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I just want to say that I’m really, really glad that I got the chance to work with JP, and I think JP’s work has contributed a bunch for the Forum.

Below I’m sharing some quick misc notes on why that is.

Meta: sharing a public comment like this on a friend’s post is pretty weird for me! But JP’s work has mostly stayed behind the scenes and has thus gotten significantly less acknowledgement than it deserves, IMO, so I did feel the urge to post this kind of thing publicly. As a compromise between those feelings, y’all are getting the comment along with this meta flag.

Misc—not exhaustive! --- notes on some subtle but important ways JP has shaped (my experience on) the Forum (team)

• Deep models of how things work. Conversations with JP have massively shaped the way I think about the Forum^[1] . My models would have been shallower and less accurate without that. More broadly, I think we would have made worse choices as a team if JP had not been not bringing his models in.

  • Quick list of some specific topics in which my models have been especially obviously shaped^[2] by JP:

    • “acculturation” stuff, the role of trust and how it works, what causes some authors to post, [productivity] & how teams (should) work (lots of good blog posts JP pointed me to!), why the rationality & EA communities have developed the way they have & how do they actually work now, [a bunch of classic EA/​rationalist writing/​models that I hadn’t encountered but have from JP], what it means for someone to be aligned in a certain way, etc.

  • In some cases I felt like “JP energy” was a very strong protective barrier between us and potential Goodharting-style mistakes^[3]

    • Over time I think I was increasingly playing a similar role, too, but could do so largely because I had absorbed a bunch of “JP energy” earlier on (and I felt that we were also helping each other improve our models). It wasn’t just me; IMO the whole team was absorbing & refining these models, and without JP this would have gone much worse.

  • (Some fraction of this “deep models” superpower, I think, can be attributed to the fact that JP had been working on the Forum for a very long time.^[4] To me this kind of thing is strong evidence of the value of sticking around, fwiw; you become a really strong pillar and an incredibly rich source of information. But length-of-Forum-tenure is not the only explanation for this superpower, IMO. (Stuff like “deeply caring”, “willingness to mull”, “being a nerd about systems”, … comes to mind.))

• Integrity /​ being a compass /​ norm/​culture-setting. JP “set the tone” for a good chunk of how I related to my Forum role. He was also one of the first people I turned to (and found really useful to consult) when I felt conflicted about decisions I was trying to make or about internal (e.g. CEA) dynamics.

  • One illustration, from one of the earliest serious incidents I worked on as a moderator (note that my recollection is fuzzy!):

    • What happened: mods had reason to be suspicious, but we weren’t sure if the user in question had actually done the specific norm-violating thing because the relevant information (e.g. vote patterns or something) was private (even if in theory accessible to the team). The Forum privacy expectations^[5] at the time were more confusing/​unwritten, IIRC, and we didn’t have a standard process for handling this kind of issue. (IIRC) JP kicked off and arranged a (multi-person?) process that got us the key info while ensuring that no one actually saw the relevant private info.

    • I remember being really impressed by this. It can seem like a fairly minor thing — realistically this wasn’t that important, it wasn’t the kind of thing where people would be surprised that this info was accessible to us or expect us to be super careful, etc. But being the kind of person/​team that handles these situations with care/​integrity is really valuable, IMO, and it sets an important team norm. The whole thing left me with a stronger/​more visceral sense of responsibility about how we should handle things.

  • Talking to JP helped me untangle some confusing/​stressful internal team/​CEA/​stakeholder dynamics, and deal with them in ways I endorsed more.^[6]

  • And it was just very energizing to work with someone who loves the Forum and the EA community :)

• Personal side—helping with development & encouragement, being kind

  • JP is great at noticing how certain habits/​patterns can be improved (and explaining), sharing productivity tips, etc. I gained a lot by bringing up various issues and working through them with him, or by following his advice on tech/​systems. (In fact I’m still taking advantage of this opportunity — highly recommend for those with the privilege.)

  • JP helped me “back myself” & fight back some of the imposter syndrome that I started with.

  • Even when I’d just started at CEA, JP was just really warm & kind to me, which makes a big difference to a recent college graduate who’s just moved to a different country.

(And obviously there was the whole “running the tech” side of things, and then the whole “running the Online Team” thing, lol… Have I mentioned this list is not exhaustive? This is basically an unfiltered babble of thoughts, but I hope it clarifies some of why I’m so grateful for JP’s work on the Forum.)

I’m really looking forward to seeing what JP does next.

1. ^

   and probably also my models of EA, and stuff like “how organizations work”

2. ^

   (To be clear, it’s not like I was constantly in agreement! Our models often diverged, or we felt different points mattered more or were better frames for understanding things, etc. But this was also very useful.)

3. ^

   I’m not saying that we were close to hardcore Goodharting or similar, to be clear! Although I do feel like there were some potential naivete-driven mistakes that we avoided because of this kind of thing

4. ^

   By relevant standards

5. ^

   i.e. what users should expect about when the Online Team might look at some user info that is normally private

6. ^

   One quite salient example for me: I felt conflicted and stressed about various Forum/​EV-related things in late 2022/​early 2023 [a] (e.g. I was pretty upset about the EV comms policy). Conversations with JP helped me untangle my feelings and thoughts and figure out what I endorsed doing. In general, having JP on the team — even before he took over from Ben — was really important for me during this time.

   [a] the uptick in Forum engagement must have increased the burden, I suppose

Thank you for your years of service!

I’m sure a lot of regular and occasional posters like myself appreciate that building and maintaining something like this is a ton of often underappreciated work, the kind that often only gets noticed on the rare occasion when something actually goes wrong and needs to be fixed ASAP.

You gave us a place to be EAs and be a part of a community of like-minded folk in a way that’s hard to find anywhere else. For that I’m grateful, and I’m sure others are as well.

Again, thank you.

And, best of luck with wherever your future career takes you!

Thank you for your amazing work on building the EA Forum! Having been involved in a few different communities/​social issues, there is no discursive & knowledge-sharing infrastructure even close to the quality of the EA Forum. It’s a true asset to the EA movement and no doubt responsible for lots of impact, be it understanding new priority cause areas, high-impact careers or something else!

We all really appreciate the work you’ve done for the Forum over these seven years!

Let me show you what the Forum 1.0 looked like seven years ago. … It didn’t work on mobile

And now time for quibbles! The mobile implementation was a bit of a hack, and there were occasional elements that were way the wrong size, but it did work! (#65, initial effort). You can play with the archive; here’s the old Forum on 2017-02-12.

The new one is of course way better ;)

Thank you for the wonderful job you did—the Forum’s navigation and ease of use is remarkable!

Thank you very much. Both EA and Less Wrong are exceptional places. To some extent, the model of what Internet shall be, and we lost somewhere in 2010s. We will recover this open high quality Intenet at a large scale. Meanwhile we have this.

JP, thanks for your work on the forum and digests! Wishing you all the best in what’s next. :)

Thank you so much for this forum, the style of discourse is unparalleled and it I’m sure a lot of design decisions made it this way.

Thanks for all your work on the Forum, JP!

Wishing all the best in your next adventure, JP.

Thank you, JP. I wish you the best in your next activities.