Lizka
Bio
I run the non-engineering side of the EA Forum (this platform), run the EA Newsletter, and work on some other content-related tasks at CEA. Please feel free to reach out! You can email me. [More about my job.]
Some of my favorite of my own posts:
- Disentangling "Improving Institutional Decision-Making"
- [Book rec] The War with the Newts as “EA fiction”
- Native languages in the EA community (and issues with assessing promisingness)
- EA should taboo "EA should"
- Invisible impact loss (and why we can be too error-averse)
I finished my undergraduate studies with a double major in mathematics and comparative literature in 2021. I was a research fellow at Rethink Priorities in the summer of 2021 and was then hired by the Events Team at CEA. I've since switched to the Online Team. In the past, I've also done some (math) research and worked at Canada/USA Mathcamp.
Some links I think people should see more frequently:
Posts 133
Comments469
Topic Contributions241
Thanks for these corrections! You're right. I'll make a few quick edits for now, and try to update it properly later (digging into the CSET report again).
I'm sorry to hear this (and grateful that you're reporting them). We have systems for flagging when a user's DM pattern is suspicious, but it's imperfect (I'm not sure if it's too permissive right now).
In case it's useful for you to have a better picture of what's going on, I think you get more of the DM spam because you're very high up in the user list.
This is just a quick comment to flag that I changed "CLOSING SOON" to "closing soon" in the title of this post (to avoid slipping into ~clickbaity titles).
Also, in case someone's interested, the original post notes the specific deadline:
The deadline for applications is September 30, 2023. Slots are limited and applications will be considered on a rolling basis, so please apply early!
Thanks for editing your post.
I've moved the post back to Frontpage (although I don't think this changes much) — see this comment. We don't generally move posts to Frontpage if the authors mark them as Personal Blog themselves. Do you want us to move this post back?
Thanks for the pushback. Writing some notes, and speaking only for myself (I don’t know what the other moderators think).
- I think my note[1] about Personal Blog-ing this post was unambiguously bad. In practice, the decision was made because I was trying to avoid delaying the comment, someone proposed (in the moderator slack) that this post was only loosely connected to doing good effectively and should be in Personal Blog, and I didn’t question it further.
- I think we probably shouldn’t have moved the post to Personal Blog, but I’m not totally sure. I’ve flip-flopped a bit about this. (I just moved the post back, although I think this doesn’t change anything at this point.) I think the bigger error is that the distinction is so messy — I had written a doc trying to clarify things last year (it was mostly focused on whether productivity-hack-style posts should go on the Frontpage or not), and we thought a bit about it when we added the Community section, but this hasn’t been resolved. I think we probably should have prioritized clearing this up earlier, but I’m once again unsure.
- Relatedly, I don’t think moving the post to “Personal Blog” substantially lowered the post’s visibility (I’m not sure it did anything except put a little “personal blog” icon on it), given that the post is also in the Community section. If it were not a Community post, then I think logged-out users wouldn’t see it on the Frontpage, but I think nothing really changes for Community posts. (Not totally confident in this; I'll check with the rest of the Online Team.)
- I agree that in an ideal world, I (or someone else from the moderation team) would have responded sooner to the replies on my comment. But I was traveling, very busy, and didn’t think the visibility of the post was actually lowered (see #3, and see the number of comments on the post), so I didn’t prioritize this issue. (I also suspect that this got ughy, although ughiness mainly pushed back my response time today, when I came back to the thread and saw newer comments.) I don’t know if I endorse the trade-offs I made, but it’s hard for me to tell.
- Setting aside Personal Blog — re: the fact that this is criticism of an influential figure in EA, and moderators should avoid responding to posts like that. I think it’s very important to protect criticism, but I also think the moderators are currently over-correcting for this kind of consideration a bit (see e.g. this), and I honestly think that I want to discourage the kinds of rhetorical attacks that I saw in this post. I want to protect whistleblowing, red-teaming, disagreement, serious critical engagement with the quality of someone’s work, etc., but I don’t want to encourage the sense that if you frame your post as criticism, then it will be featured even if it is inflammatory and misleading.
(I’m still swamped and traveling, so might continue to be slow to respond.)
- ^
“The moderators have decided to move the post to Personal Blog — the connection to EA and doing good better is not that clear”
I think I agree, but also want to flag this list in case you (or others) haven't seen it: List of AI safety newsletters and other resources
I'm curating this post.
I'm extremely unsure of how I should think about whether shrimp are sentient (or what matters to them, or whether farming them is bad for them) or similar questions, but numbers like these seem like a flashing warning sign spelling out something like "there might be a moral catastrophe over here, we can't afford to casually dismiss this."
I also find myself unable to really comprehend numbers or statements like "230 billion (90% SCI: 150 billion - 370 billion) shrimp are alive on farms at any moment, which surpasses any farmed animal estimate known to date, including farmed insect numbers."
And as always, I really appreciated the diagrams:
If you could pick research directions, do you have an idea for what might be most pressing to study?