Do I call it a "fellowship" to give it prestige, or do I call it a "seminar" / "reading group" to make it sound academic, or do I call it a "program" or a more neutral tone, ...
• Do I call it "Arete" to sound fancy, or do I call it "intro" to sound welcoming, ...
• Do I explicitly put "EA" in the title?

The one new thought here seems to be having the acronym "IDEA" stand for "Introduction to making a Di... (read more)

See also: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/bmwwQoFznjRwswCbz/announce-summer-ea-internships-farther-in-advance 

Now that Rational Animations has the human capital, budget, and experience to make high quality videos like this one, I think they should develop a more consistent brand.

They should have a consistent single face or voice of the channel. Popular edutainment channels often take off when viewer connects with a likeable personality. Examples: 

• Tom Scott, VSauce, Veritasium, Physics Girl, ...
• Channels which don't show their face in their typical format: Wendover Productions, 3Blue1Brown
• Even high-budget channels like Vox are starting to lean into this format

What about a subreddit?

If it's OK to answer:  how much did you end up dictating the content/wording of the ad?

This might be better received as an April Fools' Day post.

I should clarify—I think EAs engaging in this behavior are exhibiting cult indoctrination behavior unintentionally, not intentionally. 

One specific example would be in my comment here.

I also notice that when more experienced EAs tend to talk to new EAs about x-risk from misaligned AI, they tend to present an overly narrow perspective. Sentences like "Some superintelligent AGI is going to grab all the power and then we can do nothing to stop it" are thrown around casually without stopping to examine the underlying assumptions. Then newer EAs repeat the... (read more)

I worry that the current format of this program might filter out promising candidates who are risk averse. Specifically, the fact that candidates are only granted the actual research opportunity "Assuming all goes well" is a lot of risk to take on. For driven undergraduates, the cost of a summer opportunity falling through is costly, and they might not apply just because of this uncertainty. 

Currently your structure is like PhD programs which admit students to a specific lab (who may be dropped from that lab if they're not a good fit, and in that case... (read more)

Can undergraduates who already know ML skip weeks 1-2? Can undergraduates who already know DL skip weeks 3-5?

You may already have this in mind but—if you are re-running this program in summer 2023, I think it would be a good idea to announce this further in advance.

I was in the process of writing a comment trying to debunk this. My counterexample didn't work so now I'm convinced this is a pretty good post. This is a nice way of thinking about ITN quantitatively. 

The counterexample I was trying to make might still be interesting for some people to read as an illustration of this phenomenon. Here it is:

Scale "all humans" trying to solve "all problems" down to "a single high school student" trying to solve "math problems". Then tractability (measured as % of problem solved / % increase in resources) for this person... (read more)

I think the diagram which differentiates "Stay in school" versus "Drop out" before further splitting actually has some sense. The way I read that split is, it is saying "Stay in school" versus "Do something strange".  

In some cases it might be helpful, in abstract, to figure out the pros and cons of staying in school, before recursing down the "Drop out" path. Otherwise, you could imagine a pro/con list for ORGs 1-3 having a lot of repetition: "Not wasting time taking useless required classes" is a pro for all 3, "Losing out on connections / credential" is a con for all 3, etc. 

Another post on this topic: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/aeobxpZXQb7X9MPbM/free-money-from-new-york-gambling-websites

You must be located in New York or another eligible state while signing up and making the bets.
 

Just to confirm -- do these bets require New York residency, or just being physically present in New York? What forms of identification are requested -- does it have to be a New York state ID (e.g. driver's license)? 

I often run into the problem of EA coming up in casual conversation and not knowing exactly how to explain what it is, and I know many others run into this problem as well.

Not rigorously tested or peer-reviewed but this is an approach I've found works decently. The audience is a "normal person".

My short casual pitch of EA:

"Effective altruism is about doing research to improve the effectiveness of philanthropy. Researchers can measure the effects of different interventions, like providing books versus providing malaria nets. GiveWell, an effective alt

When I say "repeating talking points", I am thinking of: 

1. Using cached phrases and not explaining where they come from. 
2. Conversations which go like
   • EA: We need to think about expanding our moral circle, because animals may be morally relevant. 
   • Non-EA: I don't think animals are morally relevant though.
   • EA: OK, but if animals are morally relevant, then quadrillions of lives are at stake.

(2) is kind of a caricature as written, but I have witnessed conversations like these in EA spaces. 

My evidence for this claim comes form my personal experie... (read more)