harfe

Karma: 902

harfe Nov 13, 2024, 11:12 AM
8 points
2 ∶ 0
in reply to: Manuel Allgaier’s comment on: Manuel Allgaier’s Quick takes
In my opinion you have not really argued why it is neglected. As a starting point, they seem to spend roughly $35 million per year: https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/824506840. $14 million of those are for salaries, so I would be surprised if new features are strongly bottlenecked by money and talent.

I am just guessing on these issues, but my suspicion as for why some features such as “live location sharing” and “display past encrypted messages from the group chat you were not a member of but only just now joined” are not (yet) implemented because they do not fit well into Signal’s approach to security/privacy.

harfe Nov 6, 2024, 11:34 AM
15 points
3 ∶ 0
in reply to: James Herbert’s comment on: Politics and the EA Forum

Could you provide examples of political discussions on the EA Forum that appear to have negatively impacted the forum’s environment or impaired its ability to achieve its objectives?

As far as I remember, the political discussions have been quite civilized on the EA Forum. But I think this is because of the policies and culture the EA Forum has. If political discussions were a lot more frequent, the culture and discussion styles could get worse. For example, it might attract EA-adjacent people or even outsiders to fight their political battles on the EA Forum. Maybe this can be solved by hiring additional moderators though.

Also, politics can get a lot of attention that would be better spend elsewhere. For example this post about Trump generated 60 comments, and I am not sure if it was worth it.

harfe Nov 4, 2024, 10:12 PM
6 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: Eevee🔹’s comment on: evelynciara’s Shortform
Could you expand a bit on how this would look like? How are they being “shunted”, what kind of roles are low-level roles? (E.g. your claim could be that the average male EA CS-student is much less likely to hear “You should change from AI safety to community-building” than female EA CS-students.)

harfe Nov 4, 2024, 9:38 PM
5 points
3 ∶ 0
in reply to: Aaron Bergman’s comment on: aaronb50′s Shortform

That is, many (most?) people need a break-in point to move from something like “basically convinced that EA is good, interested in the ideas and consuming content, maybe donating 10%” to anything more ambitious.

I am under the impression that EAGx can be such a break-in point, and has lower admission standards than EAG. In particular, there is EAGxVirtual (Applications are open!).

Has the rejected person you are thinking of applied to any EAGx conference?

harfe Oct 25, 2024, 3:44 PM
1 point
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: Cassidy’s comment on: Tell me what to do in the next months
I think sounding like a salesman is ok here.

Maybe something like “Which orgs would benefit from my unpaid labor?” or “Offer: I can work on your project for free for some months (Tech/Operation/Management)”.

harfe Oct 2, 2024, 2:48 PM
5 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Sjir Hoeijmakers🔸’s comment on: Four strategies for scaling effective giving (MCF 2024 memo)
Great to see that you are seriously thinking about promoting etg!

If I had refreshed the frontpage and seen your post on etg I would not have posted my comment, I was just a bit surprised to see the “obvious” strategy of “lets promote etg” not explicitly mentioned.

harfe Oct 2, 2024, 2:13 PM
6 points
3 ∶ 0
on: Four strategies for scaling effective giving (MCF 2024 memo)
A strategy for scaling effective giving that is not mentioned here is earning to give.

Encouraging and helping people who are already bought into the idea of donating effectively to earn more could generate a lot of money and value. I think this strategy should be considered besides encouraging high-earners to donate effectively (I am not making a claim here about which is better).

A concrete step could be to talk to people from 80k about advertising earning to give again.

harfe Sep 11, 2024, 9:23 AM
10 points
4 ∶ 0
in reply to: Nathan Young’s comment on: Draghi’s report signal a less safety-focused European Union on AI

I hope we will endorse this, should it come to pass

Endorse what exactly? It is unclear to me what you mean there exactly.

harfe Aug 26, 2024, 1:18 PM
16 points
6 ∶ 1
in reply to: yanni kyriacos’s comment on: Yanni Kyriacos’s Shortform
This feels like misleading advertising to me, particularly “Election interference” and “Loss of social connection”. Unless bluedot is doing some very different curriculum now and have a very different understanding of what alignment is. These bait-and-switch tactics might not be a good way to create a “big tent”.

harfe Aug 15, 2024, 2:59 PM
10 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: Ross Rheingans-Yoo🔸’s comment on: Announcing the $200k EA Community Choice
This seems false.

Consider three charities A,B,C and three voters X,Y,Z, who can donate $1 each. The matching funds are $3. Voter Z likes charity C and thinks A and B are useless, and gives everything to C. Voter Y likes charity B and thinks A and C are useless, and gives everything to B. Voter X likes charities A and B equally and thinks C is useless.

Then voter X can get more utility by giving everything to charity B, rather than splitting equally between A and B: If voter X gives everything to charity B, the proportions for charities A,B,C are $0^{2} : (1 + 1)^{2} : 1^{2}$ If voter X splits between A and B, the proportions are ${\sqrt{1 / 2}}^{2} : (1 + \sqrt{1 / 2})^{2} : 1^{2}$ The latter gives less utility according to voter X.

harfe Aug 9, 2024, 12:48 PM
1 point
0 ∶ 0
on: The AI Safety Debate Is All Wrong by Daron Acemoglu
Here is the article I personally find it unsatisfying to read, as it does not adequately represent or address the xrisk concerns.

harfe Aug 2, 2024, 6:29 PM
16 points
3 ∶ 0
in reply to: Jason’s comment on: EA should unequivocally condemn race science
I do remember this post having around 20 net upvotes about a day ago.

But some changes over time can also just be noise (if some people have strong-votes). Also, timezone correlations could also be an explanation (it would not surprise me if the US is more free-speech than Europe). Or there could be changes in the way the article gets found by different people. Or people change their vote after they changed their mind over the article. Or the article gets posted in a discord channel, without any intentions or instructions of brigading. Of course its still possible that the vote changes have some sketchy origin, and I am not against the forum moderators investigating these patterns.

This post is on a controversial topic, so lots of votes in both directions are to be expected.

harfe Aug 1, 2024, 3:14 PM
20 points
4 ∶ 0
on: EA should unequivocally condemn race science

The EA Forum should ban any discussion of race science, “human biodiversity”, or racial differences in IQ

Can you link to concrete examples of things on the EA Forum that would be deleted under the proposed new EA Forum rules?

I tried searching for “human biodiversity” but few of these posts seem like the kind of post where I would guess that you want them deleted.

Things that are found were mostly about the Manifest or Bostrom controversy. I am guessing you do not want to delete these. Or this post. In the wake of the Bostrom controversy there was also this heavily downvoted post that complained about “wokism”. I am guessing this is the type of post that you want to see deleted. There is also this upvoted comment that argues against “human biodiversity”, which, if I interpret your proposed rule change correctly, should also be deleted. (A rule that says “you are allowed to argue against HBD, but not for it” would be naive IMO, and I do not get the impression that you would endorse such a rule).

Overall, I do not remember seeing people discussing “human biodiversity” on the object level. It indeed seems off-topic for EA. And explicitly searching for it does not bring up a lot, and only in relation to EA controversies.

harfe Jul 30, 2024, 8:03 PM
2 points
2 ∶ 0
on: Against AI As An Existential Risk
The section “International Game Theory” does not seem to me like an argument against AI as an existential risk.

If the USA and China decide to have a non-cooperative AI race, my sense is that this would increase existential risk rather than reduce it.

harfe Jul 29, 2024, 6:47 PM
1 point
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Rebecca’s comment on: Rebecca’s Quick takes
There is already a central repository of EA domains: https://ea.domains/. You could just add it there and wait to be contacted.

harfe Jul 16, 2024, 7:26 PM
4 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Magnus Vinding’s comment on: Silent cosmic rulers
Just speculating here, but if you want to capture most of the energy of a star (e.g. by a Dyson swarm), this will be visible. And if you can only use a fraction of the energy available, this might reduce your expansion speeds.

harfe Jul 15, 2024, 5:40 AM
1 point
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Linch’s comment on: Most smart and skilled people are outside of the EA/rationalist community: an analysis

If you take a bunch of random samples of a normal distribution, and only look at subsamples with median 2 sds out, in approximately ~0 subsamples will you find it equally likely to see + 0 sds and +4 sds.

Wait, are you claiming +0 SD is significantly more likely than +4 SD in a subsample with median +2 SD, or are you claiming that +4 SD is more likely than +0 SD? And what makes you think so?

harfe Jul 8, 2024, 10:07 PM
6 points
2 ∶ 0
on: Why not parliamentarianism? [book by Tiago Ribeiro dos Santos]
This looks like a good argument for proportional representation. This might be worth bringing up when the next discussion of FPTP vs approval vs ranked choice takes place.

What is missing (imo) is what EAs can do about it. Just having the “correct” opinion is not enough, and most countries are probably reluctant to change their constitutions.

harfe Jun 26, 2024, 1:08 PM
12 points
12 ∶ 1
in reply to: timunderwood’s comment on: Responses to Manifest are not about Manifest
FYI: Emile Torres is using they/them pronouns. I think you should edit your comment to use their preferred pronouns.

harfe Jun 21, 2024, 8:06 PM
1 point
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Chris Leong’s comment on: casebash’s Shortform

In fact, I’d go further and suggest that it would be great if they were to set up their own forum.

Manifold already has a highly active discord, where they can discuss all the manifold-specific issues. This did not prevent the EA Forum from discussing the topic, and I doubt it would be much different if Manifold had a proper forum instead of a discord.

This is annoying because many of these discussions rate high on controversy but low on importance for EA.

It might seem low on importance for EA to you, but I suspect some people who are upset about Manifest inviting right-wing people do not consider it low-importance.