This has the ring of deeply reflective and effortful honesty to me. It feels like a rare level of seeing what is there to be seen, undiverted by whatever conclusions may have been written in your subconscious before you started, and with appropriate caution given toward the traps of fallible memory and motivated narrativizing along the way. I also appreciated seeing your process of updating heuristics with the garage door up. “Don’t pit your evidence against itself” and the ignorance uncertainty vs tension uncertainty distinction feel particularly like things I want to reflect on.
Thanks for showing your part of the map so clearly.
Jonathan Mustin
Karma: 353
Thanks, added to our list.
Thanks Nathan! This one’s on our radar.
Actually it looks like a version of this is currently possible! There’s a handle in the lower-right corner of the equation editor that let’s you resize it. Once you’ve done that, it remains at the set width and wraps the contents to fit. The way the equation editor follows the cursor can be a bit janky, but it does seem to work.
Thanks Isaac! Right, I should’ve listed this under known shortcomings: I worked on a fix for this not long before releasing the feature, but the canonical solutions I found for this problem either a) weren’t usable in this case or b) interfered with text selection in the lines preceding the footnote reference. I’ll take another stab at it this coming week.
Really glad to hear footnotes have met your needs!
maybe the more reasonable ask is to make the WYSIWYG equation editor span multiple lines for large equations.
Added to the list! Are you writing long enough equations that the text goes offscreen?
Thanks for the feedback Jsevillamol! And good timing 🙂 Hope WYSIWYG footnotes are meeting your needs. Full interoperability is a pretty tall order, and I expect it won’t be a near-term add, but I’ve added it to our list in any case. Cheers!
Good suggestion! I expect this would be a well-liked feature. Added to our project list. Thanks!
Thanks Pablo! Added it to the list. The return tooltip idea in particular is clever. This one might take a bit of work, enough that I don’t expect it to go in the immediate quick-fix bucket, but I agree it’s a good addition and I will look into it!
A few things that have been brought to our attention, which I’m currently looking into:
footnotes aren’t enabled for commentslinks in hover previews behave unexpectedlyweb clippers like Pocket and Instapaper don’t capture footnote contents correctly (also seems to be true for existing markdown footnotes)
My sense is that people choose to weather currently-net-negative lives for at least two reasons that they might endorse on reflection:
The negative parts of their life may be solvable, such that the EV of their future is plausibly positive
Ending their life has a few terrible externalities, e.g. the impact it would have on their close loved ones
Eliminating those considerations, I would expect the bar for World Z to be much better than the worst lives people reflectively consider worth living today.
I’m really grateful I got to be a part of your team, Max. Coming into working at CEA nearly 2 years ago I was aware of some of its past reputation for stressful dynamics and tumult. I can happily say that’s just never been my experience, and by all accounts the shift from that CEA of yore to the functioning, welcoming CEA I’ve been lucky enough to be a part of came significantly from the work you’ve done as executive director.
Thinking about my interactions with you, the thing that stands out most is that you’ve felt consistently great at balancing priorities: you manage to maintain epistemic humility and openness to criticism, but also agency and willingness to make tough calls. You’re committed to outcomes, but you also abide by legible principles that create trust and sidestep naive utilitarian mirages. You clearly feel the immense stakes of your/our potential in your bones, while never seeming to lose your air of levity and warmth. You helm a company culture where specific improvements to the lives of beings out in the world are the consistent focus, while also ensuring that people (or at least, certainly I) never feel like mere fodder for the impact engine.
A key EA tenet is a priori implementation agnosticism. When I imagine how that looks at its best, I imagine it looking a lot like this: a delicate balance of considerations, avoiding easy answers, moving forward with your best guesses and then listening carefully to what the world has to tell you.