I’m nervous that the EA Forum might be having a small role for x-risk and some high-level prioritization work. - Very little biorisk content here, perhaps because of info-hazards. - Little technical AI safety work here, in part because that’s more for LessWrong / Alignment Forum. - Little AI governance work here, for whatever reason. - Not too much innovative, big-picture longtermist prioritization projects happening at the moment, from what I understand. - The cause of “EA community building” seems to be fairly stable, not much bold/controversial experimentation, from what I can tell. - Fairly few updates / discussion from grantmakers. OP is really the dominant one, and doesn’t publish too much, particularly about their grantmaking strategies and findings.
It’s been feeling pretty quiet here recently, for my interests. I think some important threads are now happening in private slack / in-person conversations or just not happening.
I don’t comment or post much on the EA forum because the quality of discourse on the EA Forum typically seems mediocre at best. This is especially true for x-risk.
The whole manifund debacle has left me quite demotivated. It really sucks that people are more interested debating contentious community drama, than seemingly anything else this forum has to offer.
Could you share a few examples of what you consider good quality EA Forum posts? Do you think the content linked on the EA Forum Digest also “typically seems mediocre at best”?
Very little biorisk content here, perhaps because of info-hazards.
When I write biorisk-related things publicly I’m usually pretty unsure of whether the Forum is a good place for them. Not because of info-hazards, since that would gate things at an earlier stage, but because they feel like they’re of interest to too small a fraction of people. For example, I could plausibly have posted Quick Thoughts on Our First Sampling Run or some of my other posts from https://data.securebio.org/jefftk-notebook/ here, but that felt a bit noisy?
It also doesn’t help that detailed technical content gets much less attention than meta or community content. For example, three days ago I wrote a comment on @Conrad K.’s thoughtful Three Reasons Early Detection Interventions Are Not Obviously Cost-Effective, and while I feel like it’s a solid contribution only four people have voted on it. On the other hand, if you look over my recent post history at my comments on Manifest, far less objectively important comments have ~10x the karma. Similarly the top level post was sitting at +41 until Mike bumped it last week, which wasn’t even high enough that (before I changed my personal settings to boost biosecurity-tagged posts) I saw it when it came out. I see why this happens—there are a lot more people with the background to engage on a community topic or even a general “good news” post—but it still doesn’t make me as excited to contribute on technical things here.
I’d be excited to have discussions of those posts here!
A lot of my more technical posts also get very little attention—I also find that pretty unmotivating. It can be quite frustrating when clearly lower-quality content on controversial stuff gets a lot more attention.
But this seems like a doom loop to me. I care much more about strong technical content, even if I don’t always read it, than I do most of the community drama. I’m sure most leaders and funders feel similarly.
Extended far enough, the EA Forum will be a place only for controversial community drama. This seems nightmarish to me. I imagine most forum members would agree.
I imagine that there are things the Forum or community can do to bring more attention or highlighting to the more technical posts.
I wonder if the forum is even a good place for a lot of these discussions? Feels like they need some combination of safety / shared context, expertise, gatekeeping etc?
establishing a reputation in writing as a person who can follow good argumentative norms (perhaps as a kind of extended courtship of EA jobs/orgs)
disseminating findings that are mainly meant for other forums, e.g. research reports
keeping track of what the community at large is thinking about/working on, which is mostly facilitated by organizations like RP & GiveWell using the forum to share their work.
I don’t think I would use the forum for hashing out anything I was really thinking hard about; I’d probably have in-person conversations or email particular persons.
I don’t know about you but I just learned about one of the biggest updates to OPs grantmaking in a year on the Forum.
That said, the data does show some agreement with your and commenters vibe of lowering quantity.
I agree that the Forum could be a good place for a lot of these discussions. Some of them aren’t happening at all to my knowledge.[1] Some of those should be, and should be discussed on the Forum. Others are happening in private and that’s rational, although you may be able to guess that my biased view is that a lot more should be public, and if they were, should be posted on the Forum.
Broadly: I’m quite bullish on the EA community as a vehicle for working on the world’s most pressing problems, and of open online discussion as a piece of our collective progress. And I don’t know of a better open place on the internet for EAs to gather.
Yep—I liked the discussion in that post a lot, but the actual post seemed fairly minimal, and written primarily outside of the EA Forum (it was a link post, and the actual post was 320 words total.)
For those working on the forum, I’d suggest work on bringing in more of these threads to the forum. Maybe reach out to some of the leaders in each group and see how to change things.
I think that AI policy in particular is most ripe for better infrastructure (there’s a lot of work happening, but no common public forums, from what I know), though it probably makes sense to be separate from the EA Forum (maybe like the Alignment Forum), because a lot of them don’t want to be associated too much with EA, for policy reasons.
I know less about Bio governance, but would strongly assume that a whole lot of it isn’t infohazardous. That’s definitely a field that’s active and growing.
For foundational EA work / grant discussions / community strategy, I think we might just need more content in the first place, or something.
I assume that AI alignment is well-handled by LessWrong / Alignment Forum, difficult and less important to push to happen here.
So I did used to do more sort of back of the envelope stuff, but it didn’t get much traction and people seemed to think it was unfished (it was) so I guess I had less enthusiasm.
There are still bunch of good discussions (see mostly posts with 10+ comments) in the last 6 months or so, its just that we can sometimes even go a week or two without more than one or two ongoing serious GHD chats. Maybe I’m wrong and there hasn’t actually been much (or any) meaningful change in activity this year looking at this.
As a random datapoint, I’m only just getting into the AI Governance space, but I’ve found little engagement with (some) (of[1]) (the) (resources) I’ve shared and have just sort of updated to think this is either not the space for it or I’m just not yet knowledgeable enough about what would be valuable to others.
I was especially disappointed with this one, because this was a project I worked on with a team for some time, and I still think it’s quite promising, but it didn’t receive the proportional engagement I would have hoped for. Given I optimized some of the project for putting out this bit of research specifically, I wouldn’t do the same now and would have instead focused on other parts of the project.
It seems from the comments that there’s a chance that much of this is just timing—i.e. right now is unusually quiet. It is roughly mid-year, maybe people are on vacation or something, it’s hard to tell.
I think that this is partially true. I’m not interested in bringing up this point to upset people, but rather to flag that maybe there could be good ways of improving this (which I think is possible!)
I’m nervous that the EA Forum might be having a small role for x-risk and some high-level prioritization work.
- Very little biorisk content here, perhaps because of info-hazards.
- Little technical AI safety work here, in part because that’s more for LessWrong / Alignment Forum.
- Little AI governance work here, for whatever reason.
- Not too much innovative, big-picture longtermist prioritization projects happening at the moment, from what I understand.
- The cause of “EA community building” seems to be fairly stable, not much bold/controversial experimentation, from what I can tell.
- Fairly few updates / discussion from grantmakers. OP is really the dominant one, and doesn’t publish too much, particularly about their grantmaking strategies and findings.
It’s been feeling pretty quiet here recently, for my interests. I think some important threads are now happening in private slack / in-person conversations or just not happening.
I don’t comment or post much on the EA forum because the quality of discourse on the EA Forum typically seems mediocre at best. This is especially true for x-risk.
I think this has been true for a while.
Any ideas for what we can do to improve it?
The whole manifund debacle has left me quite demotivated. It really sucks that people are more interested debating contentious community drama, than seemingly anything else this forum has to offer.
Thanks for the reminder, definitely got sucked in too much myself....
Will get back to commenting more on GHD posts and write another of my own soon!
What’s the “whole manifund debacle”? People complaining about Curtis Yarvin or something?
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/34pz6ni3muwPnenLS/why-so-many-racists-at-manifest
I think there signal vs noise tradeoffs, so I’m naively tempted to retreat toward more exclusivity.
This poses costs of its own, so maybe I’d be in favor of differentiation (some more and some less exclusive version).
Low confidence in this being good overall.
Hi Ryan,
Could you share a few examples of what you consider good quality EA Forum posts? Do you think the content linked on the EA Forum Digest also “typically seems mediocre at best”?
When I write biorisk-related things publicly I’m usually pretty unsure of whether the Forum is a good place for them. Not because of info-hazards, since that would gate things at an earlier stage, but because they feel like they’re of interest to too small a fraction of people. For example, I could plausibly have posted Quick Thoughts on Our First Sampling Run or some of my other posts from https://data.securebio.org/jefftk-notebook/ here, but that felt a bit noisy?
It also doesn’t help that detailed technical content gets much less attention than meta or community content. For example, three days ago I wrote a comment on @Conrad K.’s thoughtful Three Reasons Early Detection Interventions Are Not Obviously Cost-Effective, and while I feel like it’s a solid contribution only four people have voted on it. On the other hand, if you look over my recent post history at my comments on Manifest, far less objectively important comments have ~10x the karma. Similarly the top level post was sitting at +41 until Mike bumped it last week, which wasn’t even high enough that (before I changed my personal settings to boost biosecurity-tagged posts) I saw it when it came out. I see why this happens—there are a lot more people with the background to engage on a community topic or even a general “good news” post—but it still doesn’t make me as excited to contribute on technical things here.
I’m with Ozzie here. I think EA Forum would do better with more technical content even if it’s hard for most people to engage with.
I’d be excited to have discussions of those posts here!
A lot of my more technical posts also get very little attention—I also find that pretty unmotivating. It can be quite frustrating when clearly lower-quality content on controversial stuff gets a lot more attention.
But this seems like a doom loop to me. I care much more about strong technical content, even if I don’t always read it, than I do most of the community drama. I’m sure most leaders and funders feel similarly.
Extended far enough, the EA Forum will be a place only for controversial community drama. This seems nightmarish to me. I imagine most forum members would agree.
I imagine that there are things the Forum or community can do to bring more attention or highlighting to the more technical posts.
Here you go: Detecting Genetically Engineered Viruses With Metagenomic Sequencing
But this was already something I was going to put on the Forum ;)
I wonder if the forum is even a good place for a lot of these discussions? Feels like they need some combination of safety / shared context, expertise, gatekeeping etc?
If it’s not, there is a question of what the EA Forum’s comparative advantage will be in the future, and what is a good place for these discussions.
Personally, I think this forum could be good for at least some of this, but I’m not sure.
Three use cases come to mind for the forum:
establishing a reputation in writing as a person who can follow good argumentative norms (perhaps as a kind of extended courtship of EA jobs/orgs)
disseminating findings that are mainly meant for other forums, e.g. research reports
keeping track of what the community at large is thinking about/working on, which is mostly facilitated by organizations like RP & GiveWell using the forum to share their work.
I don’t think I would use the forum for hashing out anything I was really thinking hard about; I’d probably have in-person conversations or email particular persons.
I don’t know about you but I just learned about one of the biggest updates to OPs grantmaking in a year on the Forum.
That said, the data does show some agreement with your and commenters vibe of lowering quantity.
I agree that the Forum could be a good place for a lot of these discussions. Some of them aren’t happening at all to my knowledge.[1] Some of those should be, and should be discussed on the Forum. Others are happening in private and that’s rational, although you may be able to guess that my biased view is that a lot more should be public, and if they were, should be posted on the Forum.
Broadly: I’m quite bullish on the EA community as a vehicle for working on the world’s most pressing problems, and of open online discussion as a piece of our collective progress. And I don’t know of a better open place on the internet for EAs to gather.
Part of that might be because as EA gets older the temperature (in the annealing sense) rationally lowers.
Yep—I liked the discussion in that post a lot, but the actual post seemed fairly minimal, and written primarily outside of the EA Forum (it was a link post, and the actual post was 320 words total.)
For those working on the forum, I’d suggest work on bringing in more of these threads to the forum. Maybe reach out to some of the leaders in each group and see how to change things.
I think that AI policy in particular is most ripe for better infrastructure (there’s a lot of work happening, but no common public forums, from what I know), though it probably makes sense to be separate from the EA Forum (maybe like the Alignment Forum), because a lot of them don’t want to be associated too much with EA, for policy reasons.
I know less about Bio governance, but would strongly assume that a whole lot of it isn’t infohazardous. That’s definitely a field that’s active and growing.
For foundational EA work / grant discussions / community strategy, I think we might just need more content in the first place, or something.
I assume that AI alignment is well-handled by LessWrong / Alignment Forum, difficult and less important to push to happen here.
So I did used to do more sort of back of the envelope stuff, but it didn’t get much traction and people seemed to think it was unfished (it was) so I guess I had less enthusiasm.
Yeah even on the global health front the last 3 months or so have felt especially quiet
Curious if you think there was good discussion before that and could point me to any particularly good posts or conversations?
There are still bunch of good discussions (see mostly posts with 10+ comments) in the last 6 months or so, its just that we can sometimes even go a week or two without more than one or two ongoing serious GHD chats. Maybe I’m wrong and there hasn’t actually been much (or any) meaningful change in activity this year looking at this.
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/?tab=global-health-and-development
As a random datapoint, I’m only just getting into the AI Governance space, but I’ve found little engagement with (some) (of[1]) (the) (resources) I’ve shared and have just sort of updated to think this is either not the space for it or I’m just not yet knowledgeable enough about what would be valuable to others.
I was especially disappointed with this one, because this was a project I worked on with a team for some time, and I still think it’s quite promising, but it didn’t receive the proportional engagement I would have hoped for. Given I optimized some of the project for putting out this bit of research specifically, I wouldn’t do the same now and would have instead focused on other parts of the project.
It seems from the comments that there’s a chance that much of this is just timing—i.e. right now is unusually quiet. It is roughly mid-year, maybe people are on vacation or something, it’s hard to tell.
I think that this is partially true. I’m not interested in bringing up this point to upset people, but rather to flag that maybe there could be good ways of improving this (which I think is possible!)