Thanks for writing these reflections down! I feel there’s another unspoken career benefit here in that (I suspect) you’ll probably stand out amongst other candidates when asked “What’s a stressful situation you’ve faced?” or “What have you been doing for the last six months?”!
Nathan Sherburn
Karma: 148
Join the Founding Team: Australia’s AI Safety Institute
Agree this is likely a scam.
There was a data breach (alt) of FTX customer data recently.
I’ve reached out to Network for Good (who I believe are a legitimate donation infrastructure platform) so that they can hopefully shut this down.
Registered. I’ll also be at EAGxAustralia and would love to chat about this with you :)
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This is fantastic! Very excited to see work in this space as I much prefer audio to reading long posts. I use the apps NaturalReader and Speechify to read articles as I find it helps me stay more focused and one thing I love about them is the highlighting while reading. I suspect you’re going for a different audience with this (i.e. people who want to listen to articles as podcasts without following along with the text) but just thought I’d flag this as something I’ve found useful.
Great work all!
Thank you so much for taking the time to write this up, Habiba!
I just want to call out what I felt was one of the most valuable parts of this post for me with respect to online conversations:
> a number of men that I knew where horrified / shocked / shaken but felt some combination of a) anxiety about saying the wrong thing, b) nervousness about taking up space, c) hesitation about just offering words which seemed insubstantial / performative / just virtue signalling, and d) hesitation about having nothing novel or particularly insightful to say
> I think these hesitations were totally understandable—in the wider world (particularly contemporary American culture) there is a strong emphasis on platforming those affected and a push that we need stronger deeds than just words. However, I think the discourse in EA isn’t that mature yet! That means the simply the way that the online discourse goes and whether “basic” stuff gets said, feels more important at this stage.
Love this idea! One small suggestion, HCI research suggests that ~70 characters per line is the optimal width for text [1]. Of course, you might also have a subjective aesthetic preference for long lines of text or a dislike of whitespace so feel free to ignore this :)
[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/234578707_Optimal_Line_Length_in_Reading—A_Literature_Review
Me too! It looks like long titles no longer get cut off on mobile too! A long standing bug I kept noticing. Well done team!
It’s also important to recognise that a fully decentralised model favours people with greater privilege.
Small projects with uncertain funding are much easier to join for people who are financially secure and don’t care about things like maternity leave.
What’s Happening in Australia
Thank you for sharing, Abergal!
I was just wondering if you could share more concrete examples of “taking up the space” risks. We’re facing some choices around this in Australia at the moment and I want to make sure we’ve considered all downsides of uniting under a shared vision. Are the risks of “taking up the space” mainly:Less agile—multiple small organizations may be able to work faster
Centralized risk—if one organization among multiple small organizations faces an issue (e.g. brand damage) this is less likely to affect the other organizations
Less diversity of thought—there’s value in taking different approaches to problems and having multiple small organizations means were less at less risk of groupthink or quashing diversity of thought
I’d be keen to know if there are others we may not have considered.
Just want to say this looks super cool and I can’t wait to try it out. Congratulations QURI team!
I have a suspicion that people often dislike talking about utopias for fear of hope.
A personal example: when asking a few friends why they didn’t want to live forever, I got responses that seemed to indicate something like:
“I don’t want false hope. I’ve spent years trying to make peace with the fact that I’m going to die. I don’t even want to entertain the idea unless you have extraordinarily strong evidence it’s possible.”
I’d love to research this question.
Great post. Some of the best advice I got when I was younger was along the lines of “No one knows your situation better than yourself. Stop deferring and take ownership of your life!”
I still struggle with actually doing this even today though. I often feel its arrogant for me to think for myself rather than just assume the experts know better.
Counterintuitively, it’s often the debates I have with experts (or their writing) where I’m “arrogant” enough to disagree that I usually end up learning the most!