JP Addison🔸

Karma: 5,775

I’m a moderator for the EA Forum, and an AI Systems Specialist for 80,000 Hours.

I ran the EA Forum team for 2 years, and was the original developer working on the EA Forum 2.0 for 5 years before that.

Prior to CEA, I was a data engineer at an aerospace startup. I got into EA through reading the entire archive of Slate Star Codex in 2015. I found EA naturally compelling, and donated to AMF, then GFI, before settling on my current cause prioritization of meta-EA, with AI x-risk as my object-level preference. I try to have a wholehearted approach to morality, rather than thinking of it as an obligation or opportunity. You see my LessWrong profile here.

In my personal life, I hang out in the Boston EA and Gaymer communities, enjoy houseplants, table tennis, and playing coop games with my partner, who has more karma than me.

JP Addison🔸May 3, 2024, 9:32 PM
4 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Vasco Grilo🔸’s comment on: EA Forum feature suggestion thread
Hiding karma would be specially relevant for people with low karma, who are new to the forum?
At the time we wrote the feature, we wanted to experiment with it for only some posts, and generally we often roll(ed) out features to power users first. Rather than having someone new to the site who just happened to discover it but wouldn’t be able to model the costs/benefits of turning on the feature.
I assume it can be disabled later one (in the post editor moderation options)?
No, actually. On the basis that karma does actually contribute a lot to the way people interact with comments, we wanted to avoid changing the system midway through a thread.
(TBC this really was a long time ago and I don’t necessarily endorse the decisions that past!me made here.)

JP Addison🔸May 3, 2024, 1:53 PM
4 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Vasco Grilo🔸’s comment on: EA Forum feature suggestion thread
We do actually have a way to hide the karma for everyone on the comments of your own posts. It’s an experiment we decided to create to see if it would help certain discussions feel less like a gladiatorial arena. It’s intentionally pretty hidden right now, and might not work well after multiple years of not being used. To enable it:
1. You must have 2,000 karma
2. You first need to opt in to the feature on your account settings
3. Then you need to enable it on a new post
If you do this, consider reaching out to us to ensure it isn’t completely broken.

JP Addison🔸Apr 24, 2024, 1:46 PM
7 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Nathan Young’s comment on: Nathan Young’s Shortform
I want to throw in a bit of my philosophy here.
Status note: This comment is written by me and reflects my views. I ran it past the other moderators, but they might have major disagreements with it.
I agree with a lot of Jason’s view here. The EA community is indeed much bigger than the EA Forum, and the Forum would serve its role as an online locus much less well if we used moderation action to police the epistemic practices of its participants.
I don’t actually think this that bad. I think it is a strength of the EA community that it is large enough and has sufficiently many worldviews that any central discussion space is going to be a bit of a mishmash of epistemologies.^[1]
Some corresponding ways this viewpoint causes me to be reluctant to apply Habryka’s philosophy:^[2]
Something like a judicial process is much more important to me. We try much harder than my read of LessWrong to apply rules consistently. We have the Forum Norms doc and our public history of cases forms something much closer to a legal code + case law than LW has. Obviously we’re far away from what would meet a judicial standard, but I view much of my work through that lens. Also notable is that all nontrivial moderation decisions get one or two moderators to second the proposal.
Related both to the epistemic diversity, and the above, I am much more reluctant to rely on my personal judgement about whether someone is a positive contributor to the discussion. I still do have those opinions, but am much more likely to use my power as a regular user to karma-vote on the content.
Some points of agreement:
Old users are owed explanations, new users are (mostly) not
Agreed. We are much more likely to make judgement calls in cases of new users. And much less likely to invest time in explaining the decision. We are still much less likely to ban new users than LessWrong. (Which, to be clear, I don’t think would have been tenable on LessWrong when they instituted their current policies, which was after the launch of GPT-4 and a giant influx of low quality content.)
I try really hard to not build an ideological echo chamber
Most of the work I do as a moderator is reading reports and recommending no official action. I have the internal experience of mostly fighting others to keep the Forum an open platform. Obviously that is a compatible experience with overmoderating the Forum into an echo chamber, but I will at least bring this up as a strong point of philosophical agreement.
Final points:
I do think we could potentially give more “near-ban” rate limits, such as the 1 comment/3 days. The main benefit of this I see is as allowing the user to write content disagreeing with their ban.
1. ^
  Controversial point! Maybe if everyone adopted my own epistemic practices the community would be better off. It would certainly gain in the ability to communicate smoothly with itself, and would probably spend less effort pulling in opposite directions as a result, but I think the size constraints and/or deference to authority that would be required would not be worth it.
2. ^
  Note that Habryka has been a huge influence on me. These disagreements are what remains after his large influence on me.

JP Addison🔸Apr 24, 2024, 1:42 PM
24 points
9 ∶ 0
on: JP’s Shortform
With the US presidential election coming up this year, some of y’all will probably want to discuss it.^[1] I think it’s a good time to restate our politics policy. tl;dr Partisan politics content is allowed, but will be restricted to the Personal Blog category. On-topic policy discussions are still eligible as frontpage material.
1. ^
  Or the expected UK elections.
What links here?
- Toby Tremlett🔹's comment on Toby Tremlett’s Quick takes by Toby Tremlett🔹 (May 8, 2024, 4:16 PM; 36 points)

JP Addison🔸Apr 16, 2024, 6:53 PM
2 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: Jason’s comment on: EA Forum feature suggestion thread
I believe what you’re looking for is the personal blog distinction. Authors can decide that they want to post their writing on the Forum, but not submit it to the frontpage. Examples might be a post that is political, or if someone is dumping a larger number of posts. Devin actually did this, so you’ll notice that the posts you mentioned are in the personal blog category. If you’re seeing them on the frontpage, then my guess is you’ve customized your feed.

JP Addison🔸Apr 15, 2024, 3:09 PM
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: JP Addison🔸’s comment on: JP’s Shortform
FYI thanks for all the helpful comments here — I promptly got covid and haven’t had a chance to respond 😅

JP Addison🔸Apr 15, 2024, 3:06 PM
4 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Simon Newstead’s comment on: EA Forum feature suggestion thread
This is a really nice idea, thanks!

JP Addison🔸Apr 5, 2024, 8:20 PM
26 points
1 ∶ 0
on: JP’s Shortform
Here’s a puzzle I’ve thought about a few times recently:
The impact of an activity ( $I$ ) is due to two factors, $X$ and $Y$ . Those factors combine multiplicatively to produce impact. Examples include:
- The funding of an organization and the people working at the org
- A manager of a team who acts as a lever on the work of their reports
- The EA Forum acts as a lever on top of the efforts of the authors
- A product manager joins a team of engineers
Let’s assume in all of these scenarios that you are only one of the players in the situation, and you can only control your own actions.
From a counterfactual analysis, if you can increase your contribution by 10%, then you increase the impact by 10%, end of story.
From a Shapley Value perspective, it’s a bit more complicated, but we can start with a prior that you split your impact evenly with the other players.
Both these perspectives have a lot going for them! The counterfactual analysis has important correspondences to reality. If you do 10% better at your job the world gets $0.1 I$ better. Shapley Values prevent the scenario where the multiplicative impact causes the involved agents to collectively contribute too much.
I notice myself feeling relatively more philosophically comfortable running with the Shapely Value analysis in the scenario where I feel aligned with the other players in the game. And potentially the Shapley Value approach downsides go down if I actually run the math (Fake edit: I ran a really hacky guess as to how I’d calculate this using this calculator and it wasn’t that helpful).
But I don’t feel 100% bought-in to the Shapley Value approach, and think there’s a value in paying attention to the counterfactuals. My unprincipled compromise approach would be to take some weighted geometric mean and call it a day.
Interested in comments.

JP Addison🔸Mar 28, 2024, 4:54 PM
27 points
10 ∶ 1
on: Repost: The Centre for Effective Altruism’s CEO says, “Bankman-Fried doesn’t represent the ideas of effective altruism or the movement of people who support them.”
I think it’s a pretty important distinction that “EA” is a question which has no CEO, while the Centre for Effective Altruism does. I recommend changing the title here.

JP Addison🔸Mar 27, 2024, 6:25 PM
4 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: yanni kyriacos’s comment on: Yanni Kyriacos’s Shortform
I agree with you, and so does our issue tracker. Sadly, it does seem a bit hard. Tagging @peterhartree as a person who might be able to tell me that it’s less hard than I think.

JP Addison🔸Mar 7, 2024, 1:54 PM
7 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: SamDeere’s comment on: Who’s hiring? (Feb-May 2024)
I worked with Sam for 4 years and would recommend the experience. He’s an absolute blast to talk tech with, and a great human.

JP Addison🔸Feb 27, 2024, 5:02 PM
23 points
12 ∶ 0
on: What posts would you like someone to write?
Maybe a report from someone with a strong network in the silicon valley scene about how AI safety’s reputation is evolving post-OAI-board-stuff. (I’m sure there are lots of takes that exist, and I guess I’d be curious for either a data driven approach or a post which tries to take a levelheaded survey of different archetypes.)

JP Addison🔸Feb 7, 2024, 7:24 PM
2 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Looking for: songs or art that inspire EA values
I’m not sure if this qualifies, but the Creative Writing Contest featured some really moving stories.
I have a spotify playlist of songs that seemed to rhyme with EA to me.

JP Addison🔸Feb 6, 2024, 9:43 PM
6 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Vasco Grilo🔸’s comment on: EA Forum feature suggestion thread
Some good kabbalistic significance to our issue tracker, but I’m not sure how.
First, a note: I have heard recommendations to try to lower the number of issues. I’ve never understood it except as a way to pretend like you don’t have bugs. For sure some of those issues are stale and out of date, but quite a few are probably live but ultimately very edge-case and unimportant bugs, or feature requests we probably won’t get to but could be good. I don’t think it’s a good use of time to prune it, and most of the approaches I’ve seen companies take is to auto-close old bugs, which strikes me as disingenuous.
In any case, we have a fairly normal process of setting OKRs for our larger projects, and tiny features / bugfixes get triaged into a backlog that we look at when planning our weekly sprints. The triage process done in our asana and is intentionally not visible publicly so we can feel comfortable marking something as low priority without worrying about needing to argue about it.

JP Addison🔸Feb 6, 2024, 9:26 PM
4 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: Vasco Grilo🔸’s comment on: EA Forum feature suggestion thread
Thanks for the report. We currently do the second, which isn’t ideal to be sure. If someone redrafts and republishes after a post has been up for a while, an admin will have to adjust the published date manually. This happens surprisingly infrequently relative to what I might’ve expected, so we haven’t prioritized improving that.

JP Addison🔸Jan 31, 2024, 2:45 PM
1 point
1 ∶ 1
on: Lower-suffering egg brands available in the SF Bay Area
This is really helpful, thank you!

JP Addison🔸Jan 29, 2024, 1:51 PM
4 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Vasco Grilo🔸’s comment on: EA Forum feature suggestion thread
Definitely. I agree, and so do a few other users. We have an open ticket on it.

JP Addison🔸Jan 29, 2024, 1:44 PM
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Samrin Saleem’s comment on: EA Forum feature suggestion thread
No, sorry. I appreciate the question though, and I’ll record a ticket about it.

JP Addison🔸Jan 12, 2024, 8:23 PM
50 points
18 ∶ 1
on: Cause-Generality Is Hard If Some Causes Have Higher ROI
My guess is that cause-neutral activities are 30-90% as effective as cause-specific ones (in terms of generating labor for that specific cause), which is remarkably high, but still less than 100%
This isn’t obvious to me. If you want to generate generic workers for your animal welfare org, sure, you might prefer to fund a vegan group. But if you want people who are good at making explicit tradeoffs, focusing on scope sensitivity, and being exceptionally truth-seeking, I would bet that an EA group is more likely to get you those people. And so it seems plausible that a donor who only prioritized animal welfare would still fund EA groups if they otherwise wouldn’t exist.
In a related point, I would have been nervous (before GPT-4 made this concern much less prominent) about whether funding an AI Safety group that mostly just talked about AI got more safety workers, or just got more people interested in working on explicit AGI.

JP Addison🔸Nov 30, 2023, 9:43 PM
2 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: Jason’s comment on: EA Forum feature suggestion thread
We’ve discussed something like this, I’m generally in favor, subject to opportunity cost.