I don’t know about GWWC’s minimum specifically, but in NZ $5 is the smallest donation that is eligible for a tax credit. Many charities here use it as a minimum for that reason. Maybe there’s something similar in other countries?

It may well be worth lowering the limit even if that’s the case, but it’s a potential explanation.

I appreciate the call for more scrutiny of cost-effectiveness in HSS. Given the EA community’s focus on measurable impact, do you think there’s room to shift some methodological attention toward capturing system-level resilience, which is harder to quantify but critical for long-term outcomes (especially during shocks like pandemics or conflicts)? For example, Rwanda’s long-term investment in community health workers and data systems didn’t show immediate returns, but it was credited with enabling a rapid and coordinated pandemic response – suggesting that some HSS benefits may only become visible during moments of acute stress.

AGI by 2028 is more likely than not

Look at the resolution criteria which is based on the specific metaculus Q, seems like a very low bar

That’s what I did for my recent critical review of one of Social Change Lab’s reports.

One of the challenges here is defining what “criticism” is for purposes of the proposed expectation. Although the definition can be somewhat murky at the margin, I think the intent here is to address posts that are more fairly characterized as critical of people or organizations, not those that merely disagree with intellectual work product like an academic article or report.

For what it’s worth, I think your review was solidly on the “not a criticism of a person or organization” side of the ledger.

Second: A big reason to reach out to people is to resolve misunderstandings. But it’s even better to resolve misunderstandings in public, after publishing the criticism. Readers may have the same misunderstandings, and writing a public back-and-forth is better for readers.

That’s consistent with reaching out, I think. My recollection is that people who advocate for the practice have generally affirmed that advance notification is sufficient; the critic need not agree to engage in any pre-publication discourse.

I’m a huge fan of self-hosting and even better writing simple and ugly apps, in my dream world every org would have its resident IT guy who would just code an app that would have all the features they need.

Do people enjoy using Slack? I hate Slack and I think that Slack has bad ergonomics. I’m in about 10 channels and logging into them is horrible. There is no voice chat. I’m not getting notifications (and I fret the thought of setting them up correctly—I just assume that if someone really wanted to get in touch with me immediately, they will find a way) I’m pretty sure it would be hard to create a tool better than Slack (I’m sure one could create a much better tool for a narrower use case, but would find it hard to cover all the Slack’s features) but let’s assume I could. Is it worth it? Do you people find Slack awful as well or is it only me?

This is an extremely helpful response, thank you!

If you want a more detailed take on these issues than a Guardian article can provide, I would attend the annual Space Ecology Workshop. It’s an annual, free event for academic and industry experts to discuss the future of human space exploration and settlement. The team is really nice and might be open to adding a session on welfare /​ ethics of commercial farming in space.

Researchers at the Space Analog for the Moon & Mars at Biosphere 2 would also probably have some interesting takes. Most of their relevant work has focused on plant ecology, but questions about potential alternative sources definitely came up over the years. The project in this article is one of many different research pathways on human nutrition in space, most of which won’t end up happening.

I used to volunteer at Biosphere 2 when I lived in Tucson and like to stay in the loop, but this is not my current field at all.

I’d bet that current models with less than $ 100,000 of post-training enhancements achieve median human performance on this task.

Seems plausible the metaculus judges would agree, especially given that that comment is quite old.

I don’t think the current systems are able to pass the Turing test yet. Quoting from Metaculus admins:

“Given evidence from previous Loebner prize transcripts – specifically that the chatbots were asked Winograd schema questions – we interpret the Loebner silver criteria to be an adversarial test conducted by reasonably well informed judges, as opposed to one featuring judges with no or very little domain knowledge.”

I don’t think Moravec’s paradox is a real paradox in the first place. The reason we think of activities like walking, using your hands, being able to speak language, etc. as easy is because we don’t have any long-term memories from the first few years of life when we had to figure all of that out from scratch. https://​​x.com/​​stuartbuck1/​​status/​​1798547161489231928

Arguing Without Warning

For some reason I find this title delightful. I kind of wish I could have an “argues without warning” flair or something.

I agree with arguments you present above and your conclusion about preferred norms. That said, I think people might have in mind certain types of cases that might justify the need for reaching out beyond the case of general “criticism”. For example, imagine something like this:

Critic: Org X made this super big mistake that makes all their conclusions inaccurate and means all the work of the org is actually net-negative!!!!!

Org X: We didn’t make any mistakes, critic made a mistake on their part because they don’t have all the info/​context, but since we do have that it was easy for us to spot their error. If they had just reached out we would have explained the context. We didn’t publicly explain it because its detailed/​nuanced and we can’t spend 100% of our time explaining context about things on the off-chance someone is going to criticize us about some random detail.

Now, my view is, even if this is what happens, this is still a positive outcome, because, like you say:

it’s even better to resolve misunderstandings in public

Transparency has costs, but I think they are usually internal costs to the org, while transparency also has external benefits, and thus would be expected to be systematically under-supplied by orgs.

At the same time, I think most cases of criticism are realistically more mixed, with the critic making reasonable points but also some mistakes, and the org having some obvious corrections to the criticism but also some places where the back-and-forth is very enlightening. Requiring people to reach out I think risks losing a lot of the value that comes from such “debatable” cases for the reasons you mention.

Another set of cases that is worth separating out are allegations of intentional misconduct. I think there are particular reasons why it might make sense to have a higher expectation for critics to reach out to an org if they are accusing that org of intentional misconduct. I think this may also vary by whether the critic personally observed misconduct, in which case I think issues like a risk of retaliation or extreme difficulty for the critic may weigh in favor of not expecting the critic to reach out.

Executive summary: This exploratory post argues—with moderate to high confidence—that university EA groups can significantly improve post-fellowship engagement and weekly meeting attendance by running informal weekly socials immediately following a “Big intro fellowship,” offering practical implementation tips and observations from the University of Chicago’s experience.

Key points:

1. Running a social right after a “Big intro fellowship” more than doubled weekly attendance at UChicago’s EA group, largely by lowering friction for intro fellows and improving the social vibe for returning members.

2. The “Big intro fellowship” model—where all intro fellows meet at a fixed time before the social—is highly recommended even if a group doesn’t run a social, as it creates a reliable attendance floor and simplifies organizing.

3. Texting attendees individually before events increased turnout and deepened engagement; personalized texts proved more effective than emails or Slack messages, and were well received by most members.

4. Inviting members and leaders of adjacent clubs improves attendance and vibe, especially when content is accessible to intellectually curious students outside the EA core.

5. Providing food likely improves both attendance and conversation quality, though the authors are less confident in the causal strength due to confounding variables.

6. Light structure (e.g., discussion prompts or games) helps intro fellows engage, while one-on-ones can supplement member education that might otherwise be lost in an unstructured format.

This comment was auto-generated by the EA Forum Team. Feel free to point out issues with this summary by replying to the comment, and contact us if you have feedback.

Executive summary: This speculative analysis explores Moravec’s paradox—why tasks humans find easy are often hard for AI—and argues that evolutionary optimization explains this reversal; tasks with less evolutionary pressure, like abstract reasoning or language, are more amenable to near-term automation than perception and motor skills.

Key points:

1. Moravec’s paradox highlights a key AI development pattern: tasks humans find easy (like perception) are hard for AI, and vice versa, due to differing evolutionary optimization histories.

2. The genome information bottleneck suggests that evolution optimized not the specific “weights” of the brain but its training processes, implying that much of human intelligence arises from within-lifetime learning.

3. The brain likely has superior algorithms compared to current AIs, which explains why humans still outperform machines in many sensorimotor tasks despite AIs having more compute and data.

4. Tasks likely to be automated next include abstract reasoning in research, software engineering, and digital art—areas with low evolutionary optimization and abundant training data.

5. High-variance performance among humans may signal tasks less shaped by evolution and thus more automatable; conversely, low-variance, perception-heavy tasks (like plumbing or surgery) will be harder to automate.

6. Using biological analogies cautiously, the author encourages forecasters to combine evolutionary insights with other methods when predicting AI progress, particularly for tasks where current AI is still far behind.

This comment was auto-generated by the EA Forum Team. Feel free to point out issues with this summary by replying to the comment, and contact us if you have feedback.

Thanks for sharing, though I have to say I’m a little sceptical of this line of thought.

If we’re considering our Solar System, I expect almost all aquaculture (and other animal farming) to remain on Earth compared to other planets, indefinitely.

In the short-run this is because I expect at all self-sustaining settlements inhabited by humans beyond Earth to be very difficult and kind of pointless. Every last gram of payload will have to be justified, and water will be scarce and valuable. If there are any more calorie-efficient ways to grow or make food, compared to farming animals, then at least initially I don’t see how there would be animal farming.

And then if (say) a city on Mars really does become advanced enough to justify animal farming, I would expect at that point we’d have bioreactors to grow the animal product directly, without the energy wastage of movement, metabolism, and growing a brain and other discarded organs.^[1]

I also think this applies to the very long-run, beyond our Solar System. I personally struggle to picture a civilisation advanced enough to settle new stars, but primitive enough to choose to raise and slaughter animals. Not even “primitive” in a moral sense; more like technologically inept in this very specific way!

I also think there needs to be a specific mechanism of lock-in, in order to think that the decision to farm animals off-Earth (or deliberately choosing not to) should strongly influence long-run treatment of animals. I’d expect the more important factor is humanity’s general attitudes to and treatment of animals.

I do buy that there would be something symbolically significant about the relevant actors explicitly choosing not to farm animals off-Earth, though, that could resonate a lot (including for animal conditions back on Earth).

(This comment might also be partly relevant)

1. ^

   Honestly I think it’s notable how many startups and even academic projects get funding based on claims that they’re building some component of a mission to Mars or the Moon, based on assumptions which strike me as completely wild and basically made-up.

Vote power should scale with karma

This gives EA Forum and LessWrong a very useful property of markets: more influence accrues to individuals who have a good track record of posting.

Every.org tentatively appears to not have a minimum donation amount.

A number of organizations affiliated with our cause areas are on that platform, I believe.

Not only that, it incentivizes detractors to go back and downvote your other stuff as well. When I was coming out against HBD, older things I had written also got downvoted (and I lost voting power).
This doesn’t make sense on other forums but here it’s perfectly reasonable since with karma you’re not just deciding “how good is this post/​comment?” but also “who gets voting power?”. So if you want the forum to remain dominated by your ingroup, better upvote your ingroup’s posts/​comments while downvoting everything by the outgroup. Not necessarily because you want to, but just because that’s how the system is set up.

The only reason why I don’t go full disagree is because I could see a system akin to “liquid democracy” where you can give proxies or where once in a while we vote on which people will have more voting power for the next term.

In any case, we should expect some heavy survivorship bias here in favor of the status-quo since EAs or potential EAs who get turned off by the karma system will either fully or largely leave the forum (e.g. me).

NOTE: I will abbreviate (“reaching out” + “right to reply” as R+R)

Appreciate the clarification. Do you have any advice for people like myself who have a very different perspective on the value of what you recommend (i.e. R+R)? The way you have described it, I would normal consider the decision of what to do to be within my discretion as a poster. As an analogy, I try to write well reasoned arguments, but I understand that not too infrequently I will probably fail to do so. I might write something and think that I could refine the arguments if I took more time but decide what I have is good enough. But R+R seems much more binary than “make well reasoned arguments”. Its hard for me to shake the feeling that it would be perceived as doing something distinctly “wrong” to fail to do so in certain cases.

General disagreement/​ critical engagement with the ideas of an organisation could technically fall into this category, but is generally read as more collaborative than as an accusation of wrongdoing.

This seems like it could get awfully messy. I think strong disagreements tend to coincide with different views on the nature of the criticism and how accusatory it is, what appropriate tone is etc. It seems like the exact cases where some guidance is most needed are when people will heavily contest these types of issues.

Related to that, one of my concerns is focusing too much on R+R may predictably lead to what I consider unproductive discussions. I think back-and-forth among people who disagree has great value. I worry focusing on R+R has a “going meta” problem. People will argue about whether the degree of R+R done by the critic was justified instead of focusing on the object level merits of the criticism. The R+R debate can become a proxy war for people who’s main crux is really the merits.

I also worry that expectations around R+R won’t necessarily be applied consistently. I worry that R+R is in a sense a “regressive tax” on criticism, that R+R may in practice advantage orgs with more influence over orgs/​people with less influence. I also worry that there may a “right targets” dynamic, where people criticizing “the right targets” may not be subject to the same expectations as people targeting well-liked EA orgs. This is why some of my questions above relate to “who” R+R applies to.

I think the Forum is naturally quite sceptical and won’t let bad faith arguments stand for long

I agree with this, but the logic to me suggests that R+R might not really be needed? The OP raises the concern that orgs will have to scramble to answer criticism, but if they think people on the Forum will find the criticism might be warranted, doesn’t that indicate that it would in fact be valuable for the org to respond? I personally think this overall would produce a better result without R+R, because orgs could in some (perhaps many) cases rely on commenters to do the work, and only feel the need to respond when a response provides information that the community doesn’t have but would find useful. The fact that they feel the need to respond is a signal that there is information missing that they may uniquely have access to. Are you saying you think the Forum can identify bad faith but can’t identify criticism quality as accurately?

I don’t think it will matter if a bad faith response is published alongside a critique.

I agree, but I think similar reasoning applies to the initial criticism. Its obviously not good to have bad criticism, but its not the end of the world, and I think its often reasonably likely that the Forum will respond appropriately. I think to the extend possible it would be good to have symmetry where there aren’t specific things required because a post is “criticism”.