Hello! I'm Toby. I'm Content Manager at CEA. I work with the Online Team to make sure the Forum is a great place to discuss doing the most good we can. You'll see me posting a lot, authoring the EA Newsletter and curating Forum Digests, making moderator comments and decisions, and more.
Before working at CEA, I studied Philosophy at the University of Warwick, and worked for a couple of years on a range of writing and editing projects within the EA space. Recently I helped run the Amplify Creative Grants program, to encourage more impactful podcasting and YouTube projects. You can find a bit of my own creative output on my blog, and my podcast feed.
Reach out to me if you're worried about your first post, want to double check Forum norms, or are confused or curious about anything relating to the EA Forum.
I think I'll stick with this current statement - partly because it's now been announced for a while so people may be relying on its specific implications for their essays, but also because this new formulation (to me) doesn't seem to avoid the problem you raise, that it isn't clear what your vote would be if you think the same type of work is recommended for both. Perhaps the solution to that issue is in footnote 3 on the current banner - if you think that the value from working on AI takeover is mostly from avoiding extinction, then you should vote agree. If you think it is from increasing the value of the future by another means (such as more democratic control of the future by humans), then you should vote disagree.
A bit of a change for next week's debate week... When you vote on the banner and leave a comment, that comment will appear in a discussion thread. When it does, it'll display your vote, so that readers can put your comment in context, like so:
Let me know if you have any questions - and see you for debate week next week!
Ah yes I agree that the 1 dimensional slider doesn't represent anyone's entire opinion. But I also think it shouldn't - this is why debate week is also a week for writing posts, and we integrate comments with the banner. There are many considerations that could affect your vote, and that's great - that's (hopefully) why the week will be generative.
I'm not sure whether to count AI takeover as extinction or just as a worse future - maybe I should define extinction as actually just literal extinction, and leave scenarios with very small populations out of the definition. Any thoughts on the best way to define it here? I agree it needs some refining.
Yep it'll all be in the comments, so if you aren't around you can read it later (and I'm sure a bunch of the conversations will continue, just potentially without the guests)
this was a good flag btw - I've changed the first sentence to be clearer!