All of tilboy's Comments + Replies

Hi Bella,
thank you!
No, after 12 months we forwards the donation to our global health and poverty fund (https://effektiv-spenden.org/spendenfonds-armut-bekaempfen/ , german only). So in any case 100% of the donation benefits effective charities :)

Hey Evie, thanks for sharing! Really like the projection model.
Do you have additional ideas for why prototypical nerds maybe struggle with networking? In my case I find it sometimes hard to  "sell" myself because it can feel like bending the truth a bit too much and my default is just being honest. 

Loved it! Had to read this paragraph twice, but it's great:

Audiences sat amazed at the sacrifices you asked of them, as did I. Critics quipped that you would beggar us all in the name of harmonious circuitry.  And then there was that kid – in Milwaukee, I think – who asked what Shakespeare was worth if a click could create a hundred trillion of him?  It was the way he said “click” that caught my attention. You answered thinking his problem turned on numbers, when it was your power that he could not digest.

1
eschwitz
2y
Thanks! :-)

glad to hear that! share it far and wide ;)
yea, writing this a bit earlier would have been good, next time i guess :)

Thanks for doing this to you three! Two questions:

  • Do you see any social dangers from psychedelic use and the associated insights becoming more widespread? I am thinking of for example new forms of religious sectarianism through psychedelic induced spiritual insights, less caring about one's own and other people's suffering through a complete transcendence of the self and the identification with conscious states, etc.
  • Do you see any potential medical use of DMT?
1
Dr. Matthew W. Johnson
3y
Yes, I see a potential danger, and I've described it in at least of couple of previous posts here. But I think with the right framing we can minimize such harms and maximize benefits. And yes, I absolutely see therapeutic potential in DMT.  DMT will surely be developed into an approved medicine in my opinion, although we need to follow the data of course.
  • What are your thoughts about the long-term future of EA discussion culture, especially on the forum?
  • Are there any ideas to extend discussions on the forum beyond the post & comment model, maybe integrating other communication forms like informal short-form text conversations, voice chat, etc.?
7
JP Addison
3y
1. I don’t think I can give most of my thoughts about the future of EA discussion without a post-length treatment. That said, when I look out at the rest the world, and I look at the EA Forum and other EA discussion spaces, I’m really happy with how we compare. The future will be determined by the delicate balance between keeping our epistemics much better than the surrounding world, while also not growing stagnant and insular. 2. I definitely want the Forum to expand its reach beyond the post-comment-vote system we’re currently using. I view Question posts as a step in this direction. Stack overflow seems very meaningfully different from Reddit, despite them both being text-based. That said, I’m somewhat conservative in how much I think we should be trying to reinvent online discussion. LW is definitely trying to do this, and we do use their experiments (cf our interesting tag-relevance system), but I think there’s more potential for already-proven features that we haven’t added yet, like reactions perhaps.

Yea, I think so too. If you have the motivation to look at a video of factory farming before entering the supermarket every time, you likely also have the motivation to just buy what you really want to buy anyway. So it would be more effective if the content is presented automatically through smartphone notifications, background images on your laptop, printed out versions around your house, etc. In any case, it could be the critical extra push for some people.

Figuring out how best/most convincingly to convey the basic EA arguments around expansion of our ... (read more)

if im not mistaken, when you hover over the link to a post you just see the beginning of the post, right? this sometimes is not very useful. maybe you could give post creators another text field ("thumbnail"/"preview"/"tl;dr") where they can explicitly fill in what should be shown when hovering over the link. this field should probably be character limited then. this text should be displayed at the top of the post, too. (and if posters dont fill it out it could just fall back to showing the beginning of the post).

2
JP Addison
4y
What you describe is almost exactly identical to an admin feature that we have from LessWrong. Which isn't much help to you yet, but might get released more widely.

or written by anyone but approved by the author?

1
Nathan Young
4y
Yeah that works too.

i would find it helpful to establish a norm to begin posts with a short (!) 'tl;dr'-section which summarizes the main results/arguments of the article, since sometimes it is hard to tell what a post is about only from the title/the preview one gets by hovering over the link.

5
Will Bradshaw
4y
I think it's already quite common for commenters on posts without these to request them; is there something in the UI you'd like to change to encourage this?
3
Nathan Young
4y
This needn't be written by the author - it could be added by higher karma readers, for instance.

thanks for the summary. useful for me since i dont know a lot about this subject yet. :)

would definitely also enjoy a bit more detail about the results of the research of the last years. like what are the major camps, arguments, open questions etc

Answer by tilboyJun 15, 20201
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i use evernote to keep longterm lists of books to read, business ideas, recipes, ...

i really like this 'perspectives' post format :)

An interesting idea for sure. I see two major points that would have to be clarified/speak against it.

1. is the question what kind of claim can be made about who this letter speaks for. Procedures to ensure such a letter truly speaks for 'the EA community' would be tricky to devise i think. The first reason is that opinions on many issues are very diverse. Secondly, the community is not organized strictly enough to plausibly establish 'representative voting' or a similar mechanism

2. I see a clear danger of politization of the movement b... (read more)

An interesting idea definitely, which also raises questions about the structure

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