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Pablo
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I vaguely share your feeling that posts “count for more” than comments, though I can’t think of a better heuristic than the one I proposed, so for simplicity I just used the text in my previous comment. Feel free to refine it.
I also removed the paragraph referring to the upper bound, and revised the paragraph that followed it, for unrelated reasons. (I think it’s something someone added to the Google Doc I circulated, which I didn’t initially read very carefully. As it was worded, the paragraph gave readers advice on how to write posts, rather than on how to tag those posts, which should be the focus of the Tagging Guidelines.)
Maybe
The general tagging principle is that a tag should be added to a post when the post, including its comments thread, contains a substantive discussion of the tag’s topic. As a very rough heuristic, to count as “substantive” a discussion has to be the primary focus of at least one paragraph or five sentences in the post or the associated comments.
This assumes we want to use the same heuristic for posts and comments, though your final bullet point seems to implicitly question this assumption.
(If we adopt this revision, other parts of the document may also need to be revised. For example, one can no longer infer an upper bound from the heuristic and the length of the post.)
I have recently watched The Story of Louis Pasteur, a 1936 movie about, well, Louis Pasteur. I am not sure I recommend it artistically. It’s weirdly paced and its occasional gestures towards characterization only make it more obvious how much everyone in the story is a cardboard cutout. However, I have never seen a more effective altruist movie in my life.
Wow, I didn’t know about this feature.
This is amazing. I’d be happy to create an Anki deck for these and any other numbers suggested in this thread.
EDIT: Judging from the upvotes, there seems to be considerable interest in this. I will wait a few days until people stop posting answers and will then begin creating the deck. I’ll probably use the CrowdAnki extension to allow for collaboration and updating; see the ultimate-geography GitHub repository for an example.
In this particular example, I think it makes sense to keep Bob’s list, since it serves to characterize the discipline, and then we can cover in detail the relevant ones. I don’t think it makes much sense to keep references for the non-relevant topics, though. (But I believe you already removed those.)
In general, I think topics that have no clear reference to EA should not be discussed. But I would imagine that this may be sometimes necessary because otherwise the treatment of the subject of the entry may look unacceptably incomplete or fragmentary. In these cases, one may want to briefly discuss those topics and then zoom in selectively on the EA-relevant ones. I’ll try to keep this issue in mind and update as we stumble upon other cases where it arises.
The Organization Formerly Known as Centre for Enabling EA Learning & Research (TOFKACEEALAR)?
(Sorry.)
More seriously, perhaps you could look into the history of utopian communities for inspiration? Some had nice names, such as Owen’s ‘New Harmony’. Another option is to use the form ‘x House’, where x is the name of some suitable person or idea (as an example, someone previously suggested ‘Bentham House’).
Done. (Though I used the name constraints on effective altruism, which seemed more accurate. I don’t have strong views on whether the preposition should be ‘in’ or ‘on’, however, so feel free to change it.)
The article should be substantially revised (it was imported from EA Concepts), I think, but at least its scope is now better defined.
FWIW, this was also my reaction.
Months ago I added the paragraph below, but I now believe it isn’t really appropriate given the current length of the entry, so I’ve removed it. It is unclear to what extent the EA community believes that individuals have a moral obligation to pursue the most impactful career, so an objection to that view shouldn’t occupy a significant fraction of the article. If the article is expanded to cover arguments for such a view, the paragraph could be reinstated.
Some authors argue that there is no moral requirement to pursue the most impactful career. Such a requirement would be excessively demanding. The choice of a career may be comparable in its centrality to a person’s life as the choice of a marriage partner. But few believe a person is morally required to choose an impact-maximizing marriage. By analogy, it may be concluded that there is no moral requirement to choose an impact-maximizing career (Cholbi 2020).
I’ve deliberately kept the reference to the paper in the Bibliography, and added a line summarizing its contents, since it is still of potential interest to readers.
Thanks. Not sure what happened here, since the name change doesn’t show up in the edit history. In any case, it’s now reverted.
The improvements are now ported to the Wiki. Not only can you vote for individual contributions, but you can also see, for each article, a list of each contributor, and see their contributions by hovering over their names. Articles now also show a table of contents, and there may be other features I haven’t yet discovered. Overall, I’m very impressed!
Updated.
Good to know. If you notice this again, could you please let me know so I can investigate? Thanks.
It’s great that you are interviewing Sachs.
Here’s a possible question: William Easterly has admitted that Sachs was closer to the truth in their disagreement over the effectiveness of malaria bed nets. Is there a disagreement where Sachs thinks Easterly was the one closer to the truth?
The auto-generated alphabetical list in the Wiki homepage (after the list organized thematically) should be exhaustive. Did you notice any missing entries from that list?
The gist of what I meant is just that the parent tag has to meet the same relevance standards as any other tag, and not be included merely because of its logical relation to its child. I didn’t mean to suggest—though the passage you quote is worded in a way that seems to make that suggestion—that unless the post covers material specific to the child tag, its parent should not be tagged. I have revised the text to make this clearer (and fixed the link you mentioned in the other comment—thanks).
I mulled over this a bit, but I don’t have clear thoughts on what should be done. If others have suggestions, please leave them here. Otherwise, we can just leave this thread open and return to it in the future, when we have better ideas.
Another relevant film is The Day After, which was seen by 100 million Americans—”the most-watched television film in the history of the medium” (Hänni 2016)— and was instrumental in changing Reagan’s nuclear policy.
“President Ronald Reagan watched the film several days before its screening, on November 5, 1983. He wrote in his diary that the film was “very effective and left me greatly depressed,” and that it changed his mind on the prevailing policy on a “nuclear war”. The film was also screened for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. A government advisor who attended the screening, a friend of Meyer’s, told him “If you wanted to draw blood, you did it. Those guys sat there like they were turned to stone.” Four years later, the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty was signed and in Reagan’s memoirs he drew a direct line from the film to the signing.” (Wikipedia)
“Director Meyer and writer Hume produced The Day After to support nuclear disarmament with the ‘grandiose notion that this movie would unseat Ronald Reagan’, and the nuclear freeze groups heavily exploited the ABC movie as a propaganda.” (Hänni 2016)