Sarah Cheng

Software Engineer @ Centre for Effective Altruism
909 karmaJoined Oct 2018Working (6-15 years)Cambridge, MA, USA

Bio

Participation
4

I'm a software engineer at the Centre for Effective Altruism. I mostly work on the EA Forum.

We'd be happy to hear any feedback you have! :) Feel free to contact us or post in this suggestion thread.

Comments
68

Topic Contributions
31

A few quick things I would recommend (if you haven't already done them):

  1. Check out the map of community members to see if there are any people near you.
  2. See if there are any online groups that interest you - in particular, I would check out EA Anywhere.
  3. I've done both the introductory and in-depth EA Virtual Programs and I found them really helpful for me to learn and engage with EA ideas. The readings were great and I had some interesting discussions with my cohorts, plus kept in touch with some of them afterward! :)
  4. Since you are near Boston, I suggest you join the Boston Effective Altruism Facebook group. In particular, I know people have come from other nearby states to join the "Dinner and discussion" events, and you'll meet a pretty good mix of people there.

I'll bet EAF put a lot of thought into their palette.

As Ollie mentioned, I made the set you referenced for just this one thread. As far as I remember it was meant to to support positive vibes in that thread and was done very quickly, so I would not say a lot of thought went into that palette.

It's the "Saved & read" option in the profile photo dropdown menu:

"Filter by topics" lets you search for and select any number of topics, and the results will show anything that has all of the selected topics. Hope that helps!

Thanks for the feedback Linda! I believe you can accomplish this using the topic filters on our current search page, but please let me know if you run into any issues.

I agree that this should be a consideration. Based on the small amount of data I have talking with employees at major AI labs about this, I currently think that overall their workers are less concerned about safety than their management, so I'm worried this could be counterproductive.

Thanks for sharing your feedback! Responding to each point:

  1. I removed the profile button link because I found it slightly annoying that opening that menu on mobile also navigates you to your profile, plus I think it's unusual UX for the user menu button to also be a link.
  2. We recently changed this back, so now both the timestamp and the link icon navigate you to the comment permalink. We’ll probably change the link icon to copy the link to your clipboard instead.
  3. We didn't change the criteria for whether the vote arrows appear at the bottom of a post - we still use the same threshold (post is >300 words) as LW does. We did move the vote arrows from the right side of the title to the left side of the title on the post page. This makes the post page header more visually consistent with the post list item, which also has the karma info on the left of the title.

That's right, you should be able to mention users with @ and posts with #. However, it does seem like they're both currently broken, likely because we recently updated our search software. Thanks for flagging this! We'll look into it.

I definitely feel it was worth the time for me personally. It was great for learning about the field of AI alignment (problems and proposed solutions). I was hoping the course would spend more time on arguments for and against AI being an x-risk, but unfortunately there was little of that, so it didn't change my mind much.

I'm enjoying the podcast so far! One suggestion: I'd love if you could put links in the episode description for all the things you bring up during the episode (books, newsletters, articles, etc.), to make them easier to reference.

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