Aaron Gertler(Aaron L. Gertler)

• Aaron Gertler 21 Apr 2021 13:13 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: MichaelA’s comment on: Style guide

  This doesn’t seem like the right place. I’ve written my thoughts on tagging norms in a few places, but it would be good to collect that (plus others’ thoughts) in one place. I’ll talk to Pablo and see about one of us creating this resource.

  Meanwhile, if you have thoughts on tagging policy, feel free to mention them in replies to this comment (or to create a question post to collect others’ thoughts — though I’m not sure how much discussion is required here, as I think our tagging norms/​policy will end up being pretty simple).

• Aaron Gertler 21 Apr 2021 10:19 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: anonysaurus30k’s comment on: anonysaurus30k’s Shortform

  This is a good thing to call attention to! One of the reasons we add older EA content to the Forum is to make sure it exists in one more easily accessible place, in case another site or service goes down.

• Aaron Gertler 21 Apr 2021 10:17 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Khorton’s comment on: Khor­ton’s Shortform

  Do you consider this intuition to be a reason that people should be wary of making this type of argument? Or maybe specifically avoid the word “colonize”?

  Maybe something like “populate the galaxy” would be better, as it emphasizes that there are no native populations whose members would be harmed by space colonization?

• Aaron Gertler 19 Apr 2021 2:44 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: Agrippa’s comment on: How have you be­come more (or less) en­gaged with EA in the last year?

  That’s a good update to hear! (It’s cool that you came back to this comment to note whether your expectations were met.)

New? Start here! (Use­ful links)

[Question] What ma­te­rial should we cross-post for the Fo­rum’s archives?

• Aaron Gertler 12 Apr 2021 5:17 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: MichaelA’s comment on: The EA Fo­rum Edit­ing Fes­ti­val has be­gun!

  We have two categories (“Moral Philosophy”, “Long-Term Risks and Flourishing”) which capture lots of material relevant to longtermism.

  As for the cause area section specifically:

  • AI is its own cluster because we currently have an enormous number of articles about it. If we only had one article about AI risk, I’d put it under “Global Catastrophic Risks” and that would be that.

  • The “Global Catastrophic Risks (other)” cluster feels well-defined to me in a way that a “longtermist” cluster wouldn’t. When I look at the “Other” cluster, most of the seemingly “longtermist” causes are still things that many people work on hoping to achieve substantial change within their lifetimes, for the sake of present-day people — anti-aging research, land use reform, climate change...

    • If you ask me about a cause area in that section, I can fairly confidently say whether or not it counts as a GCR. In many cases, I wouldn’t be able to say whether or not it counted as “longtermist”. (And as you mention, many of the areas could be prioritized for longtermist or non-longtermist reasons.)

  I think of longtermism as a common value system in EA. Many causes seem especially valuable to work on given a longtermist value system, but few such causes require a longtermist value system to make sense. (But I spend less time thinking about this kind of thing than you do, so I’m open to counterpoints I might not be considering.)

• Aaron Gertler 12 Apr 2021 4:55 UTC

  5 points

  in reply to: MichaelA’s comment on: The EA Fo­rum Edit­ing Fes­ti­val has be­gun!

  I’ve added a link to your “tag proposal” thread (rather than this article, which isn’t meant to be a permanent resource).

• Aaron Gertler 12 Apr 2021 4:55 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: MichaelA’s comment on: The EA Fo­rum Edit­ing Fes­ti­val has be­gun!

  The clusters aren’t in alphabetical order — only the articles within clusters.

  The clusters are arranged according to a couple of heuristics that I value about equally:

  1. Try to make the columns of roughly equal length

  2. Have the “other” cluster near the bottom-right of the section (seems natural for that to be the last thing people look at)

  3. Have related clusters close together (e.g. “effective giving” and “career choice”)

  I’d prefer to have all the cluster names aligned horizontally, as on the LW Concepts page, but our extremely varied column lengths discourage that for now (this might change as we continue to add new articles, look at new ways to sort the page, etc.)

  If anyone has an idea for making the page better-sorted and/​or more evenly arranged, I’m all ears. Graphic design isn’t my forte and the current version is quite rough.

• Aaron Gertler 12 Apr 2021 4:42 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: MichaelA’s comment on: The EA Fo­rum Edit­ing Fes­ti­val has be­gun!

  I think of tags as being for “posts that involve X in some way”, which encompasses posts written by and about a given organization.

  I do think that org update posts are a good way to use an org’s tag. If someone is interested in The Humane League, they might want to see what THL was doing in a given month. It’s easier to use the tag for this than to make someone filter through all the monthly update posts to see which ones mention THL. (The downside is that many posts tagged with an org won’t have much info about it — are you worried about that kind of tag use not being relevant enough?)

  The case when I wouldn’t use an org is when that org’s work is very briefly referenced in a way that doesn’t have much to do with them (e.g. someone cites an 80K problem profile as a source for some claim — that doesn’t seem like a statement “about” 80K).

  As this conversation continues and I arrive at a firmer definition of an org tag policy, I’ll try to make it clearly visible in a few places.

• Aaron Gertler 12 Apr 2021 4:37 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: Chi’s comment on: The EA Fo­rum Edit­ing Fes­ti­val has be­gun!

  On point #2: Here’s what I had suggested on my post about organization tags:

  Choose an organization. Add that organization’s tag to every post about their work, every cross-post from their website, etc. (If they have no tag, create one!) You can find these posts by entering the org’s name into the searchbar.

  In general, I think it’s better to have more posts tagged rather than fewer, and I’d consider “paid work by an employee of X” to be “work paid for by X” and thus, in some sense, “the work of X”.

• Aaron Gertler 12 Apr 2021 4:33 UTC

  9 points

  in reply to: evelynciara’s comment on: The EA Fo­rum Edit­ing Fes­ti­val has be­gun!

  That’s exactly the reason I linked to this list of high-karma, untagged posts as a starting point for people to work on. (And… it’s already down at least 80% from where it was — good job, people!)

  By changing the “threshold” number at the end of that URL, you can see untagged posts at any level of karma. That’s a good way to find posts that may be especially worth tagging. (I’ve added this notice to the “how can you help” section — thanks for the suggestion.)

• Aaron Gertler 12 Apr 2021 4:31 UTC

  5 points

  in reply to: Henry_Stanley’s comment on: The EA Fo­rum Edit­ing Fes­ti­val has be­gun!

  We’ve gone with a different naming convention than LessWrong (they say “Concepts” while using the same “tags” URL), but given the amount of code our sites share, it will take some time to disentangle our terminology from theirs.

  I’d like our “Tags Portal” page to eventually have the name “Wiki”, and people should think of that page as the “homepage” of the Wiki.

  Or maybe even consider renaming tags to wiki—where posts on the forum can be ‘tagged’ with a wiki article.

  The “Tags Portal” contained a section I’d titled “Articles” but have just retitled “Wiki Articles”. The first words of that page remain the same:

  This page displays a list of articles in the EA Forum Wiki.

  Some of these articles are also tags that can be added to posts, so that people can find posts on certain topics. You can upvote or downvote a tag for a given post to move it higher or lower in the list of posts on that tag’s page.

  Note also the second sentence of this post:

  Some of these articles can be applied to posts: we call those “tags”.

  So we have similar intuitions, but I use the word “tag” to represent an article that can be used as a tag, because saying “I tagged this post with article X” also seems confusing.

  We’re still trying to figure out the extent to which having “wiki only” articles make sense (and what fraction of articles don’t work as tags). If we end up making all articles usable as tags, the distinction between “article” and “tag” disappears, which will lead to more terminology change.

Your World, Bet­ter: Global progress for mid­dle schoolers

Real­ity has a sur­pris­ing amount of detail

• Aaron Gertler 11 Apr 2021 9:11 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: JP Addison’s comment on: Sen­tience & consciousness

  I feel as though someone with broad interests in this area should be able to subscribe to multiple tags, and we should encourage that sort of thing more if it isn’t what users are naturally doing.

  Keeping a bigger tag around isn’t too harmful, but I think it might lead to lots of people using just that tag rather than looking for more narrow/​specific tags. (That’s what happened to me when I first made the tag — once it existed, it became an easy catch-all for posts that weren’t very similar.)

• Aaron Gertler 8 Apr 2021 19:15 UTC

  25 points

  on: The EA Fo­rum Edit­ing Fes­ti­val has be­gun!

  Number of tags applied to posts the day before the Editing Festival was announced: ~30

  Number of tags applied the day after the announcement: ~300!

  Good start, everyone ὠA

• Aaron Gertler 8 Apr 2021 10:24 UTC

  6 points

  in reply to: evelynciara’s comment on: Humor

  After some discussion with Pablo, I’ve renamed this tag to “Humor”. People sometimes write humorous posts on other days, and it seems excessive to have an “April Fools’ Day” tag in addition to a “Humor” tag. It’s easy enough to see which “Humor” posts were written on April Fools’ Day if someone wants to.

  This change isn’t set in stone -- I’m open to arguments that we should have an AFD-specific tag.

The EA Fo­rum Edit­ing Fes­ti­val has be­gun!

• Aaron Gertler 7 Apr 2021 6:04 UTC

  9 points

  on: Meta-EA Needs Models

  Anecdotally (and also maybe some survey data), there are people that you would consider “top EAs” where it feels like they could have not gotten into EA if things were different, e.g. they were introduced by a friend they respected less or they read the wrong introduction. It seems still quite possible that we aren’t catching all the “top people.”

  I agree with all of this. In particular, saying “all the people in EA seem like they’d have ended up here eventually” leaves out all the people who also “seem like they’d have ended up here eventually” but… aren’t here.

  I can think of people like this! I had lots of conversations while I was leading the Yale group. Some of them led to people joining; others didn’t; in some cases, people came to a meeting or two and then never showed up again. It’s hard to imagine there’s no set of words I could have said, or actions I could have taken, that wouldn’t have converted some people from “leaving after one meeting” to “sticking around” or “never joining” to “attending a first event out of curiosity”.

  The Introductory Fellowship is a thing, created and funded by “meta” people, that I think would have “converted” many of those people — if I’d had access to it back in 2014, I think EA Yale could have been twice the size in its first year, because we lost a bunch of people who didn’t have anything to “do” or who were stuck toiling away on badly-planned projects because I was a mediocre leader.

  *****

  I also have at least one friend I think would have been a splendid fit, and who was involved with the community early on, but then had a terrible experience with the person who introduced her to EA (they are no longer a member) and has now soured on everything related to the community (while still holding personal beliefs that are basically EA-shaped, AFAICT). That’s the sort of thing that meta/​community-building work should clearly prevent if it’s going well.

  Had my friend had the bad experience in 2021 rather than nearly a decade earlier, she’d have access to help from CEA, support from several specialized Facebook groups, and a much larger/​better-organized community in her area that would [I hope] have helped her resolve things.