Sure. I’ve written a short summary and my reaction to it, and made it a linkpost
Matt Goodman
Karma: 796
Anopheles stephensi malaria vector—a brief intro
Link: EU considers dropping stricter animal welfare measures (Financial Times)
My sincere apologies, I had missed that it had been updated! V. Embarrassing. Thankyou for doing that
thankyou! I keep pointing out that EVF doesn’t have anything on their website about who their trustees are, and this isn’t good for transparency.
As much as I appreciate this post, it seems to have followed the same process I have—asked ‘ok who actually are these senior figures?’, and realised that for some, there’s not much info out there, and then gathered what little there is on google search and linkedin.
It would be great if the lesser-known EVF trustees could describe, in their own words, who they are, what they do, and how someone could contact them.
I thought the bottom half was an OK response.- ‘We have long term plans and value healthy funding’ (paraphrasing)
I think this hints at a divide between EA and progressive thinking. EAs: we only have a set amount of money for food causes, we need to use it effectively Progressives: just allocate more money to good causes (like treating AIDS) and less on bad causes (like defense spending)
Objections to ‘value of my time arguments’
I often hear EA/ rationalists saying something like ’it’s not worth spending an hour to save £20, if your hourly rate of pay is over £20/ hour. I think this is wrong, but I might not understand the argument.
It could be understood as a hypotherical argument, you COULD earn this much in an hour, as a reference point to help you understand the value of your time. This hypothetical reference point isn’t really useful, when I have the very real figure of my total balance, and upcoming outgoings to consider, and the factor of whether I can afford to spend on things I enjoy, if I don’t save money now.
So, it could be a suggestion that I actually could work an extra hour for money. But I (and almost everyone I know) don’t get paid hourly. I have a fixed amount of hours, she working over that doesn’t gain me more money. To gain more, I’d need to set up a freelance/ side business, and there’s all sorts of initial costs with getting that setup and advertising my services, and reporting my income for tax, and so on and so on.
Lastly, ‘you could work an extra hour’ doesn’t factor in my enjoyment. Working an extra hour would have a negative effect on my mood. I don’t want to work more than i already do. By contrast, walking an hour to save an Uber fee would be good for my mood, and health.
I agree with that rough claim. And I liked the rest of the blog.
I guess I do see people who are struggling behaving badly sometimes. I just don’t think it’s in any more frequent than the general population. Or I see sometimes see them using the fact they’re struggling to justify their bad behaviour, and I don’t buy that.
I downvoted this post. I really don’t like the first two paragraphs.
Something I’ve noticed recently is that people who are in a bad place in their lives tend to have a certain sticky sleazy black holey feel to them. Something around untrustworthiness, low integrity, optimizing for themselves regardless of the cost for the people around them.
To me, this reads as an unhelpful demonization of those who are struggling in life. At the far end of the spectrum, it could be something as serious as depression, which is already demonized.
I also don’t think it’s accurate. Anecdotally, I’ve never experienced those who are struggling to be any less trustworthy than those who are ‘ok’.
Then, it’s just reasonable to only be loyal to others as long as you can get something out of it yourself and to defect as soon as they don’t offer obvious short-term gains.
I also think this is wrong. True, people who are struggling may rely more on others for help, than they offer back to others. But if anything, I’ve found people who are struggling exhibit more of behaviour that tracks with something like ‘loyalty’. They tend to rely more on close friends and family, and do less speculative social gains-seeking exploration.
I don’t see how any reason to think that being a in a bad place leads to low integrity behaviour, and certainly not SBF-style bad behaviour.
Apologies in advance if I’ve misunderstood the point being made here.
Is there any consensus on who’s making things safer, and who isn’t? I find it hard to understand the players in this game, it seems like AI safety orgs and the big language players are very similar in terms of their language, marketing and the actual work they do. Eg openAI talk about ai safety in their website and have jobs on the 80k job board, but are also advancing ai rapidly. Lately it seems to me like there isn’t even agreement in the ai safety sphere over what work is harmful and what isn’t (I’m getting that mainly from the post on closing the lightcone office)
Hi Howie, I’m getting back to this 3 months later. I don’t think this feature has been added and I’d like to raise again that it would be good for transparency. The link to the CEA team page doesn’t have bios for Tasha McCauley and Becca Kagan (who has since resigned from EVF, I guess it could be worth listing former board members).
When EVF announced the new interim CEOs 3 months ago, I noted that there wasn’t a bio for EVF’s board members on their website, and that it was hard to find much information on Google. At this moment in time, it’s the most upvoted comment on that post, with 35 upvoted and 29 agreements. Howie agreed to update the website, but as of now it doesn’t look like anything has been added.
I’d like to raise this again, it would be good to update EVF’s website with board member bios for transparency, and maybe a contact email address. I like that this press release has bios for Zach and Eli, and a link to Becca’s forum account. Could you add a bio for Rebecca? Again, it’s hard to find much info, since there was no bio in the previous press release I don’t know anything about her.
This resonated with me. I get some internal strife and anxiety about posting on here. I think it’s a combo of caring a lot about the kind of things being discussed here (suffering, global poverty, animal welfare, xrisk), and having thoughts about these things, and wanting to share them, but then finding the negative incentive of [being criticised in the comments] outweighs the positive incentives of [temporary status amongst strangers on the internet], plus some sort of [happiness at being able to express myself].
It seems for me the emotional drive to post has to outweigh the emotional drive to not post, and this sometimes only happens on very emotionally charged subjects, such as criticism of EA or the various recent scandals. I don’t think I’m alone in this, and I would cite for evidence the comment count on articles about scandals in the community, vs on other articles.
I don’t think the EA forum is unique in having this kind of not-great incentive structure. Some ways the EA forum might be worse than most internet forums:
The featured posts here are really high quality. Of course, that’s a good thing. But if all the frontpage posts are by someone with a phd, and the the post is a write up of their research, and they’ve been paid by an EA organisation so they can do that research full time and put many hours into making a quality post… it can be easy to compare what you were going to write against that, and be disappointed.
There’s a strong culture of searching for truth and encouraging good epistemic. Again, this is a very good thing, and I wouldn’t change this. But it can seem that unless your post is long and detailed, and has citations you’ll get criticised for it.
And some ways the EA forum is better:
People go out of their way to say thanks for the article, or praise the writing. This seems to happen a lot when someone is actually criticising; there’s almost a norm of including a clunky ‘thanks for writing this, I like some things but....’ which I actually quite like.
There are stronger norms of not being needlessly rude. The mod team seem to be more on it than e.g. a reddit forum. I’m guessing the ratio of mods/posters here is higher than on reddit, plus the mods here get paid to do it.
The EA forum team seem to actively promote posting not-perfect stuff, there’s the Shortform option, the option to share a draft with other users, the Draft Amnesty day, and workshops at EAG events on writing EA forum posts
I slightly worry the EA forum could become a place where only people who have a paid job at an EA org, or who enjoy disagreement, post. Nothing against enjoying disagreement, and it could be something to cultivate as part of developing a ‘Scout Mindset’, but I think there’s people that are more sensitive to disagreement that might be put off posting.
More food for thought: the 1% rule; I’m not sure what conclusions to draw from it.
edit: added penultimate paragraph.
I was surprised to see Twitter noted as a good place to share thoughts, I think mainly because it’s rare I hear anyone say a good word about Twitter. I don’t use it, as my impressions of twitter are:
seems like a lot of toxic arguments, ad hominen attacks, straw man arguments etc etc unless you heavily filter to only be communicating with people who already agree with pretty much everything you say
the word limit is too short to be able to explain anything with nuance, which promotes more straw man arguments because commenters take the worst possible interpretation of what’s been said and then argue against that, which then causes the OP to be upset that they’ve been misinterpreted, so they react badly and so on and so on.
Then again, I know some people I generally respect use it. Am I missing anything here?
Thanks, I appreciate it:)
I’m planning to write a piece on animal welfare, as part of that post it will help to post a picture of a dead animal. I’d like to have it blurred until users choose to see it, is there a way to do that?
Side note: I can’t see anything about this circumstance in the user manual or guide to norms.
If you press a footnote link in a post and the footnote is hidden in the ‘View more footnotes’ collapsable list the page scrolls to a footnote you can’t see. I found it confusing until I realised you have to press ‘view more footnotes’ to expand them. It would be good if it opened automatically when you follow a footnote link