Requesting Help for a Compilation of Top EA Facebook Posts
In December 2015, Claire Zabel posted links to all posts in the EA Facebook group with 50 or more likes or comments. I think it’s time for a similar post. From what I understand, the most liked and most commented on posts can be found using the “My groups dashboard” feature on Facebook. Unfortunately, I do not have a Facebook account. I am posting in this thread to request that someone with a Facebook account post the most liked and most commented on posts as a reply to this comment. I can then go through each of them and extract the key information about each (see below) so people can see if there are any they want to read without clicking every single one. I would then post this information as its own forum post. Alternatively, you can do the extracting yourself and post it as a forum post yourself.
Format
Author: Initials are used to prevent future employers from easily associating the post with the author (unless the person is a prominent EA who is likely to remain in EA, in which case the full name is used).
Year: This can give people context as various ideas have become more or less accepted over time.
Text: If the full text is too long, an excerpt is chosen that encapsulates the post.
URL: This allows people to read the post for themselves.
Link Title: This helps people decide whether to click on the link.
Link Author: This is included when the identity of the author is relevant (generally only when the author is an EA).
Link URL: This allows people to go directly to the link without having to go to the post first.
You can see examples of this formatting below.
Posts with the Most Likes as of December 2015 (based on Claire Zabel’s comment)
Text: “We are really excited to announce that 80,000 Hours got into the world’s leading startup incubator Y Combinator which helped build AirBnB, Dropbox and Reddit, among many others. As a result we are temporarily living in Mountain View!”
Posts with the Most Comments as of December 2015 (based on Claire Zabel’s comment)
1) Unable to access
2)
Author: Jacy Reese
Year: 2015
Text: “Kelsey Piper, from Stanford Effective Altruists, wrote this thoughtful post explaining how she feels about the issue [of whether meat is served in EA spaces], which summarizes many of our views (although, of course, we don’t all agree in the details), and I’d encourage everyone to read it to better understand the issue.”
Text: “To those who agree with Alexander Kruel: Does CFAR have the same problems as MIRI and LessWrong? I’ve read good things about CFAR elsewhere in this group, but there was a time when I was reading so many good things about MIRI and LessWrong that I consider myself lucky to have dodged the Basilisk.”
Text: “What academic disciplines do you think we here are undervaluing relative to their usefulness, and should be making an active effort to learn from? My top guess at the moment is history.”
As a learning exercise, I’ve been working on a web scraper to compile this info from the FB group.
Doing this in spare time, so it will likely be another week or two before I have a post put together, but posting here in the meantime as an FYI and to potentially gain 5 karma so I can post once it’s ready :)
UPDATE: After scraping the initial post data, there are 200+ posts with 50 or more likes. (Obviously the group has gotten quite a bit more active over the past couple years!)
Not sure if there’s a maximum length for a forum post, but regardless, this strikes me as probably too many “top posts” to feature. Would it be better to limit it to the top 50 posts? Top 100? Welcome any input on this.
Requesting Help for a Compilation of Top EA Facebook Posts
In December 2015, Claire Zabel posted links to all posts in the EA Facebook group with 50 or more likes or comments. I think it’s time for a similar post. From what I understand, the most liked and most commented on posts can be found using the “My groups dashboard” feature on Facebook. Unfortunately, I do not have a Facebook account. I am posting in this thread to request that someone with a Facebook account post the most liked and most commented on posts as a reply to this comment. I can then go through each of them and extract the key information about each (see below) so people can see if there are any they want to read without clicking every single one. I would then post this information as its own forum post. Alternatively, you can do the extracting yourself and post it as a forum post yourself.
Format
Author: Initials are used to prevent future employers from easily associating the post with the author (unless the person is a prominent EA who is likely to remain in EA, in which case the full name is used).
Year: This can give people context as various ideas have become more or less accepted over time.
Text: If the full text is too long, an excerpt is chosen that encapsulates the post.
URL: This allows people to read the post for themselves.
Link Title: This helps people decide whether to click on the link.
Link Author: This is included when the identity of the author is relevant (generally only when the author is an EA).
Link URL: This allows people to go directly to the link without having to go to the post first.
You can see examples of this formatting below.
Posts with the Most Likes as of December 2015 (based on Claire Zabel’s comment)
1)
Author: Peter Hurford
Year: 2014
Text: “EA Onion Article Headlines”
URL: https://www.facebook.com/437177563005273/posts/722086321181061
2)
Author: Robert Wiblin
Year: 2015
Text: “William takes 5 criticisms of Zuckerberg to pieces. The nonsense thrown at him has appalled me:”
URL: https://www.facebook.com/437177563005273/posts/971385786251112
Link Title: 5 criticisms of billionaire mega-philanthropy, debunked
Link Author: William MacAskill
Link URL: https://qz.com/564805/5-criticisms-of-billionaire-mega-philanthropy-debunked/
3)
Author: Robert Wiblin
Year: 2015
Text: “We are really excited to announce that 80,000 Hours got into the world’s leading startup incubator Y Combinator which helped build AirBnB, Dropbox and Reddit, among many others. As a result we are temporarily living in Mountain View!”
URL: https://www.facebook.com/437177563005273/posts/911770118879346
Link Title: Want To Make An Impact With Your Work? Try Some Advice From 80,000 Hours
Link URL: https://techcrunch.com/2015/08/04/80000-hours/
4)
Author: William MacAskill
Year: 2015
Text: “Peter Singer is running a MOOC on Effective Altruism. Cool, eh? Sign up if you want to learn more:”
URL: https://www.facebook.com/437177563005273/posts/850791891643836
Link URL: https://www.coursera.org/learn/altruism
5)
Author: William MacAskill
Year: 2015
Text: “Today is the launch day for Doing Good Better!”
URL: https://www.facebook.com/437177563005273/posts/908514712538220
Link URL: https://www.amazon.com/Doing-Good-Better-Effective-Difference/dp/1592409105/
Posts with the Most Comments as of December 2015 (based on Claire Zabel’s comment)
1) Unable to access
2)
Author: Jacy Reese
Year: 2015
Text: “Kelsey Piper, from Stanford Effective Altruists, wrote this thoughtful post explaining how she feels about the issue [of whether meat is served in EA spaces], which summarizes many of our views (although, of course, we don’t all agree in the details), and I’d encourage everyone to read it to better understand the issue.”
URL: https://www.facebook.com/437177563005273/posts/914246908631667
Link Title: preference accommodation problems
Link Author: Kelsey Piper
Link URL: https://theunitofcaring.tumblr.com/post/126310876481/preference-accommodation-problems
3)
Author: C. H.
Year: 2013
Text: “To those who agree with Alexander Kruel: Does CFAR have the same problems as MIRI and LessWrong? I’ve read good things about CFAR elsewhere in this group, but there was a time when I was reading so many good things about MIRI and LessWrong that I consider myself lucky to have dodged the Basilisk.”
URL: https://www.facebook.com/437177563005273/posts/570478889675139
Link Title: AI Risk Critiques: Index
Link Author: Alexander Kruel
Link URL: http://kruel.co/2012/07/17/ai-risk-critiques-index/
4)
Author: Robert Wiblin
Year: 2015
Text: “What academic disciplines do you think we here are undervaluing relative to their usefulness, and should be making an active effort to learn from? My top guess at the moment is history.”
URL: https://www.facebook.com/437177563005273/posts/856678024388556
5)
Author: T. B.
Year: 2014
Text: “In Robert Wiblin’s summit talk, he estimated that about 80-90% of EAs are concerned about animal suffering[.] [Is this correct?]”
URL: https://www.facebook.com/437177563005273/posts/725327480856945
As a learning exercise, I’ve been working on a web scraper to compile this info from the FB group.
Doing this in spare time, so it will likely be another week or two before I have a post put together, but posting here in the meantime as an FYI and to potentially gain 5 karma so I can post once it’s ready :)
UPDATE: After scraping the initial post data, there are 200+ posts with 50 or more likes. (Obviously the group has gotten quite a bit more active over the past couple years!)
Not sure if there’s a maximum length for a forum post, but regardless, this strikes me as probably too many “top posts” to feature. Would it be better to limit it to the top 50 posts? Top 100? Welcome any input on this.
Top 50 sounds good to me. Thanks for doing this.
UPDATE: Here’s the post.
It seems you need the Grytics tool to do this. I can’t work out to do it in facebook itself. Would also be interested to see this.