Maxdalton

• Maxdalton 13 Aug 2019 16:50 UTC

  12 points

  on: New pro­tein al­ter­na­tive pro­duced from CO2

  I won­der if this is also a thing that ALLFED might be in­ter­ested in—I haven’t looked into this much, but the ar­ti­cle claims that the pro­cess only re­quires wa­ter, CO2, and elec­tric­ity, which we might have in lots of dis­aster sce­nar­ios. So if pro­duc­tion of this were scaled up in the short term, that might be helpful for ALLFED’s mis­sion.

• Maxdalton 11 Jul 2019 9:20 UTC

  3 points

  on: Op­ti­miz­ing Ac­tivi­ties Fairs

  Thanks for the writeup! I re­ally ap­pre­ci­ate peo­ple tak­ing the time to share what they’ve learned. I agree that ac­tivi­ties fairs are a re­ally high lev­er­age time for stu­dent groups.

  My sum­mary of this ap­proach is “Try to get as many email ad­dresses as pos­si­ble, and an­ti­ci­pate that many peo­ple will un­sub­scribe/​never en­gage”. I’d be in­ter­ested to hear more about why this ap­proach is recom­mended over oth­ers.

  I think that this could well be the right ap­proach, but it’s not to­tally clear to me. It could be that hav­ing slightly longer con­ver­sa­tions with peo­ple would build more ra­port, give them a bet­ter sense of the ideas, and make them a lot more likely to con­tinue to en­gage, so you get more/​higher qual­ity peo­ple lower down your fun­nel. My mem­ory of go­ing to fresh­ers fairs was that if I had a proper con­ver­sa­tion with some­one it did make some differ­ence to the like­li­hood that I en­gaged later on.

  I also worry a bit about the max­i­miz­ing for email ad­dresses ap­proach com­ing across as un­friendly.

  It does seem right to me that ar­gu­ing with peo­ple isn’t worth the time.

  I’d be in­ter­ested in why Eli and Aaron think that the “max­i­mize for email ad­dresses” ap­proach is cor­rect long-term. I could well imag­ine that they’ve tried both ap­proaches, and seen more en­gage­ment lower down the fun­nel with the “max for email ad­dresses” ap­proach.

  [Speak­ing from my ex­pe­rience as a groups or­ga­nizer, not on be­half of CEA]

• Maxdalton 6 Dec 2018 12:22 UTC

  11 points

  on: Im­pact in­vest­ing is only a good idea in spe­cific circumstances

  I strong up­voted this. I think it’s great to have a refer­ence piece on this, and par­tic­u­larly one which has such a good sum­mary.

The Front­page/​Com­mu­nity distinction

• Maxdalton 12 Nov 2018 10:23 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: Emanuele_Ascani's comment on: What’s Chang­ing With the New Fo­rum?

  That’s right, this is in­tended as a fea­ture. All com­ments and posts start with a weak up­vote (we as­sume you think the thing is good, or you wouldn’t have posted it). You can strong up­vote your con­tent, which is de­signed as a way for you to sig­nal-boost con­tri­bu­tions that you think are un­usu­ally valuable. Ob­vi­ously, we don’t want peo­ple to be strong-up­vot­ing all their con­tent, and we’ll keep an eye on that hap­pen­ing.

• Maxdalton 9 Nov 2018 8:58 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: alexrattee's comment on: Even non-the­ists should act as if the­ism is true

  To link this to JP’s other point, you might be right that sub­jec­tivism is im­plau­si­ble, but it’s hard to tell how low a cre­dence to give it.

  If your cre­dence in sub­jec­tivism + model un­cer­tainty (+ I think also con­struc­tivism + quasi-re­al­ism + maybe oth­ers?) is suffi­ciently high rel­a­tive to your cre­dence in God, then this weak­ens your ar­gu­ment (al­though it still seems plau­si­ble to me that the­is­tic moral­ities end up with a large slice of the pie).

  I’m pretty un­cer­tain about my cre­dence in each of those views though.

• Maxdalton 9 Nov 2018 8:41 UTC

  0 points

  in reply to: jpaddison's comment on: Even non-the­ists should act as if the­ism is true

  Upvote for start­ing with praise, and split­ting out sep­a­rate threads.

• Maxdalton 8 Nov 2018 18:14 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: Elizabeth's comment on: Burnout: What is it and how to Treat it.

  I found the Man­ager Tools ba­sics pod­casts, and the Effec­tive Man­ager a great way to cover the ba­sics. (But I know oth­ers have found them less helpful.)

  A great piece on this from the Fo­rum is: Ben West’s post on De­liber­ate Perfor­mance in Peo­ple Man­age­ment.

• Maxdalton 8 Nov 2018 14:41 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: kokotajlod's comment on: How to use the Forum

  As long as you make clear how it’s rele­vant to figur­ing out how to do as much good as pos­si­ble, that sort of con­tent is wel­come.

• Maxdalton 8 Nov 2018 11:48 UTC

  10 points

  in reply to: edoarad's comment on: Why the EA Fo­rum?

  That’s right—one of the main goals of hav­ing posts sorted by karma (as well as hav­ing two sec­tions) - is to al­low peo­ple to feel more com­fortable post­ing, know­ing that the best posts will rise to the top.

• Maxdalton 8 Nov 2018 11:37 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Khorton's comment on: Which piece got you more in­volved in EA?

  If you high­light the text, a hover ap­pears above the text, and the link icon is one of the op­tions—click on it, paste the url, and press en­ter.

• Maxdalton 8 Nov 2018 11:14 UTC

  5 points

  in reply to: Elizabeth's comment on: Burnout: What is it and how to Treat it.

  I sleep a lot bet­ter when I’m cooler, and I’ve found this helpful: https://​​www.chilitech­nol­ogy.com/​​. Others recom­mend https://​​bed­jet.com/​​.

• Maxdalton 8 Nov 2018 11:12 UTC

  5 points

  in reply to: laurenlee's comment on: Burnout: What is it and how to Treat it.

  Link to Zvi’s se­quence on LessWrong, which in­cludes the posts you men­tioned: https://​​www.less­wrong.com/​​s/​​HXkpm9b8o964jbQ89

• Maxdalton 8 Nov 2018 11:03 UTC

  5 points

  in reply to: richard_ngo's comment on: What’s Chang­ing With the New Fo­rum?

  Hi Richard, I think you’re right that “ba­sic con­cepts” is in­cor­rect: I agree that it’s im­por­tant to dis­cuss ad­vanced ideas which build off each other. We’d want both of the posts you men­tion to be front­page posts. I’ll sug­gest an edit to Aaron.

  By de­fault, we’re mov­ing all con­tent to ei­ther Front­page or Com­mu­nity, since we’re try­ing to have a slightly less ac­tive mod­er­a­tion policy than LessWrong. We might re­visit this at some point. You can still click on a user’s name to see their per­sonal feed of posts.

• Maxdalton 8 Nov 2018 10:31 UTC

  1 point

  on: Why the EA Fo­rum?

  Moder­a­tion no­tice: stick­ied on com­mu­nity.

• Maxdalton 8 Nov 2018 10:30 UTC

  1 point

  on: What’s Chang­ing With the New Fo­rum?

  Moder­a­tion no­tice: Stick­ied in Com­mu­nity to give con­text for peo­ple fa­mil­iar with the old Fo­rum.

Why the EA Fo­rum?

• Maxdalton 7 Nov 2018 10:36 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: SiebeRozendal's comment on: Keep­ing Ab­solutes in Mind

  I agree with your point about sub­jec­tive ex­pected value (al­though re­al­ized value is ev­i­dence for sub­jec­tive ex­pected value). I’m not sure I un­der­stand the point in your last para­graph?

• Maxdalton 6 Nov 2018 12:28 UTC

  15 points

  on: Keep­ing Ab­solutes in Mind

  Strong up­vote. I think this is an im­por­tant point, nicely put.

  A slightly differ­ent ver­sion of this, which I think is par­tic­u­larly in­sidious, is feel­ing bad about do­ing a job which is your rel­a­tive ad­van­tage. If I think Cause A is the most im­por­tant, it’s tempt­ing to feel that I should work on Cause A even if I’m much bet­ter at work­ing on Cause B, and that’s my com­par­a­tive ad­van­tage within the com­mu­nity. This also ap­plies to how one should think about other peo­ple—I think one should praise peo­ple who work on Cause B if that’s the thing that’s best for their skills/​mo­ti­va­tions.

• Maxdalton 18 Sep 2018 8:40 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: Peter_Hurford's comment on: EA Fo­rum 2.0 Ini­tial Announcement

  Hi Peter, thanks for the feed­back! To re­spond to the things that oth­ers haven’t already re­sponded to:

  • We hope to keep work­ing on the ty­pog­ra­phy to im­prove things.

  • We are definitely aiming for a lighter touch to mod­er­a­tion than on LW: we’ve deleted the “cu­rated” sec­tion, and we want karma to sort out what ends up on the Front­page. The main mod­er­a­tion de­ci­sions we’ll be tak­ing are polic­ing the Com­mu­nity/​Front­page dis­tinc­tion, com­ment­ing to en­courage good dis­course norms, and send­ing mes­sages to peo­ple where they could im­prove their dis­course. The norms we’re try­ing to pro­mote are set out in the mod­er­a­tion policy, and are fo­cused on tone/​style etc. We’d love peo­ple to help us out by en­forc­ing good norms, and by check­ing that we’re fol­low­ing the policy. The main rea­son that we want to be a lit­tle more ac­tive is to provide users with more pos­i­tive feed­back, and fewer difficult re­sponses, so that they’re en­couraged to en­gage more. I don’t think the cur­rent Fo­rum is par­tic­u­larly bad at this, but I would like to see an­other nudge in that di­rec­tion. I’d be in­ter­ested how that sounds to you?

  • I would like to see a side­bar even­tu­ally. Cur­rently we want to fo­cus on re­build­ing in some el­e­ments from LW (like se­quences, and their map of lo­cal groups), but this is on our long-list

  • Although we’ve re­moved cu­rated, we are aiming to rein­tro­duce the se­quences fea­ture (NB these are sig­nifi­cantly less ob­tru­sive once you’re logged in). The rea­son­ing be­hind this is that we ex­pect some new peo­ple to come to the Fo­rum, and we think it’s good that they are ini­tially sent to more in­tro­duc­tory ma­te­rial. We also think that it’s valuable to have some set of com­mon knowl­edge for the com­mu­nity. This is a way to ce­ment in­tel­lec­tual progress: rather than re­build­ing the same wall, there can be an (ex­pand­ing) set of core ideas which we can build on. Users will be able to cre­ate their own se­quences, and we are con­sult­ing about what sort of things should be in the core se­quences, which are most visi­ble. We want the core se­quences to be rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the com­mu­nity.

  • Bug re­port has been filed for Ctrl + K

  • https://​​fo­rum.effec­tivealtru­ism.org/​​meta isn’t in­tended to be a link (we’ve called this sub­fo­rum “Com­mu­nity” rather than “meta” (https://​​fo­rum.effec­tivealtru­ism.org/​​com­mu­nity)). I’m guess­ing you’re refer­ring to the side­bar link, which I’ll ask that we re­move.