All of Lizka's Comments + Replies

Thanks for flagging this! I'll update the website with "likely June, July, or August" and similar language for now. 

I really enjoy Cage's piece

Thank you for sharing these! (A great way to learn Illustrator, I'd bet.)

Good point. Also, Bosch's stuff (e.g. the Garden of Earthly Delights, which you linked) has a bunch of moralizing/satirizing that's arguably relevant. For instance, his famous "Ship of Fools" painting is an illustration of Plato's allegory representing "the problems of governance prevailing in a political system not based on expert knowledge" (or generally coordination issues, rhetoric-vs-demonstrated-skill, etc.).

Thanks for sharing this!

I absolutely love that Ted Chiang story (and so many of the others, in both that collection and the other).

Thank you so much for the other recommendations!

Good point. Here are a couple of historical pieces & thoughts on types of things historical art can do.

[Disclaimer: written quickly, links are half-assed.]

• Picasso's Guernica (see Wikipedia -- it's a very famous anti-war/anti-Fascist painting from 1937). I think it probably deserves its fame as a powerful way to communicate the horror of the war.

There are many more extremely moving pieces of art from other terrible historical events. Notebooks from GULAG camps by Eufrosinia Kersnovskaya survive. (Some images here --- note that they're quite graphic.... (read more)

This post is concise and clear, and was great for helping me understand the topics covered when I was confused about them. Plus, there are diagrams! I'd be excited to see more posts like this.
[Disclaimer: this is just a quick review.]

This story is really beautiful.

(Thank you for writing it!)

I really appreciate this comment-- thank you for taking the time to write it out.

Please let me know if 1) you know of something I can read to get a summary of the relevant facts (this is really vague, but maybe someone knows a good resource), or 2) you know of ways I can help with this. (Writing letters somewhere? Volunteering some hours for a project? Donating? Posting on social media?)

This news has been driving me crazy, so I might as well try to channel that productively.

(So far, I posted a fiction review I thought was very relevant when I first read the news, but I wish I had a better sense of what would actually be helpful.)

This is it, all the people involved. There is no team B working on this.

That is really awful to hear, and I'm incredibly grateful to the people who are working on this.

Thanks for pointing this out--- and I'd love to hear how I can help change this fact.

Thanks for pointing this out! You're right, and I've edited the post to clarify.

Thanks for coming to the workshop, and for writing this note!

Uncertainty is super important, and it's really useful to flag. It's possible I should have brought it up more during the workshop, and I'll consider doing that if I ever run something similar.

However, I do think part of the point of a Fermi estimate is to be easy and quick.

In practice, the way I'll sometimes incorporate uncertainty into my Fermis is by running the numbers in three ways:

1. my "best guess" for every component (2 hours of podcast episode, 100 episodes),
2. the "worst (reasonable) case" for every component (only 90? episodes have been produced, a

Thanks so much for taking the time to write up these thoughts. Lots of people seem to be having this experience, so I really appreciate that you brought it up.

We have in fact been prioritizing one-on-one meetings, as attendees have been reporting that they get a lot of value from them. And we’re always looking for ways to improve our approach, so we would love ideas on how to better support those meetings.

It sounds like you are pointing out the following things: 1) Some of the most engaged attendees are in one-on-one meetings for most of the conference, wh... (read more)

Thanks so much for sharing your experience! I think your suggestions are excellent. We’re exploring ways to support group meetings and shorter meeting times at EA Global.

Thanks for this comment, and for boosting Charles’ message!

Thanks for these comments! I agree: more nooks and quiet spaces would be great.

I really appreciate this feedback. Communicating uncertainty in reasonable ways and getting the “message of EAG” right is super difficult, so I think there’s probably a lot of room for brainstorming on this front.

Thanks for this idea! This sounds interesting, so I’m curious if you have more thoughts on how this would work, and whether you feel it should be integrated into an “EA Global” conference, or if you are picturing it as a separate event.

I recently ran a quick Fermi workshop, and have been asked for notes several times since. I've realized that it's not that hard for me to post them, and it might be relatively useful for someone.

Quick summary of the workshop

1. What is a Fermi estimate?
2. Walkthrough of the main steps for Fermi estimation
   1. Notice a question
   2. Break it down into simpler sub-questions to answer first
   3. Don’t stress about the details when estimating answers to the sub-questions
   4. Consider looking up some numbers
   5. Put everything together
   6. Sanity check
3. Different models: an example
4. Exampl

Thanks for this post! I appreciated it. 

It seems worth listing or crowd-sourcing articles that people should focus on, and attaching that to existing project compilations and resources. (Michael seems to point in this direction in a comment, too.)

Maybe you or someone else can write up a quick list of topics to explore, or a meta strategy for identifying such topics? One thing that springs to mind as a possible starting point is simply checking to see which of the EA Forum Wiki tags/pages don't have a corresponding Wikipedia page, or have a poor one (a... (read more)

Meta point: I appreciate the test and how it's being addressed. 

Jargon glossaries sound like a great idea! (I'd be very excited to see them integrated with the wiki.)

A post I quite like on the topic of jargon: 3 suggestions about jargon in EA. The tl;dr is that jargon is relatively often misused, that it's great to explain or hyperlink a particular piece of jargon the first time it's used in a post/piece of writing (if it's being used), and that we should avoid incorrectly implying that things originated in EA. 

(I especially like the second point; I love hyperlinks and appreciate it when people give me a term to G... (read more)

Superman gets to business [private submission to the Creative Writing Contest from a little while back]

“I don’t understand,” she repeated. “I mean, you’re Superman.”

“Well yes,” said Clark. “That’s exactly why I need your help! I can’t spend my time researching how to prioritize while I should be off answering someone’s call for help.”

“But why prioritize? Can’t you just take the calls as they come?”

Lois clicked “Send” on the email she’d been typing up and rejoined the conversation. “See, we realized that we’ve been too reactive. We were taking calls as they... (read more)

I just want to link this article on "Research Debt" and the distillation of ideas: https://distill.pub/2017/research-debt/

A couple of passages:

There’s a tradeoff between the energy put into explaining an idea, and the energy needed to understand it. On one extreme, the explainer can painstakingly craft a beautiful explanation, leading their audience to understanding without even realizing it could have been difficult. On the other extreme, the explainer can do the absolute minimum and abandon their audience to struggle. [...] Research debt is the accumul

I agree with this. I also think writing can only be "bad" with respect to a goal of some kind, whereas it can be "boring" regardless of its goal.

Very often, that goal is to engage the reader, communicate clearly and memorably, etc. -- for those things, boring -> bad.

A couple of random/extreme examples off the top of my head, assuming a generic purpose of "being useful to readers" (I haven't thought this through):

• Legal texts are (probably) often boring writing but not bad writing.
• Some Buzzfeed articles are (probably) bad writing but not boring writi

I find I really like this comment. I don't really know exactly why and don't have time to spend figuring that out, but I figured I'd put that out there. (I suppose if you're looking for encouragement to write more, there it is. )

Also, +1 to "people are more likely to act when emotionally engaged rather than merely intellectually."

I don’t have time to go into great depth for every one of your questions, but I’ll try to give quick replies to as many as I can.

It’s fair to separate errors from disagreements, and I focused mostly on disagreements in my original reply. (There are more things that should be classified as disagreements than should be classified as errors, and I think that the disagreements in this case mattered more to the discussion, which is why I focused on them. It’s possible I should have deleted the “some errors” line in my reply once I drafted it.) Things I think ar... (read more)

I think it's very important that CEA in particular is highly transparent about the decisions it makes and why it makes them – to the point, if necessary, of investing in extra capacity to make this extra transparency possible.

I agree, for many forms of transparency (like information people need to make decisions), though less so for other forms (our internal reasoning about event management). We’re doing a lot right now to scale up our capacity.

“ I do think there was quite a bit that could have been done to increase transparency relatively easily, inc

I think this is a complete list of everything that was done, before and after the decision to expand. Is that correct? If so, what's the subset of things that were done to compensate for expansion?

Some of the things I listed were added to the COVID Protocol only after the decision to expand. One example of this is that we weren’t planning on requiring tests before we decided to expand. We also decided to closely monitor the number of people who were present in any given room, especially during lunch, when we thought more people would be unmasked. (Very ... (read more)

This is true, thank you for pointing it out! I plan on following up with people who could not attend for a bunch of different reasons, and this is one such reason. I really do appreciate you pointing it out, though, since it could be a real confounder, and I'm editing a note in my original response to that end.

This is just a super quick note that there is also

• this list of groups on the EA Hub: https://resources.eahub.org/learn/connect/ and
• this post about the Creatives & Communicators group: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/3sRZkuQDbss3vwddk/ea-creatives-and-communicators-slack

Note/disclaimer: I recently started working on the Events Team (I do communications and impact assessment), and I shared this response with them before posting it (for edits and comments). Still, the thoughts here are mine.

The tl;dr:

I think you bring up some good points. I agree that we could have planned further in advance, been more transparent, and done more to reduce COVID risk at the event. I think these are important points, and I’ll discuss them below.

But in the end, I think it was right to increase the size of EAG: it roughly doubled the value prod... (read more)

Reflection on my time as a Visiting Fellow at Rethink Priorities this summer

I was a Visiting Fellow at Rethink Priorities this summer. They’re hiring right now, and I have lots of thoughts on my time there, so I figured that I’d share some. I had some misconceptions coming in, and I think I would have benefited from a post like this, so I’m guessing other people might, too. Unfortunately, I don’t have time to write anything in depth for now, so a shortform will have to do.

Fair warning: this shortform is quite personal and one-sided. In particular, when I t... (read more)

I'm highly enjoying the "death of the author" interpretation (and even just its existence), thanks! :)

Fair point, thank you! If I have some time, I might replace the sprout with some other kind of risk (maybe something flammable), but I haven't though about it very carefully yet, and would definitely take suggestions. 

For what it's worth, I highly enjoyed reading this interaction:) +1 to Dario and everyone else here. 

Thanks for the feedback! I definitely dislike propaganda, and would be curious to see which parts felt the most propaganda-y to you. Also, to echo Dario, below--- I appreciate your very kind delivery of the negative feedback. :)
I don't know if I will ever end up spending much time improving the story, as my life is pretty hectic at the moment, but I would be interested in any specific improvements you suggest. (So far, I haven't really tried much, but I've considered ways of addressing the inadequacy of the oak sprout metaphor by e.g. replacing it with something flammable.) 

To be honest, I didn't think very hard about the names. The thought process was roughly: 1) I want to make a story whose characters are birds, and I could have a smart black bird. 2) Incidentally, I like that it doesn't have to be technical or complicated--- there are birds you can call "blackbirds," and there are birds you can call "bluebirds," so 3) I'll call my characters "black bird" and "blue bird." And I liked the colors this suggested, so that didn't veto the decision. :) 

In any case, I'm glad you liked it, thanks! 

Thanks for the comments! The urgency argument makes sense. I'm not sure if I'll end up changing things, but I'll consider it, and thanks for pointing this out! 

Thanks a bunch--- I'm glad you liked it!

Thank you for this comment! 

Thank you! I'm glad. :)

An update: after a bit of digging, I discovered this post, "Should marginal longtermist donations support fundamental or intervention research?", which contains a discussion on a topic that is quite close to "should EA value foundational (science/decision theory) research," (in the pathway (1) section of my post). The conclusions of the post I found do not fit into my vague impressions of "the consensus." In particular, the conclusion of that post is that longtermist research hours should often be spent on fundamental research (which is defined by its goal... (read more)

For what it's worth, I've seen "pathway to impact" used in the way you seem to use "impact chain" (e.g. and e.g., and I used it a bunch), and it seems somewhat more natural to me. It's possible that "pathway to impact" is just a niche term that clicked with me, though, and I definitely agree that it's a useful concept. 

Thank you for this comment! 

I intuitively would’ve drawn the institution blob in your sketch higher, i.e. I’d have put fewer than (eyeballing) 30% of institutions in the negatively aligned space (maybe 10%?). 

I won't redraw/re-upload this sketch, but I think you are probably right. 

In moments like this, including a quick poll into the forum to get a picture what others think would be really useful.

That's a really good idea, thank you! I'll play around with that.

re: "argument for how an abstract intervention that improves decision-making woul

I think this is a really cool work/parable: "That Alien Message." It's by Eliezer Yudkowsky, so I don't know if it's too well known to count, but it still seems worth collecting in this context. (The topic, or "relevance" from an EA point of view, of the story is a spoiler, but should be pretty clear.)