I’d like to be able to highlight a word or phrase in text I’m writing and Ctrl-V a URL link directly into that phrase. This is something that other platforms, like Slack do.
Yes, you can highlight a phrase and bring up the toolbar to add a link, but being able to do it immediately through a well known keyboard shortcut is easier.
Thanks for writing this up. It’d be nice to have a paragraph of bio for each of the board members on ev’s website. Google search didn’t give me much for some of the board members.
Are you planning to back-date each piece of content that you timestamp to the time it was created? If so, how hard is it to find the time of creation of pieces at the moment? This seems to be the very problem this initiative is planning to tackle (so I’m guessing it’s at least somewhat hard) although I think the argument here is ‘it will get harder in the future’.
The only alternative I can see is to add the timestamp of the time that the content is processed as part of this initiative. This might be easier than finding the creation date but it would probably contain less useful information, because a bunch of content would all be timestamped around the time this initiative got started. And it might even be misleading, if people saw the timestamp and thought this was the time the content was actually created.
Update: FLI FAQ on the rejected grant proposal controversy.
Although I still think the original statement was not good, reading the FAQ and comments in the linked post have helped me have more empathy for the difficulties of releasing a PR when under public pressure to say something urgently.
I think my tone here was too confrontational and demanding, and I’m sorry if that caused additional stress for FLI.
Thankyou to FLI for updating both the initial statement, and putting out the FAQ, which clears things up.
I don’t think both words are accurate here. Crimea was illegally annexed, and ‘invasion’ to me means entering another country’s territory.
My fundamental belief here is that the norms on a countries borders should be decided by referendum, and then respected (i.e. not invaded).
The 2014 referendum was one month after Russia invaded Crimea. I wouldn’t trust the results of it (a 96% result to join Russia is implausible), or really any referendum since, while Russia is still in control. So, I would think the latest and most authoritative piece of evidence would be the 1991 referendum.
I think you’re overstating the badness of the word ‘imported’ here, although I accept it’s not usually used for people. My point is that Russia has used various methods to bring immigrants in—I’m reading for example, one-off payments of $30,000, and that up to 1,000,000 people may have emigrated to Crimea since 2014. It seems implausible that that amount of people would move without significant incentives or coercion from Russia, which is a war crime according to the Geneva convention, Article 49 - “the transfer, directly or indirectly, by the Occupying Power of parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies”.
I’m not gonna reply further to this thread, it’s an emotional issue for with the suffering the Ukrainian people have, and are experiencing during the war. This also has zero decision relevance to me (and probably most people reading this).
I downvoted for the use of the word ‘invading’. ‘Invading’ describes what Russia did to Crimea in 2014, ‘retaking’ would be a better word for this context.
As for self-determination, 54% of Crimieans voted for Ukrainian independence in the 1991 referendum. Since the 2014 invasion, Russia has probably imported so many citizens that the demographics have changed massively and this would skew any future referendum.
Thankyou for linking that. I’m glad FLI has issued that statement, and it reassures me somewhat. I’d still like to hear more detail of FLI’s logic around this grant—why it was considered in the first place, what FLI’s pipeline for considering grants is, at what stage Nya Dagblade was rejected, and why. (Hopefully the ‘why’ part is obvious, but it would be good to understand what information they received that changed their minds, that they didn’t have in the first place).
....which makes no mention of the neo-nazi views of Nya Dagbladet, and does not condemn them. That section reads to me as almost an afterthought to their response, which is a rant about how Expo.se is unfairly criticising FLI, and how Nya Dagbladet is not neo-nazi.
Here’s that quote in context:
We will continue to engage the broadest sample of humankind, whether or not we are criticized by anyone who questions our motives, or who may have their own agendas. And in this effort, the Future of Life Institute stands and will always stand emphatically against racism, bigotry, bias, injustice and discrimination at all times and in all forms.
This is very vague and makes no mention of Nya Dagbladet! In fact, when read immediately after the sentence before it, it could appear to be a kind of hit back at Expo.se’s criticism of FLI in a ‘those damn intolerant liberal bigots’ kind of way.
This is why I take issue with FLI talking about engaging ‘across the immensely diverse political spectrum’ and standing again ‘discrimination at all times and in all forms’ - it’s ok to discriminate against neo-nazis! In fact, it’s completely necessary, in order for a tolerant society to survive.
Platitudes like ‘we stand against injustice and discrimination’ do not cut it when your organisation has ben accused of offering funding to neo-nazis. FLI needs to explicitly condemn and disavow Nya Dagbladet and neo-nazi ideas.
Unless we actually are saying that talking with ‘bad people’ is automatically bad and something you should apologize to all your right thinking friends for having contaminated them with proximity to badness afterwards.
This is putting it very, very euphemistically, if you want to call ‘offering $100,000 in funding to a neo-Nazi publication’ ,‘talking with bad people’.
Is there a principled argument that thinking about funding a group like that, and then changing your mind is bad?
Yes. Even if they thankfully never granted the money, the question remains—why was Nya Dagbladet ever anywhere near a shortlist of things that FLI would consider funding?
The fact remains that FLI has not disavowed Nya Dagbladet for their neo-nazi views. This is the most FLI gave as an explanation for them rescinding the offer of funding:
we ultimately decided to reject it because of what our subsequent due diligence uncovered
This is incredibly vague and could be talking about almost anything! Other parts of their non-apology seem to hint that they consider Nya Dagbladet’s political views are acceptable, and ok to be engaging with. Again, this is taken from their apology:
The Future of Life Institute makes no apologies for engaging with many people across the immensely diverse political spectrum, because our mission is so important that it needs broad support from all sectors of society...
We will continue to engage the broadest sample of humankind, whether or not we are criticized by anyone who questions our motives, or who may have their own agendas.
I can’t believe I’m writing this, but some political views should be roundly rejected and never considered acceptable when thinking about the future of humankind. Holocaust deniers should be top of that list, and FLI needs to say as such ASAP.
I really can’t express clearly how badly I think of FLI’s non-apology.
Why on earth would they think a neo-nazi publication would ever be a good thing to fund?
The Future of Life Institute makes no apologies for engaging with many people across the immensely diverse political spectrum, because our mission is so important that it needs broad support from all sectors of society
Why on earth would they put this in their response, rather than condemning neo-nazism?
@Tegmark
Minor quibble, but this should be titled ‘New Good things that happened in EA this year’.
There’s already loads of existing good things happening, that shouldn’t get forgotten about. I don’t have the numbers, but I’d like to know- how many nets did AMF distribute? How many times did animal charities expose abuse and take companies to court to protect existing laws?
I know this stuff is happening, and it’s great and we should hear more about existing, ongoing good work
I’d like to be able to bookmark comments, in the same way you can bookmark posts. There’s a lot of really, really well thought out and written comments, in some cases containing just as much value as articles, and I’d like to be able to bookmark a comment to come back to.
I’d argue this is even more important than bookmarking articles, because articles have tags and titles to search for, whereas comments don’t, and it’s easy to loose track of what article and what thread the one you’re looking for is contained in.
I think floods often result in an increase in snakebites, due to both humans and snakes seeking out the bits of land and houses that are above water. I’m linking this post about snakebites as a cause area, in case it’s helpful.
I agree. To take the distinctions of trust one step further—there’s a difference between trust in the intentions and judgements of people, and trust in the systems they operate in.
Like, I think you could be trusting of the intentions and judgement of EA leadership, but still recognise that people are human, and humans make mistakes, and that transparency and more open governance leads to more voices being heard in decision making processes, which leads to better decisions. It’s the ‘Wisdom of Crowds’ kind of argument.
How do you access the donation matching?
‘Trust’ can mean a few different things. Here it’s used like ‘trust someone has good intentions’. But it could also mean ‘trust someone’s judgement’.
Lack of the second kind of trust in EA leadership could make someone in favour of more/broader governence and transparency, even if they have the first kind of trust.
Thanks for the explanation. According to that wiki article, Ben Delo was charged with violating the Bank Secrecy Act on 1 October 2020.
I think EA leadership should have learned from this and been much more cautious about the financial, legal and reputational risks of having large amounts of their funding provided by crypto billionaires.
I’m now much less sympathetic to the view that “The FTX collapse and it’s effect on EA was a freak unforeseeable event”, and more sympathetic to the view that “EA has a major blind spot in this area, and some aspects of EA culture or ideology may encourage or enable the kind of fraud that apparently happened at FTX.”
ok, thanks for the explanation. I’m also working from my memory of that time. And my impression at the time was that things were moving very quickly—FTX had gone in a few days from one of the biggest crypto trading firms, to insolvent—and I was very unclear what was happening, and most of the information seemed to be coming from twitter. So I was more approving, not less, when Will and Holden used qualifiers like “I’m not 100% certain what has happened”. But it’s possible in hindsight I should expect them to have had better access to information than me.
throwaway790 what’s your reason for approving of Rob Wiblin’s statement about FTX, but not Will Macaskill’s, or Holden Karnovsky’s? I read all their statements as ‘we strongly condemn this’ in summary.
The formatting toolbar doesn’t appear until after you highlight text. This means you can only format text after you’ve written it—you can’t for example, select bold and have your text appear in bold as you write it. This is something I find unintuitive. It took me a a few minutes of looking for the toolbar and googling how to do it before I realised the toolbar only appears when you highlight text. I’d like the formatting toolbar to always be on the page when I’m writing.