It's not clear that EA funding relies on Facebook/Meta much anymore. The original tweet is deleted, and this post is 3 years old but Holden wrote of Cari and Dustin's wealth:

I also note that META stock is not as large a part of their portfolio as some seem to assume

You could argue Facebook/Meta is what made Dustin wealthy originally, but probably not correct to say that EA funding "deeply relies" on Meta today.

Yep, I think this is right, but we don't totally rely on these kinds of surveys!

We also conduct follow-up surveys to check what actually happens a few months after each event and unsurprisingly, you do see intentions and projects dissipate (as well as many materialising). A problem we face is that these surveys have much lower response rates.

Other more reliable evidence about the impact of EAG comes from surveys which ask people how they found impactful work (e.g., the EA Survey, Open Phil's surveys), and EAG is cited a lot. We'll usually turn to this kind of evidence to think about our impact, though end-of-event feedback surveys are useful for feedback about content, venue, catering, attendee interactions etc. and you can also do things like discounting reported impact in end-of-event surveys using follow-up survey data.

I'm reading "OK" as "morally permissible" rather than "not harmful". E.g., I think it's also "OK" to eat meat, even though I think it's causing harm.

(Not saying you should clarify the poll, it's clear enough and will probably produce interesting results either way!)

I thought this was a great post, thanks for sharing! I think you're unusually productive at identifying important insights in ethics and philosophy, please keep it up!

I strongly upvoted this. I don't endorse all your claims, but this is really easy to engage with, a very important topic and I admire how you charitably worked within the framework Shapira offered while ending up in a very different place.

Thanks. In the original quick take, you wrote "thousands of independent and technologically advanced colonies", but here you write "hundreds of millions".

If you think there's a 1 in 10,000 or 1 in a million chance of any independent and technologically advanced colony creating astronomical suffering, it matters if there are thousands or millions of colonies. Maybe you think it's more like 1 in 100, and then thousands (or more) would make it extremely likely.
 

probably near 100% if digital sentience is possible… it only takes one

Can you expand on this? I guess the stipulation of thousands of advanced colonies does some of the work here, but this still seems overconfident to me given how little we understand about digital sentience.

I found this moving and enlightening, thanks for sharing. Looking forward to the series!

• EAGx undergraduate acceptance rate across 2024 and 2025 = ~82%
• EAGx first-timer undergraduate acceptance rate across 2024 and 2025 = ~76%

Obvious caveat that if we tell lots of people that the acceptance rate is high, we might attract more people without any context on EA and the rate would go down.

(I've not closely checked the data)

I'd feel pretty gaslit if someone said EA was going swimmingly and unaffected by the tribulations of the last couple of years, perhaps less so if they think there's been a bounce back after an initial decline but, you know, I'd want to see the data for that.

I agree with this fwiw, that seems fair