Thanks for the suggestion. We’ve thought about this for a while, and I agree it’s a good idea. Given the lack of a huge amount of use of the shortform feature, my guess is it’s not winning the prioritization battle. But I’ve noted this as bump to the request.

This is a very exciting development!

I have one critical comment. In your third footnote, you write:

It might be argued that [rewarding participants for publishing analyses that move our subjective estimates significantly away from the our current views] makes the prize encourage people to have views different from those presented here. This seems hard to avoid, since we are looking for information that changes our decisions, which requires changing our beliefs.

However, an analysis that convinces you that your current estimates are correct can make your beliefs more resilient, and in turn change your decisions. For example, it can make you donate a larger fraction of your assets now, since you expect your beliefs to change less in the future than you did before. It can also make you less willing to run these prize contests, since they are less likely to change your views. So I wonder if you should have instead rewarded participants for either moving your estimates significantly away from your current views or for making your current views significantly more resilient.

I think this is still in the framework of thinking that large groups of people having to coordinate leads to stagnation. To change my mind, you’d have to make the case that having a larger number of startups leads to less innovation, which seems like a hard case to make.

I think de-facto right now people have to coordinate in order to do work on AI Alignment, because most people need structure and mentorship and guidance to do any work, and want to be part of a coherent community.

Separately, I also think many startup communities are indeed failing to be innovative because of their size and culture. Silicon Valley is a pretty unique phenomenon, and I’ve observed “startup communities” in Germany that felt to me liked they harmed innovation more than they benefitted it. The same is true for almost any “startup incubator” that large universities are trying to start up. When I visit them, I feel like the culture there primarily encourage conformity and chasing the same proxy metrics as everyone else.

I think actually creating a startup ecosystem is hard, and I think it’s still easier than creating a similar ecosystem for something as ill-defined as AI Alignment. The benefit that startups have is that you can very roughly measure success by money, at least in the long run, and this makes it pretty easy to point many people at the problem (and like, creates strong incentives for people to point themselves at the problem).

I think we have no similar short pointer for AI Alignment, and most people who start working in the field seem to me to be quite confused about what the actual problem to be solved is, and then often just end up doing AI capabilities research while slapping an “AI Alignment” label on it, and I think scaling that up mostly just harms the world.

There is a cambrian explosion of research groups, but basically no new agendas as far as I can tell? Of the agendas listed on that post, I think basically all are 5+ years old (some have morphed, like ELK is a different take on scalable oversight than Paul had 5 years ago, but I would classify it as the same agenda).

There is a giant pile of people working on the stuff, though the vast majority of new work can be characterized “let’s just try to solve some near-term alignment problems and hope that it somehow informs our models of long-term alignment problems” and a large pile of different types of transparency research. I think there are good cases for that work, though I am not very optimistic about it helping with existential risk.

It was a bet worth taking and we likely learned a lot. We will keep fighting the good fights. I feel grateful to all the people who worked hard on this.

If we were going to go down the multi-forum path, a less icky option would be to have both forums be open, but one explicitly for more in-depth, more advanced, more aggregative or more whatever posts, and moderation that moved ones that didn’t meet the bar back to the more beginner-friendly forum.

Or as the forum currently is, we could just add tags that capture whatever it is the OP is trying to capture - ‘beginner-friendly’, ‘not beginner-friendly’ or whatever.

If that’s not enough, I’d imagine there’s some middle ground UX that we could implement.

Hey! Regarding more locations for EAGx and Georgia, we are just starting EA community in Georgia (country) and would love to host an EAGx at some point in near future.

I agree with your edit more than with the rest of your comment.

It would be uncharitable to interpret “takes” to be about people’s specific views. Instead, it’s about things like the following:

Do I learn something from talking to this person? When I dig deeper into the reasons why they believe what they believe, do I find myself surprised by good arguments or depth of thought, or something of the like? Or does it just seem like they’re parroting something or are ideologically clouded and can’t seem to reason well? Do they seem interested in truth-seeking, intellectually honest, etc? Do they seem to have “good judgment” or do they make arguments where it feels like the conclusions don’t even follow from their premises and they’re just generally off about the way things work? [There are tons of other factors that go into this; I’m just gesturing at some of the things.]

Regarding competence, there’s no single axis but that doesn’t mean the concept isn’t meaningful. Lots of concepts work like that – they’re fuzzy but still meaningful.

To be fair, some things might be less about competence and more about not having equally “high standards.” For instance, I notice that sometimes people new to EA make posts on some specific topic that are less thorough than some post from 5-10 years ago that long-term EAs would consider “canonical.” And these new posts don’t add new considerations or even miss important considerations discussed in the older post. In that case, the new person may still be “competent” in terms of intelligence or even reasoning ability, but they would lack a kind of obsessiveness and high standards about what they’re doing (otherwise they’d probably have done more reading about the topic they were going to make a top-level post about – instead of asking questions, which is always an option!). So, it could also be a cultural thing that’s more about lack of obsessiveness (“not bothering to read most of what seems relevant”) or high standards, rather than (just) about “competence.”

(And, for what it’s worth, I think it’s totally forgivable to occasionally make posts that weren’t aware of everything that’s previously been written. It would be absurd to expect newcomers to read everything. It just gets weird if most of someone’s posts are “worse than redundant” in that way and if they make lots of such posts and they’re all confidently phrased so you get the impression that the person writing the post is convinced they’ll be changing the minds of lots of EAs.)

Thank you! I will include a link in OP too

I don’t understand this. Have you written about this or have a link that explains it?

But even then, I think my logic stands: notice that OP talks about EA orgs in particular. Meaning OP does want to see a higher concentration of posts with views correlated to those of EA org employees. But that means a lower concentration of posts from people with views who don’t directly align with EA orgs—which would cause a cycle of blocking more diverse views.

I suspect OP doesn’t want more posts from employees at EA orgs because they are such employees—I understood OP as wanting higher quality posts, wherever they come from.

True, the post does suggest that employees at EA orgs make higher quality posts on average, and that they may have less time to post on the Forum than the average user, but those are empirical matters (and seem plausible to me, anyway).

Edit to add: I generally didn’t get the feeling that OP wholeheartedly supports intervening on any or each of these possible explanations, or that doing so wouldn’t risk other negative consequences (e.g. increased groupthink).

EA Forum ‘human narrated’ podcasts are coming back soon in some form or another, with some new partnerships.

For now, see “Hosting/​introducing: “EA Forum Summaries Weekly”, narrated and produced by Coleman Snell. ” by Effective Altruism Forum Podcast.

⚓ https://​​spotifyanchor-web.app.link/​​e/​​5kui2HqlCtb

Thanks!

Though I don’t know what the insight was, nor do I know the justification for not revealing it, and even though I currently believe more transparency in the admissions process is probably a good idea given how confused even long-time EAs are—despite all this, I strongly doubt there is anything insidious going on.

And because I had a hard time finding what “government house utilitarianism” meant without being blocked by the paywall of a scholarly article here is probably the most important part found on Henry Sidgewick’s wikipedia article:

Sidgwick is closely, and controversially, associated with esoteric morality: the position that a moral system (such as utilitarianism) may be acceptable, but that it is not acceptable for that moral system to be widely taught or accepted.^[17]

Bernard Williams would refer to Sidgwickian esoteric utilitarianism as “Government House Utilitarianism” and claim that it reflects the elite British colonialist setting of Sidgwick’s thought.

What was this distinct reason? If this was mentioned in the post, I didn’t see it.

If it wasn’t mentioned in the post, it feels very disingenuous of you to not mention it and give the impression that you were left in the dark and had to come up with your long list of hypotheses.

Sorry for not explaining myself well enough. But I still stand behind my interpretation. Does my new comment help?

Re OP’s point 3:

I tried not to imply that OP directly opposes diversity (my comment was initially phrased more harshly and I changed it before publishing) - so I’m sorry that’s still how I came across.

And I don’t really get what you mean by competence differences etc. There’s no single axis, competence at which makes people’s posts on the forum more valuable, and similarly no single axis for getting hired by EA orgs.

There might be some common ones. But even then, I think my logic stands: notice that OP talks about EA orgs in particular. Meaning OP does want to see a higher concentration of posts with views correlated to those of EA org employees. But that means a lower concentration of posts from people with views who don’t directly align with EA orgs—which would cause a cycle of blocking more diverse views.

Edit: I forgot to add, OP could have phrased this differently, saying that people with productive things to say (which I assume is what they may have meant by “better takes”) would be busier doing productive work and have less time to post here. Which I don’t necessarily buy, but let’s roll with it. Instead, they chose to focus on EA orgs in particular.

Hi Jonathan!

I’m Dion from EAGxSingapore, one of the two community contact people for the event. I’m sorry you felt this way during the conference and wanted to clarify some points.

1. We did not monitor attendee interactions or 1-1s during the conference. The only exception where we kept track of attendees was for the underaged participants, as alcohol was served during the event. This was explicitly stated to the affected individuals.

2. It was a priority for us to have a local community contact person. (Me!) However, I (personally) felt that our other contact person was valuable as he had much more context on the EAs flying in from outside the region than any other person on the team. The decision was also partially made because the two of us were the most likely to be contactable since our responsibilities during the conference allowed us to be on our phones/​laptops more than the others.

3. The community contact persons did not work in isolation. Whenever an issue was raised, we would consult each other, the rest of the team, and sometimes CEA’s Community Health team or the local group organizers relevant to the situation to get as much context as possible. For the cases in EAGxSingapore, we preferred to have people sort it out themselves unless we were explicitly requested to step in.

4. The staff for the conference were probably walking/​looking around a lot more than at other events. However, this was because we underestimated the required clean-up crew and were on the lookout for trash lying around.

Happy to discuss any other feedback that you have about the conference!

Very good point. Considering last dollar spent or marginal dollar spent lowers these numbers by quite a lot—though I think even an order of magnitude still gives you quite high numbry

Yes, I think it is a very difficult and perhaps neccesarily uneasy balancing act, at least for those whose main or sole priority is to maximize impact. Minimum viable self-care is quite problematic, but it is not plausible we can maximize impact without any sacrifice whatsoever either