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.
As a moderator, I think this comment is unnecessarily rude and breaks Forum norms. Please don't leave any more comments like this or you will be banned from the Forum.
The moderation team is issuing Charles a 3-month ban.
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)
Here are some things we think break Forum norms:
The mentioned thread about doxing also brea... (read more)
The moderation team is issuing Charles a 3-month ban.
I honestly don't see such a problem with Gwern calling out out Charles' flimsy argument and hypocrisy using an example, be it a part of an external dispute.
On the other hand, I think Charles' uniformly low comment quality should have had him (temporarily) banned long ago (sorry Charles). The material is generally poorly organised, poorly researched, often intentionally provocative, sometimes interspersed with irrelevant images, and high in volume. One gets the impression of an author who holds their reader in contempt.
The moderators feel that several comments in this thread break Forum norms. In particular:
The moderators feel that some comments in this thread break Forum norms and are discussing what to do about it.
Here are some things we think break Forum norms:
The mentioned thread about doxing also brea... (read more)
This comment is not civil, and this sort of discourse is not appropriate for the Forum. The moderation team will issue a ban on the poster if we see this activity again.
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:
I think they're especially relevant for this section:
... (read more)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)
Hey everyone, the moderators want to point out that this topic is heated for several reasons:
We want to ask everyone to be especially careful when discussing topics this sensitive.
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!)
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:
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:
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!
From Wikipedia: "The Butter Battle Book is a rhyming story written by Dr. Seuss. It was published by Random House on January 12, 1984. It is an anti-war story; specifically, a parable about arms races in general, mutually assured destruction and nuclear weapons in particular."
It's short and on point, and I quite like the ending.
Hi Chris, thanks for suggesting this! I'll add it.
Thanks for posting this question! You can see an incomplete list of speakers from past EA Global conferences here: https://www.eaglobal.org/speakers/
And you can see lots of videos here: https://www.youtube.com/c/EffectiveAltruismVideos/featured
(Although you might already be aware of both of these resources.)
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:
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.
Thank you! I was hoping it would be useful to people to consult just the heading they were curious about.
I agree that a lot of this is baked into the UX, and really appreciate the feedback!
Thanks for the feedback! :)
Linch commented this below, but I think Karel Čapek’s 1936 science fiction satire The War with the Newts not-quite-predicted AGI and many aspects of WWII (the book portrays things that are eerily similar in style but different in form -- and is generally just insightful).
I think a recent post has a good discussion on this topic: "EA needs money more than ever"
I keep coming back to this Calvin and Hobbes strip, which captures an important part of the EA mindset (something we're trying to fight), I think:
Relevant links:
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!)
Agreed that there should be a clearer system here. Currently, a number of related tags exist:
We're reworking the tagging system a bit, so let us know if you have more ideas!
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 :
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 agree that collections of "we investigated a possible intervention/focus area and decided not to go for it for XYZ reasons" could be a really useful resource.
It's also probably worth emphasizing that there aren't causes that are universally rejected by EA as a community or movement. (As you say, this might be organization-specific: some organizations will have decided to focus on some "causes" -- specific risks, or specific philosophies or approaches to improving the world -- over others.)
I don't have a good answer to this, but I will say that the ... (read more)
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. :)
Excerpt from Deepfakes: A Grounded Threat Assessment - Center for Security and Emerging Technology (I haven't read the whole paper):
... (read more)This paper examines the technical literature on deepfakes to assess the threat they pose. It draws two conclusions. First, the malicious use of crudely generated deepfakes will become easier with time as the technology commodifies. Yet the current state of deepfake detection suggests that these fakes can be kept largely at bay.
Second, tailored deepfakes produced by technically sophisticated actors will represent the grea
Thank you!