Propose and vote on potential tags

[MichaelA]

(I have no as­so­ci­a­tion with the EA Fo­rum team or CEA, and this idea comes with no offi­cial man­date. I’m open to sug­ges­tions of to­tally differ­ent ways of do­ing this.)

Up­date: Aaron here. This has our offi­cial man­date now, and I’m sub­scribed to the post so that I’ll be no­tified of ev­ery com­ment. Please sug­gest tags!

The EA Fo­rum now has tags, and users can now make tags them­selves. I think this is re­ally cool, and I’ve now made a bunch of tags.

But I find it hard to de­cide whether some tag ideas are worth in­clud­ing, vs be­ing too fine-grained or too similar to ex­ist­ing tags. I also feel some hes­i­ta­tion about tak­ing too much unilat­eral ac­tion. I imag­ine some other fo­rum users might feel the same way about tag ideas they have, some of which might be re­ally good! (See also this thread.)

So I pro­pose that this post be­comes a thread where peo­ple can com­ment with a tag idea there’s some­what un­sure about, and then other peo­ple can up­vote it or down­vote it based on whether they think it should in­deed be its own tag. De­tails:

• I am not say­ing you should always com­ment here be­fore mak­ing a tag. I have nei­ther the power nor the in­cli­na­tion to stop you just mak­ing tags you’re fairly con­fi­dent should ex­ist!

• I sug­gest hav­ing a low bar for com­ment­ing here, such as “this is just a thought that oc­curred to me” or “5% chance this tag should ex­ist”. It’s of­ten good to be open to rais­ing all sorts of ideas when brain­storm­ing, and ap­ply most of the screen­ing pres­sure af­ter the ideas are raised.

  • The tag ideas I’ve com­mented about my­self are all “just spit­bal­ling”.

• Feel free to also pro­pose al­ter­na­tive tag la­bels, pro­pose a rough tag de­scrip­tion, note what other tags are re­lated to this one, note what you see as the ar­gu­ments for and against that tag, and/​or list some posts that would be in­cluded in this tag. (But also feel free to sim­ply sug­gest a tag la­bel.)

• Feel free to com­ment on other peo­ple’s ideas to do any of the above things (pro­pose al­ter­na­tive la­bels, etc.).

• Make a sep­a­rate com­ment for each tag idea.

• Prob­a­bly up­vote or down­vote just based on the tag idea it­self; to ad­dress the ex­tra ideas in the com­ment (e.g., the pro­posed de­scrip­tion), leave a re­ply.

• Maybe try not to hold back with the down­votes. Peo­ple com­ment­ing here would do so speci­fi­cally be­cause they want other peo­ple’s hon­est in­put, and they never claimed their tag idea was definitely good so the down­vote isn’t re­ally dis­agree­ing with them.

Also feel free to use this as a thread to dis­cuss (and up­vote or down­vote sug­ges­tions re­gard­ing) ex­ist­ing tags that might not be worth hav­ing, or might be worth re­nam­ing or tweak­ing the scope of, or what-have-you. For ex­am­ple, I cre­ated the tag Poli­ti­cal Po­lari­sa­tion, but I’ve also left a com­ment here about whether it should be changed or re­moved.

[MichaelA]

Poli­ti­cal Polarisation

I already made this tag, but maybe it should be re­moved.

Ar­gu­ments against its ex­is­tence:

• Not cur­rently a very com­monly dis­cussed topic in EA

• Ar­guably re­lated to the tag Policy Change

• Maybe there’s some other tag that would do a bet­ter job cov­er­ing this and re­lated mat­ters. Su­per rough ideas: Cul­tural Forces; Cul­ture, Poli­tics, & Norms; In­sti­tu­tions & Norms

Ar­gu­ments for its ex­is­tence:

• Some EAs seem quite in­ter­ested in this

• In­ter­est may be in­creas­ing: There were 3 posts on the topic just this year, which each got de­cent to large amounts of attention

• There may also be a lot of in­ter­est in this on LessWrong? If so, this may ul­ti­mately spill over to more in­ter­est here?

• My short­form col­lec­tion of posts on the topic got 17 karma

[MichaelA]

Now vs Later, or Op­ti­mal Timing, or Op­ti­mal Timing for Altru­ists, or some other name.

This would be in­tended to cap­ture posts rele­vant to the de­bate over “giv­ing now vs later” and “pa­tient vs ur­gent longter­mism”, as well as re­lated de­bates like whether to do di­rect work now vs build ca­reer cap­i­tal vs move­ment-build, and how much to give/​work now vs later, and when to give/​work if not now (“later” is a very large cat­e­gory!).

This tag would over­lap with Hinge of His­tory, but seems mean­ingfully dis­tinct from that.

Not sure what the best name would be.

[JP Addison]

Pa­tient Philan­thropy seems like the gen­eral cat­e­gory. Not all of it will be about the de­bate as to whether it’s right, but it seems like a tag that en­com­passes ques­tions like, “given that I want to give later, how do I do that” seems good.

[MichaelA]

Thanks for high­light­ing pa­tient philan­thropy as an op­tion, and good point that it’d be good for this tag to not just be about the de­bate but also how to im­ple­ment the pa­tient ap­proach.

I’ve now made this tag, though with the name Pa­tient Altru­ism. I haven’t heard that term used, but it makes sense to me as a gen­er­al­i­sa­tion of pa­tient philan­thropy to also ac­count for how to use work, not just how to use dona­tions. I’ve now also writ­ten a short­form post ar­gu­ing for the term.

One worry I have is that by say­ing Pa­tient Altru­ism rather than Pa­tient vs Ur­gent Altru­ism, this tag puts vir­tu­ous con­no­ta­tions on one side but not the other. But the ver­sion with “vs Ur­gent” is longer, it per­haps doesn’t as nat­u­rally in­clude posts about how to take the pa­tient ap­proach, and I’ve only heard the term “ur­gent longter­mism”, not “ur­gent philan­thropy” (though I do sug­gest use of the terms “ur­gent philan­thropy” and “ur­gent al­tru­ism” in that short­form post).

[saulius]

When tags were in­tro­duced, the post said to “sub­mit new tag ideas to us us­ing this form.” I made a bunch of sug­ges­tions (don’t re­mem­ber what they were) and prob­a­bly some other peo­ple did too. Could some­one who has ac­cess to re­sults of that form paste all those sug­ges­tions here?

[MichaelA]

That sounds like a great idea!

I think ideally they’d be pasted as sep­a­rate com­ments, so they can each be voted up or down sep­a­rately. (Not say­ing you were sug­gest­ing oth­er­wise.)

[MichaelA]

(Up­date: I’ve now made this tag.)

Operations

Ar­gu­ments against

• Maybe over­laps some­what with Org Strat­egy, EA Hiring, and Entrepreneurship

• Maybe not very many posts on the fo­rum that are es­pe­cially re­lated to op­er­a­tions in particular

Ar­gu­ments for:

• I’d guess there are at least 5 rele­vant posts

  • Some posts with the above-men­tioned tags might be relevant

• I’d guess there’ll be more rele­vant posts in future

• I’d guess at least a few EA fo­rum users would ap­pre­ci­ate see­ing a col­lec­tion of posts on this

[Larks]

I like Lists, so get me a List of Lists for my tag List.

There are a num­ber of good posts that are ba­si­cally lists of links to differ­ent ar­ti­cles (like this one). It would be nice to be able to eas­ily ac­cess them.

[MichaelA]

I very much share this af­fec­tion for lists.

I think Col­lec­tion and Re­sources might cover this? E.g., those read­ing lists from Richard Ngo have each been given that tag.

Do you think there’s still a gap for a List tag, or a way the de­scrip­tion of the Col­lec­tion and Re­sources tag should be ad­justed?

[Larks]

Ahh yes, that cov­ers it. I looked through the list of tags to check if there was already some­thing on there; I guess I missed that one.

[MichaelA]

Up­date: I’ve now made this tag.

[Some­thing about war, armed con­flict, or great power con­flict]

Ar­gu­ments against:

• Ar­guably a sub­set of In­ter­na­tional Re­la­tions.

• Also over­laps with some tags like Nu­clear Weapons and Ex­is­ten­tial Risk.

Ar­gu­ments for:

• Ar­guably a very im­por­tant sub­set of In­ter­na­tional Re­la­tions, which might war­rant a tag of its own.

• Ar­guably not en­tirely a sub­set of In­ter­na­tional Re­la­tions, as things like civil/​in­trastate armed con­flicts could also be im­por­tant. (But maybe any EA Fo­rum post that cov­ers that would in prac­tice also cover other In­ter­na­tional Re­la­tions things.)

[MichaelStJules]

Would be good if tags always had de­scrip­tions/​defi­ni­tions of the things they’re for.

[MichaelA]

Agreed. I think peo­ple cre­at­ing tags should prob­a­bly always add those de­scrip­tions/​defi­ni­tions.

One thing I’d note is that any­one can add de­scrip­tions/​defi­ni­tions for tags, even if they didn’t cre­ate them. This could be hard if you’re not sure what the scope was meant to be, but if you think you know what the scope was meant to be, you could con­sider adding a de­scrip­tion/​defi­ni­tion your­self.

[MichaelStJules]

Do we need both Longter­mism (Philos­o­phy) and Long-Term Fu­ture?

[MichaelA]

Per­son­ally, I think those two tags have suffi­ciently large and sep­a­rate scopes for it to make sense for the fo­rum to have both tags. (I didn’t cre­ate ei­ther tag, by the way.)

But the Longter­mism (Philos­o­phy) tag has per­haps been used too liber­ally, in­clud­ing for posts that should’ve only been given tags like Long-Term Fu­ture or Ex­is­ten­tial Risk. Per­haps this is be­cause the Longter­mism (Philos­o­phy) tag was around be­fore Long-Term Fu­ture was cre­ated (not sure if that’s true), and/​or be­cause the first two sen­tences of the Longter­mism (Philos­o­phy) tag didn’t ex­plic­itly in­di­cate that its scope was limited to philo­soph­i­cal as­pects of longter­mism only. In­spired by your com­ment, I’ve now ed­ited the tag de­scrip­tion to hope­fully help a bit with that.

The tag de­scrip­tion used to be:

Longter­mism is the idea that we can max­i­mize our im­pact by work­ing to en­sure that the long-run fu­ture goes well (be­cause it may con­tain an enor­mous num­ber of peo­ple whose lives we may be able to im­prove).

This is a rel­a­tively new idea, and peo­ple in the EA move­ment cur­rently work on a wide range of open ques­tions re­lated to differ­ent facets of longter­mism.

This tag is meant for dis­cus­sion of longter­mist philos­o­phy, rather than spe­cific longter­mist cause ar­eas (there are other tags for those, like Ex­is­ten­tial Risk).

The tag de­scrip­tion is now:

The Longter­mism (Philos­o­phy) tag is for posts about philo­soph­i­cal mat­ters rele­vant to longter­mism, mean­ing, roughly, “an eth­i­cal view that is par­tic­u­larly con­cerned with en­sur­ing long-run out­comes go well” (MacAskill). Longter­mism is a rel­a­tively new idea, and peo­ple in the EA move­ment cur­rently work on a wide range of open ques­tions re­lated to differ­ent facets of longter­mism.

For posts about what the long-term fu­ture might ac­tu­ally look like, see Long-Term Fu­ture. For posts about spe­cific longter­mist cause ar­eas, see other tags such as Ex­is­ten­tial Risk.

(The sec­ond sen­tence could per­haps be cut.)

For com­par­i­son, the tag de­scrip­tion of Long-Term Fu­ture is:

The Long-Term Fu­ture tag is meant for dis­cus­sion of what the long-term fu­ture might ac­tu­ally look like. This doesn’t nec­es­sar­ily over­lap with the Longter­mism (Philos­o­phy) tag, be­cause a post at­tempt­ing to e.g. model the fu­ture of space travel won’t nec­es­sar­ily dis­cuss the philo­soph­i­cal im­pli­ca­tions of its model.

[MichaelA]

(Up­date: I’ve now made this tag.)

Co­op­er­a­tion & Co­or­di­na­tion or [just one of those terms] or Mo­ral Trade

(I think I lean to­wards the first op­tion and away from Mo­ral Trade.)

Pro­posed de­scrip­tion:

The Co­op­er­a­tion & Co­or­di­na­tion tag is for posts about whether, when, and how peo­ple—es­pe­cially effec­tive al­tru­ists and oth­ers aiming to do good—should co­op­er­ate and co­or­di­nate. Such posts will of­ten draw on ideas re­lated to game the­ory, moral trade, moral un­cer­tainty, and how to think about and mea­sure coun­ter­fac­tual im­pact.

See also Move­ment Strat­egy, Mo­ral Ad­vo­cacy /​ Values Spread­ing, and Epistemic Hu­mil­ity.

Some posts this would cover:

• Effec­tive Altru­ism and Free Riding

• Com­mon ground for longtermists

• Var­i­ous things which have the other tags men­tioned above

• Some of the sorts of things the Cen­ter on Long-Term Risk and 80,000 Hours have writ­ten pre­vi­ously, though I’m not sure how many of those spe­cific things are on the forum

Ar­gu­ments against this:

• Too broad?

  • Maybe it just sounds that way, and a differ­ent name and/​or de­scrip­tion would fix that?

• Well cov­ered by the other tags men­tioned above?

  • I don’t think so, really

• Not enough fo­rum posts this is rele­vant too?

  • Even if that’s true, I ex­pect there will be more in fu­ture, or that we should just fix that by mak­ing link posts to CLR and 80k posts

Alter­na­tive idea:

• A tag for Game The­ory?

  • But that feels like a less nat­u­ral cat­e­gory for the fo­rum for me

[JP Addison]

I lightly think both is bet­ter than ei­ther one on its own.

[MichaelA]

Ok, I’ve now made this tag and used the name that in­cludes both terms :)

[MichaelA]

(Up­date: I’ve now made this tag.)

Im­prov­ing In­sti­tu­tional De­ci­sion-Mak­ing (or similar)

Ar­gu­ment against:

• Ar­guably over­laps some­what with the ex­ist­ing tags Fore­cast­ing, Policy Change, Poli­ti­cal Po­lari­sa­tion, In­ter­na­tional Re­la­tions, Direct Democ­racy, and Euro­pean Union

• It might make more sense to in­stead change the name and de­scrip­tion of Policy Change so it more clearly cov­ers im­prov­ing in­sti­tu­tional de­ci­sion-mak­ing as well

Ar­gu­ments for:

• Seems sub­stan­tially dis­tinct from any of the above tags, in­clud­ing Policy Change

• A ma­jor topic in EA (e.g., one of 80k’s main prob­lem ar­eas, has a large FB group)

• There are already 64 posts tagged Policy Change, and I’d guess >20 posts could war­rant the tag Im­prov­ing In­sti­tu­tional De­ci­sion-Mak­ing. So I think even if the top­ics over­lapped quite a bit (which I’m not sure they do), they could each war­rant a tag due to be­ing big enough that the non-over­lap­ping part is quite big.

The post that prompted this, be­cause it’s clearly rele­vant to IIDM but doesn’t seem very rele­vant to Policy Change: Should We Pri­ori­tize Long-Term Ex­is­ten­tial Risk?

[MichaelA]

(Up­date: I’ve now made this tag, with the name Epistemic Hu­mil­ity and a de­scrip­tion not­ing it can be about other, broadly re­lated things as well.)

So­cial Episte­mol­ogy & Epistemic Hu­mil­ity or [just one of those terms] or [some other la­bel]

Some posts that might fit this tag:

• In defence of epistemic modesty

• Some thoughts on defer­ence and in­side-view models

• EA read­ing list: clue­less­ness and epistemic modesty

• “Good judge­ment” and its components

• Maybe some other posts tagged Rationality

[JP Addison]

I re­ally like So­cial Episte­mol­ogy ex­cept for the cru­cial flaw that I haven’t heard it called that be­fore. Without the abil­ity for peo­ple to rec­og­nize it, I think it’s worse than Epistemic Hu­mil­ity. (Nor­mally I’d pre­fer the more gen­eral term, rather than a term for one strat­egy within the space.)

[MichaelA]

I haven’t heard it called that before

Do you mean you haven’t heard the term so­cial episte­mol­ogy, or that you haven’t heard epistemic hu­mil­ity speci­fi­cally (or de­bates around that) referred to by the term so­cial episte­mol­ogy?

I’d en­vi­sion this tag in­clud­ing not just things like “How epistem­i­cally hum­ble should we be, and how should we up­date given other peo­ple’s state­ments/​be­liefs?”, but also things like when we should give just our con­clu­sions vs also our rea­son­ing if we’re con­cerned about in­for­ma­tion cas­cades, and to what ex­tent pub­li­cly stat­ing ex­plicit es­ti­mates will cause an­chor­ing by oth­ers. Those things could ar­guably be seen as about epistemic hu­mil­ity in that they’re about how to com­mu­ni­cate given how other peo­ple might han­dle epistemic hu­mil­ity, but say­ing they’re about so­cial episte­mol­ogy (or some­thing else) seems more nat­u­ral to me.

(That said, I think I’m only fa­mil­iar with the term so­cial episte­mol­ogy from how it’s oc­ca­sion­ally used by EAs, and the Wikipe­dia ar­ti­cle’s lead sec­tion makes me un­cer­tain if they’re us­ing the term in the stan­dard way.)

Maybe the best tag la­bel would be Epistemic Hu­mil­ity & So­cial Episte­mol­ogy, to put the term that’s more com­mon in EA first? That’s a longer la­bel than av­er­age, though.

FWIW, both my sug­ges­tion of this tag and my sug­ges­tion of the term so­cial episte­mol­ogy for it were prompted by the fol­low­ing part of Owen Cot­ton-Bar­ratt’s re­cent post:

Learn­ing can be much more effi­cient if we al­low the trans­mis­sion of heuris­tics be­tween peo­ple, but if you don’t re­quire peo­ple to have any ground­ing in their own ex­pe­rience or cases they’ve di­rectly heard about, it’s pos­si­ble for heuris­tics to be prop­a­gated with­out re­gard for whether they’re still use­ful, or if the un­der­ly­ing cir­cum­stances have changed enough that they shouldn’t be ap­plied. Nav­i­gat­ing this ten­sion is an in­ter­est­ing prob­lem in so­cial episte­mol­ogy.

[JP Addison]

I have now read the post that con­tains So­cial Episte­mol­ogy.

I also wasn’t clear be­fore, but I was bi­as­ing to­wards one shorter la­bel or an­other.

[Max_Daniel]

Global pri­ori­ties re­search and macros­trat­egy.

I wanted to use these tags when ask­ing this ques­tion, but they don’t seem to ex­ist.

There is a tag on cause pri­ori­ti­za­tion. But I think it’d be more use­ful if that tag was fo­cused on con­tent that is di­rectly rele­vant for pri­ori­tiz­ing be­tween causes, e.g. “here is why I think cause A is more tractable than cause B” or “here’s a frame­work for as­sess­ing the ne­glect­ed­ness of a cause”. Some global pri­ori­ties or macros­trat­egy re­search has this prop­erty, but not all of it. E.g. I think it’d be a bit of a stretch to ap­ply the cause pri­ori­ti­za­tion la­bel to this (amaz­ing!) post on Quan­tify­ing an­thropic effects on the Fermi para­dox.

[MichaelA]

I’m ten­ta­tively in favour of Macros­trat­egy. A big is­sue is that I don’t have a crisp sense of what macros­trat­egy is meant to be about, and con­ver­sa­tions I’ve had sug­gests that a lot of peo­ple who work on it feel the same. So I’d have a hard time de­cid­ing what to give that tag to. But I do think it’s a use­ful con­cept, and the ex­am­ple post you men­tion does seem to me a good ex­am­ple of some­thing that is macros­trat­egy and isn’t cause pri­ori­ti­sa­tion.

I feel like a tag for Global Pri­ori­ties Re­search is prob­a­bly un­nec­es­sary once we have tags for both Cause Pri­ori­ti­sa­tion and Macros­trat­egy? But I could be wrong. (Also I’m just offer­ing my views as in­puts; I have no gate-keep­ing role and any­one can make what­ever tags they want.)

[MichaelA]

(Up­date: I’ve now made this tag.)

Mo­ral Uncertainty

Ar­gu­ment against:

• Ar­guably a sub­set of Mo­ral Philosophy

• Over­laps with Meta-Ethics

Ar­gu­ment for:

• Ar­guably an im­por­tant sub­set of Mo­ral Philosophy

• I’d es­ti­mate there’s at least 10 posts on the topic

[JP Addison]

I’d be in fa­vor.

[JP Addison]

What’s the in­tended differ­ence be­tween Meta-Ethics and Mo­ral Philos­o­phy?

[MichaelA]

As I un­der­stand it, ethics is of­ten split into the branches meta-ethics, nor­ma­tive ethics, and ap­plied ethics. I’m guess­ing the Mo­ral Philos­o­phy tag is meant to cover all of those branches, or maybe just the lat­ter two. Meta-Ethics would just cover ques­tions about “the na­ture, scope, and mean­ing of moral judg­ment” (Wikipe­dia).

So some ques­tions that wouldn’t fit in Meta-Ethics, but would fit in Mo­ral Philos­o­phy, in­clude:

• Should we be de­on­tol­o­gists or con­se­quen­tial­ists?

• What should be con­sid­ered in­trin­si­cally valuable (e.g., suffer­ing, plea­sure, prefer­ence satis­fac­tion, achieve­ment, etc.)?

• What be­ings should be in our moral cir­cles?

Whereas Meta-Ethics could in­clude posts on things like ar­gu­ments for moral re­al­ism vs moral an­tire­al­ism. (I’m not sure whether those posts should also go in Mo­ral Philos­o­phy.)

[MichaelA]

I no­ticed there’s no Con­scious­ness tag, so I was go­ing to cre­ate one, but then I saw the Sen­tience tag. Per­haps that should be re­named “Sen­tience /​ Con­scious­ness”, and/​or its de­scrip­tion should be tweaked to men­tion con­scious­ness?

(I’m putting this here so it can be up- or down-voted to in­form whether this change should be made. I think the tag pages will later have the equiv­a­lent of Wikipe­dia’s “Talk” pages, at which point I’d put com­ments like this there in­stead.)

(Up­date: This got 2 up­votes, and con­tinues to seem to me like a good idea, so I up­dated the name and de­scrip­tion of this tag ac­cord­ingly.)

[Aaron Gertler]

I’ve ed­ited this post to in­clude our offi­cial man­date at the top. Thanks for cre­at­ing it, MichaelA!

[MichaelA]

Global Catas­trophic Risk

Ar­gu­ment against:

• Ob­vi­ously very re­lated to Ex­is­ten­tial Risk, and to var­i­ous other tags like Civ­i­liza­tional Col­lapse & Re­cov­ery and Nu­clear Weapons

Ar­gu­ment for:

• Con­cep­tu­ally dis­tinct from all of those other tags (but it’s still pos­si­ble that, in prac­tice, posts that are partly about GCRs speci­fi­cally will always partly be about one of the re­lated tag top­ics as well)

• Very im­por­tant topic in it­self, in my view

Some posts that might fit this tag but not the Ex­is­ten­tial Risk tag:

• Food Cri­sis—Cas­cad­ing Events from COVID-19 & Locusts

• *up­dated* CTA: Food Sys­tems Hand­book launch event

[MichaelA]

[Any 80,000 prob­lem ar­eas and ca­reer paths—or the ad­di­tional prob­lem ar­eas and ca­reer ideas they men­tion—that are not di­rectly cov­ered by ex­ist­ing tags]

I haven’t yet looked through these prob­lem ar­eas and ca­reer paths/​ideas with this in mind, to see what’s not cov­ered by ex­ist­ing tags and what the ar­gu­ments for and against cre­at­ing new tags for these things would be.

(Feel free to com­ment your­self with spe­cific tag ideas drawn from the 80k prob­lem ar­eas and ca­reer paths, or the ad­di­tional ones they men­tion.)

[MichaelA]

(Up­date: I’ve now made this tag.)

Nan­otech­nol­ogy or Atom­i­cally Pre­cise Manufacturing

Ar­gu­ments against:

• Maybe a lit­tle niche?

• Some­what well-cov­ered by Ex­is­ten­tial Risk?

Ar­gu­ments for:

• Not su­per niche

• 80k high­light this a po­ten­tially im­por­tant area (though it’s not one of their top pri­ori­ties)

• The small set of (maybe-not-trust­wor­thy) es­ti­mates we have sug­gest nan­otech/​APM is de­cently likely to be among the top 10 largest ex­is­ten­tial risks we know of (given usual ways of clas­sify­ing things), and per­haps smaller only than AI and bio

[MichaelA]

(Up­date: I’ve now made this tag.)

Space (or maybe Space Gover­nance, or Space Gover­nance & Colon­i­sa­tion, or some­thing along those lines)

“Gover­nance of outer space” is men­tioned by 80k here.

Would per­haps just be a sub­set of Long-Term Fu­ture. But per­haps a suffi­ciently large and im­por­tant sub­set to war­rant its own tag.

Some posts this should in­clude:

• Will we even­tu­ally be able to colonize other stars? Notes from a pre­limi­nary review

• Space gov­er­nance is im­por­tant, tractable and neglected

• Off-Earth Governance

• An In­for­mal Re­view of Space Exploration

• Maybe Lu­nar Colony

• Maybe Does Utili­tar­ian Longter­mism Im­ply Directed Pansper­mia?

[MichaelA]

(Up­date: I’ve now cre­ated this tag.)

Meta-Ethics

Ar­gu­ment against: This is ar­guably a sub­set of the tag Mo­ral Philos­o­phy.

Ar­gu­ments for: This seems like an im­por­tant sub­set, which there are sev­eral Fo­rum posts about, and which some peo­ple might ap­pre­ci­ate a spe­cific tag about (e.g., if they’re be­gin­ning to grap­ple with meta-ethics and are less fo­cused on moral philos­o­phy as a whole right now).

Some posts this should in­clude:

• All posts in the se­quence com­menc­ing with this one: Mo­ral Anti-Real­ism Se­quence #1: What Is Mo­ral Real­ism?

• Mo­ral­ity vs re­lated concepts

• Maybe Hi, I’m Luke Muehlhauser. AMA about Open Philan­thropy’s new re­port on con­scious­ness and moral pa­tient­hood (due to some com­ments there and some parts of the re­port)

• Maybe a bunch of stuff on AI al­ign­ment, cause pri­ori­ti­sa­tion, and/​or moral un­cer­tainty?

• Maybe Prin­cipia Qualia: blueprint for a new cause area, con­scious­ness re­search with an eye to­ward ethics and x-risk

[MichaelA]

(Up­date: I’ve now made this tag.)

Law

Some posts this could cover:

• In­tro­duc­ing the Le­gal Pri­ori­ties Project

• Var­i­ous posts tagged In­ter­na­tional Re­la­tions, Global Gover­nance, AI Gover­nance (e.g., posts by GovAI and/​or Cul­len O’Keefe), Policy Change, Im­prov­ing In­sti­tu­tional De­ci­sion-Mak­ing, or Euro­pean Union

Ar­gu­ments for:

• I have a sense it could be use­ful to have a tag for each ma­jor field/​dis­ci­pline that many EAs are from and/​or that is rele­vant to many EA ar­eas.

  • The key rea­son is that this could maybe help peo­ple find posts rele­vant to their back­grounds, and think about ways they can use their back­grounds to ad­vance EA causes.

  • I think Law would qual­ify here

  • I think this is the same rea­son why there are Face­book groups for the in­ter­sec­tions of EA and var­i­ous disciplines

    • And there is in­deed a de­cently sized (153 peo­ple) FB group for Effec­tive Altru­ism & Law

• There’s already a tag for His­tory, EA Psy­chol­ogy, EA Philos­o­phy, and prob­a­bly a few other areas

  • And some­what analo­gously, Oper­a­tions, En­trepreneur­ship, and Earn­ing to Give

  • I also sug­gested a tag for Eco­nomics but haven’t made it yet.

• I ex­pect there are at least 10 highly rele­vant posts, and that they could be read­ily found by go­ing through the tags men­tioned above

Ar­gu­ments against:

• Over­laps with the tags men­tioned above

[evelynciara]

How about a tag for global gov­er­nance and/​or pro­vid­ing global pub­lic goods? This is ar­guably one of the most press­ing prob­lems there is, be­cause many of the prob­lems EA works on are global co­or­di­na­tion prob­lems, in­clud­ing ex­is­ten­tial risk (since ex­is­ten­tial se­cu­rity is a global pub­lic good).

[MichaelA]

I’d agree that a tag for Global Gover­nance would be good (thanks for sug­gest­ing it!). This could cover things like:

• how much var­i­ous moves to­wards more global gov­er­nance would help with ex­is­ten­tial risks and other global and/​or trans­gen­er­a­tional pub­lic goods issues

  • E.g., these two posts

• how much var­i­ous moves to­wards more global gov­er­nance could in­crease risks of totalitarianism

• how to best im­ple­ment or pre­vent var­i­ous moves to­wards global governance

• etc.

Per­son­ally, I don’t see much value in a tag for some­thing like pro­vid­ing global pub­lic goods. This is partly be­cause that mat­ter is com­mon to so many differ­ent EA is­sues. Re­lat­edly, I don’t think many posts are es­pe­cially fo­cused on global pub­lic goods pro­vi­sion, rel­a­tive to a huge por­tion of other posts. But that’s just my ten­ta­tive two cents.

If no one sug­gests oth­er­wise or does it them­selves, I’ll prob­a­bly cre­ate a Global Gover­nance tag in a cou­ple days.

[MichaelA]

Up­date: I’ve now made this tag.

[Timothy_Liptrot]

Please sep­a­rate global de­vel­op­ment from global health.

Global health is one part of global de­vel­op­ment, which can in­clude poli­ti­cal, eco­nomic and hu­man­i­tar­ian in­ter­ven­tions. I write on poli­tics in de­vel­op­ing coun­tries, but I’m prob­a­bly the only one on the fo­rum so I don’t need my own tag.

[MichaelA]

Cluelessness

Ar­gu­ments against:

• Per­haps some­what niche?

• My cur­rent in­de­pen­dent im­pres­sion is that clue­less­ness, or some of the ideas or im­pli­ca­tions that peo­ple as­so­ci­ate with it, is a con­fused and not es­pe­cially use­ful idea, and that we shouldn’t re­ally worry about it

  • (I definitely think we’re very un­cer­tain about a lot of things and should take that very se­ri­ously, but that doesn’t re­quire the term “clue­less­ness”)

  • (See also)

Ar­gu­ments for:

• Many smart longter­mist and/​or philo­soph­i­cally minded EAs seem to think clue­less­ness is a re­ally im­por­tant idea, and I think some non-EA philoso­phers write about the idea as well. The out­side view says there’s a good chance that they’re right and I’m wrong.

• In any case, given that many peo­ple talk and think about clue­less­ness, it might be use­ful to make it eas­ier for peo­ple to find posts about the idea, and then ideally those posts would help their be­liefs con­verge on the truth (which may or may not be that the con­cept isn’t use­ful).

[MichaelA]

(Up­date: I’ve now made this tag.)

Im­pact Assess­ment (or maybe some­thing like Im­pact Mea­sure­ment or Mea­sur­ing Im­pact)

Pro­posed rough de­scrip­tion:

The Im­pact Assess­ment tag is for posts rele­vant to “mea­sur­ing the effec­tive­ness of or­gani­sa­tional ac­tivi­ties and judg­ing the sig­nifi­cance of changes brought about by those ac­tivi­ties” (source). This could in­clude posts which in­clude im­pact as­sess­ments; dis­cuss pros, cons, and best prac­tices for im­pact as­sess­ment; or dis­cuss the­o­ries of change or fore­casts of im­pacts, against which mea­sured im­pacts could later be com­pared.

See also Org Strat­egy, Statis­ti­cal Meth­ods, and Re­search Meth­ods.

A hand­ful of the many posts that this tag would fit:

• Re­think Pri­ori­ties Im­pact Survey

• Should sur­veys about the qual­ity/​im­pact of re­search out­puts be more com­mon?

• Re­think Pri­ori­ties 2019 Im­pact and Strategy

• 2017 LEAN Im­pact Assess­ment: Qual­i­ta­tive Find­ings and other posts in that series

• Les­sons from a full-time com­mu­nity builder. Part 1 of 4. Im­pact assessment

• How the Giv­ing Games Pro­ject Tracks Its Impact

• Maybe Ask­ing for advice

• Maybe Do re­search or­gani­sa­tions make the­ory of change di­a­grams? Should they?

• Maybe Effec­tive Altru­ism Foun­da­tion: Plans for 2020 for the sec­tion on “Re­view of 2019”

[MichaelA]

In ad­di­tion to the three tags men­tioned as “See also”, this tag would per­haps over­lap a bit with the tags:

• Forecasting

• Org Update

• Cause Prioritization

• Com­mu­nity Projects

• Crit­i­cism (EA Cause Areas)

• Crit­i­cism (EA Move­ment)

• Crit­i­cism (EA Orgs)

• Data (EA Com­mu­nity)

• EA Funding

[MichaelA]

Economics

The Eco­nomics tag would be for posts fo­cus­ing on top­ics in the do­main of eco­nomics, mak­ing par­tic­u­larly heavy use of con­cepts or tools from eco­nomics, or high­light­ing ways for peo­ple with eco­nomics back­grounds to do good.

Some posts that would fit:

• An in­tro­duc­tion to global pri­ori­ties re­search for economists

• Posts with the Eco­nomic Growth tag

• Maybe some posts wth the Global Health and Devel­op­ment and Statis­ti­cal Meth­ods tags

• Prob­a­bly a lot of other posts, but not merely any post that uses terms like “ex­ter­nal­ities”—hence “par­tic­u­larly heavy use of con­cepts or tools from eco­nomics”

Ar­gu­ments against this tag:

• Over­laps/​sub­sumes with Eco­nomic Growth

• Over­laps a bit with Global Health and Devel­op­ment and maybe Statis­ti­cal Methods

• Maybe too broad a cat­e­gory, as eco­nomics con­cepts and tools are used at least a bit in a lot of EA stuff

• Maybe it wouldn’t make sense to have this tag with­out hav­ing a tag for each of a large ar­ray of other fields/​pro­fes­sions (e.g., Biol­ogy)

  • But maybe we should have a tag for each of a large ar­ray of other fields/​pro­fes­sions?

  • And we already have tags for some, e.g. EA Psychology

Ar­gu­ments for:

• I imag­ine it could be nice for some­one with an eco­nomics back­ground to have an eas­ily ac­cessible col­lec­tion of posts that are es­pe­cially rele­vant to their back­ground and that high­light ways for them to contribute

• Anal­ogy to the His­tory tag, the Eco­nomics of Do­ing Good (Effec­tive Altru­ism) Face­book group, the His­tory and Effec­tive Altru­ism Face­book group, and var­i­ous other groups

[MichaelA]

Maybe some of the ex­ist­ing tags re­lated to poli­tics & policy should be deleted, and a tag for Poli­tics & Policy should re­place them?

Some rele­vant tags that might be on the chop­ping block: Im­prov­ing In­sti­tu­tional De­ci­sion-Mak­ing, Policy Change, Poli­ti­cal Po­lari­sa­tion, In­ter­na­tional Re­la­tions, Direct Democ­racy, and Global Gover­nance.

I think I’m mod­er­ately against this idea, as I think the sub-top­ics are large/​im­por­tant enough to war­rant their own tags, even if there’s a lot of over­lap. But I thought I’d throw this idea out there any­way.

[MichaelA]

(If you hate the above idea but also hate dis­rupt­ing my deli­cious karma, feel free to down­vote that com­ment and up­vote this one to keep the uni­verse in or­der.

Or vice versa, I guess, if you’re a mav­er­ick.)

[fmoreno]

Sorry if off­topic but how do I re­move a tag af­ter wrongly us­ing it?

[MichaelA]

If you mean un-tag­ging a page, you vote down its rele­vance by hov­er­ing over the tag on the page and click­ing the < ar­row. If the rele­vance score gets to or be­low 0, the tag is re­moved.

If you mean delet­ing a tag en­tirely (not just from one page), I think you’d have to mes­sage the EA Fo­rum team?

More info on tags here and here.