Does the evidence support a conclusion that EAs as a whole have some sort of consensus that is against pause advocacy and/or PauseAI US? The evidence most readily available to me seems mixed.

• PauseAI US' fundraising challenges suggest that the major funding sources are -- at a minimum -- not particularly excited about the org.
• I don't have any knowledge about PauseAI's success among rank-and-file EA donors (and PauseAI may not have good insight here either, given that donations don't come with an EA flag on them and the base rate of EA-aligned donations to a random org in the AI space may be hard to discern).
• PauseAI ranked very well in last year's donation election, although it didn't quite end up in the money.

• Holly's posts relating to AI issues have on average received significant karma on net over the past ~2 years, such as:

  

• To be fair, other posts have low (but still positive) karma. Some of these I would characterize as sharp in tone -- to be clear, I am using sharp in a descriptive sense, trying to avoid any evaluation of the tone here. For example, the title and first paragraph of this post claim that a significant number of readers have been "[s]elling out," "are deluded," and need to "[w]ake up." My recollection is that sharply toned posts tend to incur a karma penalty irrespective of the merits of the perspective offered (unless the target is, e.g., SBF). But although the net karma on that post is only +3, that is on 60 votes -- suggesting quite a bit of upvotes to counter the downvotes.
• Holly also has some high-karma comments which express a lot of frustration with EA being too cozy with Big AI, such as this (+51) and this (+39). There are also comments with net negative karma, some of which are very sharp and some of which I think are not reasonably explainable on that basis.

There's of course much more to EA than the Forum, but its metrics have the advantage of being quantifiable and thus maybe a little less vibes-based than some competing measures.

(If the country being invaded is democratic and holds elections during wartime, this decision would even have collective approval from citizens, since they'd regularly vote on whether to continue their defensive war or change to a government more willing to surrender to the invaders.)

There's some force to this -- but in most cases only a minority of citizens are at risk of conscription. This is usually true on demographics alone -- e.g., men 25-60 in Ukraine, significantly narrower in 20th century US conscriptions -- and then is narrowed down further. A fair number of people who are demographically eligible know they would have discretionary exemptions or mandatory exclusions (e.g., based on disability, occupation, single parenthood, etc.). Those who would reap the benefits of not surrendering to invaders, but would not personally bear the costs of conscription, would be incentivized to vote for more than the optimal amount of conscription (and for undercompensating those who were conscripted).

They weren’t just replicating the effort of experts. 

In fact, they were largely building off the efforts of recognized domain experts. See, e.g., this bibliography from 2010 of sources used in the "initial formation of [its] list of priority programs in international aid," and this 2009 analysis of bednet programs.

And one should probably give some weight to limitations imposed by the medium -- a 3-minute video on a platform whose users are on average not known for having long attention spans.

Late 2021 is the date of the article, not the website: "They started the project in May of 2020 for their own use, and within a few months, created a version for the public."

The U.S. government advice was pretty bad, but I don't think this was from lack of knowledge. I think it was more a deliberate attempt to downplay the effectiveness of masks to mitigate supply issues.

I also wouldn't expect the government to necessarily perform well on getting the truth out there quickly, or on responding well to low-probability / high impact events by taking EV+ actions that cause significant disruption to the public. Government officials have to worry about the risk of stoking public panic and similar indirect effects much more than most private individuals, including rationalist thinkers. For example, @Denkenberger🔸 mentions some rationalists figuring out who they wanted to be locked down with on the early side; deciding that the situation warrants this kind of behavior -- like deciding to short the stock market, or most other private-actor stuff -- doesn't require consideration of indirect effects like government statements do. Nor are a political leader's incentives aligned to maximize expected value in these sorts of situations.

So I'd consider beating the government to be evidence of competence, but not much evidence of particularly early or wise performance by private entities.

For balance, the established authorities' early beliefs and practices about COVID did not age well. Some of that can be attributed to governments doing government things, like downplaying the effectiveness of masks to mitigate supply issues. But, for instance, the WHO fundamentally missed on its understanding of how COVID is transmitted . . . for many months. So we were told to wash our groceries, a distraction from things that would have made a difference. Early treatment approaches (e.g., being too quick to put people on vents) were not great either.

The linked article shows that some relevant experts had a correct understanding early on but struggled to get acceptance. "Dogmatic bias is certainly a big part of it,” one of them told Nature later on. So I don't think the COVID story would present a good case for why EA should defer to the consensus view of experts. Perhaps it presents a good case for why EA should be very cautious about endorsing things that almost no relevant expert believes, but that is a more modest conclusion. 

Do you think the EA tendency toward many smaller-to-midsize organizations plays a role in this? I'm not in the industry at all, but the "comms-focused" roles feel more fundamental in a sense than the "digital growth" roles. Stated differently, I can imagine an org having the former but not the latter, but find it hard to envision an org with only the latter. If an org only has a single FTE available for "marketing-related" work, it wouldn't surprise me to learn that the job description for that role is often going to lean in the comms-focused direction.

Although I think Yarrow's claim is that the LW community was not "particularly early on covid [and did not give] particularly wise advice."  I don't think the rationality community saying things that were not at the time "obvious" undermines this conclusion as long as those things were also being said in a good number of other places at the same time.

Cummings was reading rationality material, so that had the chance to change his mind. He probably wasn't reading (e.g.) the r/preppers subreddit, so its members could not get this kind of credit. (Another example: Kim Kardashian got Donald Trump to pardon Alice Marie Johnson and probably had some meaningful effect on his first administration's criminal-justice reforms. This is almost certainty a reflection of her having access, not evidence that she is a first-rate criminal justice thinker or that her talking points were better than those of others supporting Johnson's clemency bid.)

Thanks! I may be thinking about it too much from the consumer perspective of owning a condo in a 100-year-old building, where the noise of filtration is a major drawback and the costs of a broader modernization of HVAC systems would be considerable.

I haven't polled grocery store owners, but an owner would bear all the costs of improving air quality yet may capture few of the economic benefits. Although customers would care a lot in a pandemic, they probably wouldn't otherwise care in a way that increases profits -- and managers are incentivized toward short-term results. Cynically, most of their employees may not have paid sick time, so the owner may not even realize most of the benefit from reduced employee illness. (Of course, regulators could require compliance -- but that's not an awareness problem. So maybe the candidate intervention is lobbying?)