Exciting! Are you eligible for gift-aid in the UK? Seems like it is based around US donors so far (reasonable triage). 

Hey Vasco:

It's likely we should invest in public mod comments again, as this case underlines, it's pretty unfair to Yarrow to have to explain it to their interlocutors. 

As you might guess I strongly disagree with pretty much every aspect of Yarrow's framing of the rate-limit we applied to their account. I'll talk to other mods about whether we want to reinstate the public comments, and if so I'll share more detail on the Yarrow decision in said public comment. 

A quick version is that we made this decision because of the way that Yarrow disagrees with people, not the fact that they do. Primarily because of repeatedly sneer-y and snarky comments^[1], but also because of generally unproductive and attritional disagreements, for example, see this description I sent to Yarrow at the time of the rate-limit:

"There is a clear pattern in your comments — you seem to have particularly unproductive disagreements with other users, generally due to an overly literal interpretation on your part, or excess defensiveness. This is no great sin of yours, but it isn’t great for the quality of Forum discussion, especially when you are naturally so prolific."

This wasn't a decision taken lightly (many gdocs involved), as I also said in the message: "I still think you could be a particularly valuable Forum user if you changed how you engaged a bit". 

If readers take anything away from this comment - I want to underline that we really don't want to discourage disagreement on this platform. It's a key part of our theory of why this forum is valuable. But valuable disagreement requires good faith and mutual understanding. Another line I sent to Yarrow:   

"Critical voices like yours are a crucial part of a functioning epistemic (or epistemological if you prefer) community, but if we aren't careful about how we integrate more spirited voices, we could end up with a breakdown of trust and understanding on our platform."

PS- I haven't spoken to the mod team about this so these are my takes. 

 

1. ^{^}

   And incidentally I disagree with the line: "The mods seem pretty reluctant to moderate for civility on the EA Forum in general, and mostly just let things slide". If you see someone breaking our civility norms, please report the comment or post in the three dot menu. 

Would Granola separate the speakers in the transcript?

I've been recording using Mac's native voice recorder, and asking Claude to clean up or summarise the transcript. Downside is that it doesn't recognise different voices. 

For that you'd probably need a specialist app (podcast apps work, but I'm sure there's a simpler solution). I'd also love a solution here - I'm so crap at taking notes so I love a transcript. 

Biggest one for me is the meta-skill of asking it to make skills for tasks I want it to do in more than one chat. I can now make an early draft of the EA Newsletter almost entirely with a chain of claude skills. 

Edit: 'early draft' because they are each a bit crap in their own way. They do get better every month though. 

+1, so many of my wishlist conversations to get on the Forum are in slacks somewhere. This is a great example of how we can make those convos public. 

Hey Joe - you don't need to disclose AI use if less than 10% of your text is likely LLM-generated. In this case pangram doesn't suspect AI-use, so I'd guess you don't need to disclose anything. 

If you avert a existential extinction level disaster in 2030 that allows future people in 2100 to live and flourish, but a second disaster (of the same or a similar type) needs to be averted in 2050, how do you avoid double counting that life saved?

The short answer is that you discount the value of the future you save based on the expected number of lives in it. 

I.e. if, in a simple case, you know the Sun will turn into a red giant and kill us all in 2100, then averting extinction this year would says 10s of billions of lives, but no more. This is more complicated when we have X% chance of going extinct by 2100, Y% by 2200 etc... 

I'm less sure what to say about Paul's point that saving a life today = many more lives that exist in the future. I'd guess that demographic projections lower the impact of this on the calculation (i.e. we expect a lower population anyway), but I'm not sure. A more general response is that basically everything except preventing extinction washes out in the long-term, so increasing population over the next 100 years would be no exception. 
 

Hmm yes - would it also work if it was a coloured callout you could get used to and ignore? I explicitly want newer users to know what the disclosures mean - i.e. a colour code without any text would be too esoteric. 

And also, AFAIK if you volunteer your ticket is free :)