All of Lizka's Comments + Replies

Thank you!

Good point, thanks! I'm really impressed, seems like a very hard switch to make. 

Thanks a bunch for sharing this! I think this is really cool. 

The issue was that we were letting people upload files as submissions. If you uploaded a file, your email or name would be shared (and we had a note explaining this in the description of the question that offered the upload option). Nearly no one was using the upload option, and if you didn't upload anything, your information wasn't shared. 

Unfortunately, Google's super confusing UI says: "The name and photo associated with your Google account will be recorded when you upload files and submit this form. Your email is not part of your response," which ... (read more)

Thanks for asking! Unless I got things wrong when I was transferring the Google Doc to the Forum post, there wasn't anything from M-Z or from I-M. (Some organizations on the list didn't have an update this month, apparently, and also the list of organizations is pretty early-alphabet-heavy.)

Thanks for posting this! I really appreciate it. 

I want to highlight some relevant posts: 

• Aim high, even if you fall short (Julia Wise)
• The motivated reasoning critique of effective altruism (Linch)
• Beware surprising and suspicious convergence (Gregory Lewis)
• You have more than one goal, and that's fine (Julia Wise — you're already linking to this post)

I think they're especially relevant for this section:

But possible self-defeating dynamics aren’t the only issue. Another is that pressure to justify everything can cause people to come up with justifi

I'd be happy to see this kind of process, and don't think it's against the rules of the contest. You might not want to tag early versions with the contest tag if you don't expect them to win and don't think panelists should bother voting on them, but tagging the early versions wouldn't count against you for the final version. 

On a different note (taking off my contest-oragnizer hat, putting on my Forum hat): I think people should feel free to post butterfly ideas with the idea that they will develop them further. The Forum exists in part for this kind... (read more)

FYI: LessWrong currently has an AGI Safety FAQ / all-dumb-questions-allowed thread --- if you have questions or things you're confused about, this could be a good opportunity for you.

The finalists from the Future of Life Institute's Worldbuilding Contest have produced some interesting additions to this topic. 

This has been recently brought up again, alongside individual species extinctions.

It's permitted, yes! 

The team of coauthors who write the winning submission will get the prize, and can share it as the members see fit. A good default might be to just split the prize evenly, and if you're collaborating on something that might win a prize that you think should be distributed differently, I'd recommend that you agree on this in advance. 

(No need to apologize. I don't think we discussed co-authorship anywhere in the post. I'm now thinking we should consider adding it to the Q&A section, so thank you for bringing it up!)

Appendix to the post

I’ve attended and helped organize sessions that discuss the theory of impostor syndrome (or the impostor phenomenon). Here are brief notes adapted from one such session that we ran at Canada/USA Mathcamp (this is mostly not my original work!).

The theory

The impostor phenomenon is heavily tied to the process of “discounting,” which is the process by which validation from an outside source is disregarded as inauthentic.

Examples: 

1. My supervisor praises me. I tell myself she’s just being nice. 
2. I get a good grade. I tell myself I got

Thanks for this post! As someone who's agonized over some career (and other) decisions, I really appreciate it. It also seems to apply for e.g. shallow investigations into potential problems/causes (e.g., topic). Also, I love the graphs. 

A few relevant posts and thoughts: 

• The author's other post on the topic is very relevant: Use resilience, instead of imprecision, to communicate uncertainty
• For some of the advice in this post (like on flakiness, parallel trial and evaluation, etc.), I'd also point people to: Should you reverse any advice you hear

You can now look at Forum posts from all time and sort them by inflation-adjusted karma. I highly recommend that readers explore this view! 

Hi Chris, thanks for suggesting this! I'll add it. 

Thanks for this suggestion! You can in fact see your past upvotes, although the feature is really not easily discoverable right now, sadly. 

I'll echo some of the other commenters: thanks for writing this, I appreciated the post! I don't entirely agree with everything you say, but I do really want to see more art and thought put into aesthetics.  (On the other hand, I'm not sure how much of our resources we should put into this.)

You might be interested in: 

• My question from January: "What are some artworks relevant to EA?"
• "FLI launches Worldbuilding Contest with $100,000 in prizes," also from January (I only skimmed the initial post and haven't looked at the submissions yet)
• The "Effect

Thanks for this comment! 

I think you're right that I'm proving too much with the broad argument, and I like your reframing of the arguments I'm making as things to be wary of. I'm still uncomfortable with longtermism-as-identity, though --- possibly because I'm less certain of the four beliefs in (0). 

I'd be interested in drawing the boundaries more carefully and trying to see when a worldview (that is dependent on empirical knowledge) can safely(ish) become an identity without messing too much with my ability to reason clearly. 

Fair point, thanks!

I think it's probably not great to have "effective altruist" as an identity either (I largely agree with Jonas's post and the others I linked), although I disagree with the case you're making for this. 

I think that my case against EA-as-identity would be more on the (2) side, to use the framing of your post. Yours seems to be from (1), and based (partly) on the claim that "EA" requires the assumption that "you have to try to do the most good" (which I think is false).  (I also think you're pointing to the least falsifiable of t... (read more)

I keep coming back to this map/cartogram. It's just so great. 

Thanks for pointing this out! Yeah, the link was broken, but it should work now. 

The shortform should in fact appear in recent activity -- not sure what happened there. 

And I agree that we should grow and develop low-barrier ways of interacting with the Forum.

Thanks for pointing out that this is not discoverable! I've added a note about this to the user manual, but I agree that it should also just be easier to notice as you're exploring the platform. 

Thanks for pointing this out, and for linking to the user! I've deleted their account. 

For now, if you ever come across a spam user, please feel free to let me know (you can DM me on the Forum or you can email forum@effectivealtruism.org ), but I agree that a feature like this should exist.  

As a moderator, I agree with Michael. The comment Michael's replying to goes against Forum norms.

Thanks for sharing this! 

I also recommend looking at Michael's "central directory of open research questions," which has a lot of topics to explore. 

I really appreciated this in-depth post, both because it seems like a well researched analysis of a problem with some concrete suggestions and because it's easy to read at different levels; the section headers and summaries made it really easy to get a sense of the overall take and then dive deeper into the sub-topics that I was most confused about. 

I agree that a lot of this is baked into the UX, and really appreciate the feedback!

Thanks for the feedback! :)

I suspect there is a decent amount of overlap

I strongly agree. I struggle a lot with points 1 and 2. I've also seen many Forum posts make the mistakes you describe. :) 

(Thanks for posting!)

Thanks for posting this. I really appreciate it in part because it's a clear write-up of something important that's happening that might not be on a lot of people's radars. 

Questions I have after reading this : 

• How unusual is this situation? (How often is there is there a flu that's spreading and as pathogenic as H5N1?)
• Is there anything people reading this or people in EA can or should do?

Thanks for setting this up! 

In case anyone's interested, there's also the EA Focusmate group. 

Thanks for this newsletter, and congrats on getting to 1000!

I really appreciate this post (and the other two obituaries Gavin posted). (Thank you!)

This is incredibly useful, thanks for pointing it out! Adding it to the "Semi-related thoughts" section. :)