Mini EA Forum Update

We now have a unified @mention feature in our editor! You can use it to add links to posts, tags, and users. Thanks so much to @Vlad Sitalo — both for the GitHub PR introducing this feature, and for time and again making useful improvements to our open source codebase. 💜

I think those are both good points. In my experience, different subsets of EA can vary a lot in terms of cause prioritization. Though I'm guessing that Aaron means something slightly different than you do when he says "consensus EA".

the risk that the results have been affected by off-Forum advocacy and organizing

I'm not sure if this addresses your concern, but just want to clarify that accounts can only vote if they were created before Oct 22, 2024. I think that having to have created an account prior to the announcement of the donation election is a medium bar (at least I think it's higher than Manifund's event was) — it's quite easy to use the Forum without creating an account, so people who create an account tend not to be casual readers.

I do think it would be interesting to compare the overall results with those of the subset of users who have earned at least some karma.

Personally I found it really helpful to listen through the Spotify playlist of Marginal Funding Week posts during a recent flight. (Note that unfortunately many of the candidates aren't in that playlist, apologies!)

In particular, I found @Holly Elmore ⏸️ 🔸's PauseAI post surprisingly convincing, given that I am generally a bit skeptical of pausing AI as a strategy for reducing risk. I'm also sympathetic to the argument that the EA Forum should allocate our money to charities that are harder to fundraise for elsewhere, and PauseAI scores well there. So I've made PauseAI my top choice, which I didn't spend too much time debating since my one vote isn't currently the winning one. I may revisit my vote if that changes.

In general I recommend listening to the Spotify playlist (or even reading through all the Marginal Funding Week posts/comments if you're extra virtuous!) — I found the experience both inspiring (hearing about all the work people are doing to improve the world) and sad (realizing how much more money we need to do all these things).

I think this post makes some great points, thanks for sharing! :) And I think it's especially helpful to hear from your perspective as someone who does grantmaking at OP.

I really appreciate the addition of concrete examples. In fact, I would love to hear more examples if you have time — since you do this kind of research as your job I'm sure you have valuable insights to share, and I expect that you can shift the donations of readers. I'd also be curious to hear where you personally donate, but no pressure, I totally understand if you'd prefer to keep that private.

Work in sub-areas that major funders have decided not to fund

I feel like this is an important point. Do you have any specific AI risk reduction sub-areas in mind?

Thanks so much for flagging this, and really sorry for the mistakes. I've gone through and updated both, hopefully they are now both up-to-date. Please let me know if you see any other issues.

Thank you for doing this work. I’m very supportive of productive criticism on the Forum. As a moderator, I’d like to recommend this post for tips on how to make criticism more productive. EA is a collective project, and I think that steps such as sharing this feedback with ACE directly and writing a less aggressive title for your post would improve the outcomes of this work.

Does Jesse have an EA Forum account? We can manually add them as a co-author — feel free to contact us with Jesse's account info. :)

Appreciate the response! To be clear, I am genuinely glad that you wrote the quick take, so I don't want to discourage you from doing more off-the-cuff quick takes in the future. Hopefully hearing my perspective was helpful as well. I'm glad to hear that you don't think we are actually fighting. :)

On collaborating/cutting costs: my outside impression is that AIM is already quite good about keeping their costs low and is not shy about being proactive. So my view is something like, if they thought it would be good for the world to collaborate more closely with CEA, I trust that they would have acted upon that belief. This is something that I respect about AIM (at least the version that's in my head, since I don't know them). 

Thank you for sharing this Timothy. I left a long comment on the LW version of the post. I'm happy to talk about this more with you or Elizabeth — if you're interested, you're welcome to reach out to me directly.