Some Reflections on EA Strategy Fortnight

Ben_West🔸29 Jun 2023 17:46 UTC
83 points
14 comments2 min readEA link


  1. I stated “I see this mostly as an experiment into whether having a simple “event” can cause people to publish more stuff” and I feel like the answer is conclusively “yes”. I put a little bit of effort into pitching people, and I’m sure that my title and personal connections didn’t hurt, but this really was not a terribly heavy lift.

    1. Thanks to the fortnight I have a post I can reference for EA being a do-ocracy! I would encourage other people to try to organize things like this.

  2. I noticed an interesting phenomenon: contributors who are less visible in EA wanted to participate because they thought it would give their writing more attention, and people who are more visible in EA wanted to participate because they thought it would give their writing less attention.[1]

    1. I think the average EA might underestimate the extent to which being visible in EA (e.g. speaking at EAG) is seen as a burden rather than an opportunity.

    2. This feels like an important problem to solve, though outside the bounds of this project.

3. Part of my goal was to get conversations that are happening in private into a more public venue. I think this basically worked, at least measured by “conversations that I personally have been having in private”. There are some ways in which karma did not reflect what I personally thought was most important though:

  • I’ve started to worry that it might be important to get digital sentience work (e.g. legal protection for digital beings) before we get transformative AI, and EA’s seem like approximately the only people who could realistically do this in the next ~5 years.[2] So I would have liked to have seen more grappling with this post, although in fairness Jeff wasn’t making a strong pitch for prioritizing AI welfare.

  • I also find myself making the points that Arden raised here pretty regularly, and wish there was more engagement with them.

4. When doing a “special event” on the forum, I always wonder whether the event will add to the forum’s engagement or just cannibalize existing engagement. I think the strategy fortnight was mostly additive, although it’s pretty hard to know the counterfactual.

5. Some events I would be interested in someone trying to organize on the Forum

  • “Everyone change your job week”[3] – opportunity for people to think seriously about whether they should change their jobs, write up a post about it, and then get feedback from other Forum users

  • Rotblat day – Joseph Rotblat was a physicist on the Manhattan project who was originally motivated by wanting to defeat Nazi Germany, but withdrew once he realized the project was actually motivated by wanting to defeat the USSR. On Rotblat day, people post what signs they would look for to determine if their work was being counterproductive.

  • “Should we have an AI moratorium?” debate week – basically the comments here, except you recruit people to give longer form takes.

  • Video week – people create and post video versions of forum articles (or other EA content)

  1. ^

    Or more specifically: they would be seen as one of many voices, rather than someone whose opinions should receive special attention/​deference

  2. ^

    Largely because no one else cares.

  3. ^

    This and the Rotblat idea come from Sydney Von Arx

Ben_West🔸29 Jun 2023 17:46 UTC
83 points
14 comments2 min readEA link