I wished all EA papers were posted on the EA Forum so I could see what other EAs thought of them (through karma and comments), which would help me decide whether I want to read them (and also would complement my reading).
I’d like to see the typical article linking to other Forum posts, blog posts or academic articles which relate to it. I think it’s important to show what inspired your thinking and where people can read more.
I hope we’ll import the tagging system from LessWrong.
I would very much like to see posts labelled with “short-term” vs “long-term” as I think a lot of discussion is wasted on what often ends up being a fundamental disagreement. The discussion is wasted because it doesn’t tackle the fundamental disagreement, and both interlocutors wrongly model the other as also being a short/long termist.
Fundamental disagreement can include:
Highly discounting the future
Disregarding indirect impact
Trusting our intuitions that explicit reasoning that gives weird conclusions are false
Etc.
There’s not much synergy between the short-termist cluster and long-termist cluster.
Also the labels are not fully self-explanatory. For example, the article “How the Simulation Argument Dampens Future Fanaticism” might superficially seem like it belongs in the short-termist cluster, but doesn’t (I would argue).
I have a vague impression some of us are thinking “this is too weird for EAs/the EA Forum, I’ll post on LW”. There’s also the fact that LessWrong used to host some EA topics pre EA Forum. This make it so some content is spread over those 2 forums. I’m not sure if/how we can improve on that.
Ideas:
a) Norm for posting EA content on the EA Forum, not on LessWrong
b) Syncing the Alignment Forum with the EA Forum instead of LessWrong (by the way, I think the Alignment Forum was a really good idea to organize information)
I wish people x-posting between LessWrong and the EA Forum encouraged users to only comment on one to centralize comments. And to increase the probability that people do follow this suggestion, for posts (which take a long time to read anyway, compare to the time of clicking on a link), I would just put the post on one of the 2 and a link to it on the other
I would like people to turn off comments when they share a link to the EA Forum on Facebook and/or invite people to comment on the original post in order centralize the discussion in one place because: a) it makes it easier to see everything that’s been said about the post, b) it makes it easier to avoid duplicating work
This is more of a feature request at this point, but I would like if we could share draft posts publicly in order to be able to collaborate faster. Once this would be a feature, I would like if it became a common practice.
When posts would work better as a wiki entry, I wished they would just be a wiki entry (on the Cause Prioritization Wiki) and then shared here as a linked post.
Addendum: Maybe the Cause Prioritization Wiki could be moved to “wiki.effectivealtruism.org″ (and also moved to the MediaWiki platform) and better integrated with the Forum (ex.: with a list of recent major edits on the main page).
Don’t share one just “because most people already know about it”.
Don’t share because “other people are wrong to be concerned”. At least build a solid argument in private with others before sharing publicly. See paper on unilitarilist curse.
Don’t share because “come on that’s weird”. Your intuitions might not be well calibrated on this.
Don’t share because “it doesn’t actually work”. There might be ways to fix their bugs. But don’t even think about whether there are obviously.
Sharing is rarely useful at the object-level, is potentially dangerous, and creates a norm of tolerating info-hazards. A norm of self-censoring is the best norm I can think. Censoring others creates a large risk of bringing more attention to it unfortunately.
It’s not worth the dopamine rush of showing how smart you are. I despise everyone not taking that seriously.
I wished all EA papers were posted on the EA Forum so I could see what other EAs thought of them (through karma and comments), which would help me decide whether I want to read them (and also would complement my reading).
I’d like to see the typical article linking to other Forum posts, blog posts or academic articles which relate to it. I think it’s important to show what inspired your thinking and where people can read more.
I hope we’ll import the tagging system from LessWrong.
I would very much like to see posts labelled with “short-term” vs “long-term” as I think a lot of discussion is wasted on what often ends up being a fundamental disagreement. The discussion is wasted because it doesn’t tackle the fundamental disagreement, and both interlocutors wrongly model the other as also being a short/long termist.
Fundamental disagreement can include:
Highly discounting the future
Disregarding indirect impact
Trusting our intuitions that explicit reasoning that gives weird conclusions are false
Etc.
There’s not much synergy between the short-termist cluster and long-termist cluster.
Also the labels are not fully self-explanatory. For example, the article “How the Simulation Argument Dampens Future Fanaticism” might superficially seem like it belongs in the short-termist cluster, but doesn’t (I would argue).
Example of mostly wasted discussion: example 1
Note: I expect this idea to get some push-back.
I have a vague impression some of us are thinking “this is too weird for EAs/the EA Forum, I’ll post on LW”. There’s also the fact that LessWrong used to host some EA topics pre EA Forum. This make it so some content is spread over those 2 forums. I’m not sure if/how we can improve on that.
Ideas:
a) Norm for posting EA content on the EA Forum, not on LessWrong
b) Syncing the Alignment Forum with the EA Forum instead of LessWrong (by the way, I think the Alignment Forum was a really good idea to organize information)
I wish people x-posting between LessWrong and the EA Forum encouraged users to only comment on one to centralize comments. And to increase the probability that people do follow this suggestion, for posts (which take a long time to read anyway, compare to the time of clicking on a link), I would just put the post on one of the 2 and a link to it on the other
I would like people to turn off comments when they share a link to the EA Forum on Facebook and/or invite people to comment on the original post in order centralize the discussion in one place because: a) it makes it easier to see everything that’s been said about the post, b) it makes it easier to avoid duplicating work
This is more of a feature request at this point, but I would like if we could share draft posts publicly in order to be able to collaborate faster. Once this would be a feature, I would like if it became a common practice.
When posts would work better as a wiki entry, I wished they would just be a wiki entry (on the Cause Prioritization Wiki) and then shared here as a linked post.
Addendum: Maybe the Cause Prioritization Wiki could be moved to “wiki.effectivealtruism.org″ (and also moved to the MediaWiki platform) and better integrated with the Forum (ex.: with a list of recent major edits on the main page).
I would like for more posts to be posted as questions instead so that other people could answer them as well all in the same place.
For example, I feel like a lot of people would have posted Why do we need philanthropy? Can we make it obsolete? as a post, but I think it’s better as a question.
Taking info-hazards seriously.
Don’t share one just “because most people already know about it”.
Don’t share because “other people are wrong to be concerned”. At least build a solid argument in private with others before sharing publicly. See paper on unilitarilist curse.
Don’t share because “come on that’s weird”. Your intuitions might not be well calibrated on this.
Don’t share because “it doesn’t actually work”. There might be ways to fix their bugs. But don’t even think about whether there are obviously.
Sharing is rarely useful at the object-level, is potentially dangerous, and creates a norm of tolerating info-hazards. A norm of self-censoring is the best norm I can think. Censoring others creates a large risk of bringing more attention to it unfortunately.
It’s not worth the dopamine rush of showing how smart you are. I despise everyone not taking that seriously.