All of mawa's Comments + Replies

I meant just the newsletter itself, not the linked posts.

I would really like a narration of new EA Organization Updates, and the EA Newsletter! For most posts I skim them first in order to check if I want to read them, but for the updates/newsletter I usually just read all of it, so that could be replaced well by audio for me.

3
D0TheMath
3y
A narration of the newsletter, or the posts linked in the newsletter?

I think reading Why We Sleep is good for some people, but may be harmful for others. 

If you are already convinced that sleep is really important, but find it hard to fall asleep, and therefore going to bed starts feeling aversive, then reading a lot about not sleeping enough will harm you will probably only increase anxiety, making it harder to fall asleep. 

In that case, I recommend reading Say Goodnight to Insomnia  by Greg D. Jacobs instead. I read Why We Sleep first, and then Say Goodnight to Insomnia, and it is remarkable how different t... (read more)

We’re particularly interested in hearing about things that you, personally, would actually read // use // engage with


I would personally be excited about a filtering tool similar to the 80000 Hours job-board, that lets you filter resources for background, cause area, role type, etc. (E.g. "If your background is in economics, and you are particularly interested in animal welfare, we would recommend the following resources" )

Background:

I would distinguish the different concreteness levels of career advice/career-relevant information, maybe like this:

1. Genera... (read more)

2
omernevo
3y
Thank you! This viewpoint it really helpful. It seems relatively easy to look at a specific article and figure out who it might be useful for, but creating a generic way to organize articles that would work for most people is quite a bit harder. And I agree that concreteness is definitely something we should be explicitly thinking about when creating content and organizing it. And I agree regarding both downsides \ risks. They're definitely something to think about. The first might mean that this is something that might come later if we don't find a relatively simple way of doing this. The second can probably be mitigated to a large extent if some effort but requires more thinking in any case. We've discussed this in related contexts (making sure we don't counterfactually cause readers not to engage with other existing quality content), but not in this context.

Thanks for writing up your thoughts on the incident and showing that much respect to both sides of the argument!

I'm a bit confused about the last parts (7. and 8.):
1. Would a rephrasing of 8. as "Some of the people who spent a lot of time having private conversations with community members think that EA should be more cautious and attentive to diversity. And some of them don't. So we can't actually draw conclusions from this." be fair?
2. By whom is EA is presented as some kind of restrictive orthodoxy? So far, I did not get the i... (read more)

9
Aaron Gertler
4y
1. Yes, you could rephrase it that way. I've spoken directly to the people who think we should be more cautious/attentive, but only heard secondhand from them about the people who think this is a bad idea (and have talked to lots of community members about these topics -- I've met people with views all over the spectrum who haven't had as many such conversations). 2. I was referring mostly to the comments that popped up in the various Twitter threads surrounding the decision, one of which I linked at the top of the piece. A few quotes along these lines: "Effective altruism has been shown to be little more than the same old successor-ideology wearing rationalism as a skin-suit." "They believe they are in a war and the people like Hanson are the enemy." "If EA starts worrying about PR and being inoffensive, what even is the point anymore? Make EA about EA, not about signaling." "There always was something 'off' about so-called effective altruism." Some of these types of comments probably come from people who never liked or cared about EA much and are just happy to have something to criticize. But I sometimes see similar remarks from people who are more invested in EA and seem to think it's become much more censorious over time. While there is some truth to that (as I mention in the piece), I think the overall picture is much more complicated than these kinds of claims make it out to be. ***** Regarding trade-offs, that would be a much longer post. You could check the "Diversity and Inclusion" tag, which includes some Forum posts along similar themes. Kelsey Piper's writing on "competing access needs" is also relevant.