Sarah Cheng

Karma: 1,625

I worked as a software/product engineer at the Centre for Effective Altruism for three years, and recently became the Interim EA Forum Project Lead. If you’d like to support our work, sign up for a 30 min user interview with someone on our team. Hearing about your experience with the Forum helps us improve the site for everyone.

In general, we’d be happy to hear any feedback you have! :) Feel free to contact us or post in this suggestion thread. You can also give us anonymous feedback via this form.

Sarah Cheng 8 Nov 2024 20:54 UTC
30 points
11 ∶ 1
on: A Critique of Animal Charity Evaluators (ACE)
Thank you for doing this work. I’m very supportive of productive criticism on the Forum. As a moderator, I’d like to recommend this post for tips on how to make criticism more productive. EA is a collective project, and I think that steps such as sharing this feedback with ACE directly and writing a less aggressive title for your post would improve the outcomes of this work.

Sarah Cheng 7 Nov 2024 4:41 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Anthony DiGiovanni’s comment on: Winning isn’t enough
Does Jesse have an EA Forum account? We can manually add them as a co-author — feel free to contact us with Jesse’s account info. :)

Sarah Cheng 28 Oct 2024 20:07 UTC
2 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: Gemma 🔸’s comment on: Gemma Paterson’s Quick takes
Appreciate the response! To be clear, I am genuinely glad that you wrote the quick take, so I don’t want to discourage you from doing more off-the-cuff quick takes in the future. Hopefully hearing my perspective was helpful as well. I’m glad to hear that you don’t think we are actually fighting. :)
On collaborating/cutting costs: my outside impression is that AIM is already quite good about keeping their costs low and is not shy about being proactive. So my view is something like, if they thought it would be good for the world to collaborate more closely with CEA, I trust that they would have acted upon that belief. This is something that I respect about AIM (at least the version that’s in my head, since I don’t know them).

Sarah Cheng 28 Oct 2024 18:25 UTC
12 points
0 ∶ 0
on: EA: Renaissance or Diaspora?
Thank you for sharing this Timothy. I left a long comment on the LW version of the post. I’m happy to talk about this more with you or Elizabeth — if you’re interested, you’re welcome to reach out to me directly.

Sarah Cheng 28 Oct 2024 18:20 UTC
8 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: JWS 🔸’s comment on: JWS’s Shortform
I agree that it’s useful to make this more visible here, thank you!
[Flagging that I only know my own very limited perspective, and I don’t expect that Lincoln has done anything wrong, it’s just that I don’t see much from where I’m sitting] I found that statement a bit confusing, because as a person who works at CEA, I barely knew that Lincoln was on the EV board, and I have never heard about him interacting with anyone at CEA (though it seems likely that he has done this and I just don’t know about it). I feel like this is complicated because I don’t know what the best practices are wrt how involved a board member should be in the details of the organization; I could imagine there might be good reason for board members not to be reaching out to individual employees and pushing their pet causes. But he specifically said he was “worried about the EA Forum” in his comment, and yet I do not know what any of his views on the Forum are, and I have never heard of him sharing any of his views on the Forum with anyone on the CEA Online Team. So I am left feeling pretty confused. I’ll just say that I have directly reached out and offered to talk with him, because as you can imagine, I am very interested in understanding what his concerns are.

Sarah Cheng 27 Oct 2024 22:32 UTC
20 points
2 ∶ 0
in reply to: Gemma 🔸’s comment on: Gemma Paterson’s Quick takes
I work for CEA but I’m writing this from a personal perspective. Others at CEA may disagree with me.
Thanks for writing this! :) I think it’s an interesting argument. I generally agree with everything @Lorenzo Buonanno🔸 said in his comments, so I’ll just add a few things here.
I ultimately disagree that CEA should change its name, because EA principles are important to me and I like that we are trying to do good explicitly using the framework of EA (including promoting the framework itself) rather than using a more nebulous framing. I can’t speak for AIM, but it does seem like our two organizations have different goals, so in that sense it seems good that we both exist and work towards achieving our own separate goals. For example, I think (just a low confidence guess based on public info) that AIM are not interested in stewarding EA or owning improving the EA brand. CEA is interested in doing those things, and it seems good for us to have “EA” in our name in order to do those things. I think you and I both agree that the EA brand needs improving, and CEA is working on hiring for our Comms Team to have more capacity to do this work.
I think they have more in common than they think and are focussing too much on where they differ.
I’m not sure who “they” are in this sentence. I personally don’t think I have done this. I have a very high opinion of AIM overall, and I think that sentiment is common within CEA. I have personally applied to one of their incubation rounds because I thought there was a chance I could do more good there than at CEA. They are one of the orgs that best takes advantage of CEA’s infrastructure (such as EAG and the EA Forum) — they make frequent appearances in our user surveys about how people have found value from those projects. Our team includes AIM’s opportunities in our email newsletters and have curated multiple posts by them. I don’t personally know the people who run AIM, but from my perspective we are collaborators on the same team.
Looking at where CEA people actually donate, it looks like they are hedging the higher risk nature of their work with donations to interventions with clearer returns.
I think it’s hard to use the linked post as evidence to support this. I counted ~4/10 of the CEA employees that responded as falling into that category, and the rest mostly donated to causes that I think you would consider more speculative (at least more than the average AIM charity). Most CEA employees decided not participate in the public post, and I’m guessing that the ones that did not are more biased towards donating to less legibly cost-effective projects. I think there is also a bit of a theme where people tended to donate to interventions with clearer returns before joining CEA, and at CEA are spending more time considering other donation options (this is broadly true for myself, for example). So there are forces that push in both directions and it’s not clear to me what the net result is.
We shouldn’t be internally fighting for a bigger slide of the existing pie, we should be demonstrating value externally so we can grow the size of the pie.
Again, I’m not sure who is fighting internally. I guess this is making me worried that AIM views us as fighting with each other? That possibility makes me genuinely quite sad. If anyone at AIM wants to talk with me about it, you’re welcome to message me on the Forum.

Sarah Cheng 27 Oct 2024 21:09 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Sarah Cheng’s comment on: EA Forum update (Oct 2024)
(BTW, Ollie and Will fixed this on Friday, so it should now be working for comments)

Sarah Cheng 27 Oct 2024 21:08 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Lorenzo Buonanno🔸’s comment on: EA Forum update (Oct 2024)
Ah thanks for clarifying! Now I see what you mean. Yeah I think that has been an issue with the karma notification system for a while, and we didn’t fix it when we updated the UI. I do think getting notifications right is pretty important, so I’ll plan on getting our team to look into this issue.

Sarah Cheng 25 Oct 2024 17:15 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Ben Millwood🔸’s comment on: EA Forum update (Oct 2024)
Oh gosh, do you mean that literally they no longer appear in the list in the dropdown? Or do you mean that you perceive it that way because all the notifications get marked as read when you open the dropdown?
I would love to hear more thoughts from others as well, about what specific things about notifications they find frustrating about the current setup, or examples of sites that do notifications particularly well.

Sarah Cheng 24 Oct 2024 23:55 UTC
6 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Chris Leong’s comment on: EA Forum update (Oct 2024)
Personally, I think the most important advantage is discoverability. This is related to Will’s first point around making it easier to view past editions, but also I think it would be easier to find via search engines and easier for readers to share individual editions with others.

Sarah Cheng 24 Oct 2024 22:51 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: ChanaMessinger’s comment on: EA Forum update (Oct 2024)
Yeah I agree and I noticed that too—I posted about it in slack so if it’s easy to add it should be done soon. :)

Sarah Cheng 24 Oct 2024 20:22 UTC
26 points
3 ∶ 0
in reply to: John Salter’s comment on: Giving Season 2024 Announcement
Compared to last year’s donation election, which was limited to programs that are already listed on GWWC (note that they do not list all AIM-incubated programs), we expect many more programs to be eligible for candidacy this year, and I think that is already a big improvement.
To accomplish this, we are not using GWWC’s platform this year, and are instead hosting the fund directly within EV. There are still legal details we need to confirm with the EV legal team, which is why we mentioned that we plan to publish a separate post about the Donation Election — this will likely be published at the start of our Giving Season event (Nov 4), but may be sooner as well.
As Jason suggested, there is a fair amount of admin overhead for EV ops to handle the legal, financial, and grantmaking work of the donation election fund. We are really appreciative of the time they can provide us, but they also support all the other projects within EV so there is only so much we can ask of them.
For the specific question about fiscal sponsors: my understanding is that, as long as the fiscal sponsor is a registered charity in the US or UK, and the program receiving the donation agrees that we can distribute money to them via that sponsor, then that will allow the program to be eligible for the donation election.

Sarah Cheng 24 Oct 2024 17:25 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Chris Leong’s comment on: EA Forum update (Oct 2024)
To clarify, do you mean relative to the current system (i.e. sending emails via Mailchimp), or relative to something else?

Sarah Cheng 24 Oct 2024 13:55 UTC
4 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Meta charity focused on earning to give?
Some additional context that might be helpful is this recent post by Sjir (GWWC’s Interim CEO): Thoughts on earning to give (MCF 2024 memo)

EA Forum update (Oct 2024)

Sarah Cheng24 Oct 2024 13:03 UTC

46 points

12 comments3 min readEA link

Sarah Cheng 4 Oct 2024 21:47 UTC
6 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Sarah Cheng’s Quick takes
The CEA Online Team (which runs this Forum) has finalized our OKRs for this new half-quarter, and I’ve updated the public doc, so I’m reposting the link to the doc here.

Sarah Cheng 4 Oct 2024 20:50 UTC
3 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Linch’s comment on: Sarah Cheng’s Quick takes
Interesting — I feel like I don’t have good intuitions for how to compare an hour of coding with an hour of writing. But I believe you’re suggesting something like, convert both of these into “hours of Forum engagement” per hour of my work (like, comparing how much engagement my post gets, divided by the hours I spent writing it, to the hours of engagement I add to the Forum for adding a feature, divided by the hours I spent building it).
If I were to do that comparison, I’m guessing that coding looks way better. My best post got ~23 hours of engagement total, and I don’t expect to get significantly more than that. One of our best features wrt engagement is adding AI-narrated audio for posts. This gets us very approximately 8 hours of engagement per day, was relatively quick to do, and we expect it will last for years. If it lasts 5 years that would be 14,600 hours of engagement. Even if it took 10x as long to build as the post did to write, building the feature seems clearly better.
Perhaps this is some evidence that I should not spend more time writing on the Forum, though I think there’s some value from posting that is not captured by this, so maybe converting everything into dollars is still better if it allows me to account for more factors.

Sarah Cheng 3 Oct 2024 22:21 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Gemma 🔸’s comment on: casebash’s Shortform
I’m glad that you like the wiki! ^^ I agree that it’s a nice way for people in the community to contribute.
I believe no one on the team has focused on the wiki in a while, and I think before we invest time into it we should have a more specific vision for it. But I do like the idea of collaborative wiki editing events, so thanks for the nudge! I’ll have a chat with @Toby Tremlett🔹 to see what he thinks. For reference, we do have a Wiki FAQ page, which is a good starting point for people who want to contribute.
About your specific suggestion, thank you for surfacing it and including detailed context — that’s quite helpful. I agree that ideally people could contribute to the wiki with lower karma. I’ll check if we can lower the minimum at least. Any more substantive changes (like making a “draft” change and getting it approved by someone else) would take more technical work, so I’m not sure when we would prioritize it.
(It looks like your link to a specific quick take did work, but if you think there’s a bug then let me know!)

Sarah Cheng 3 Oct 2024 21:26 UTC
4 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Chris Leong’s comment on: casebash’s Shortform
Yeah I agree, it does feel like a thing that should exist, like there’s some obvious value to it even though I got some evidence that there was low demand for it on the Forum. I think it would be faster to add to EA.org instead so perhaps we should just add a static page there.
I like that we have a list in the wiki, so that people in the EA community can help us keep the info up-to-date by editing it, but practically speaking people don’t spend much time doing that.

Sarah Cheng 3 Oct 2024 4:24 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Chris Leong’s comment on: casebash’s Shortform
Thanks for the suggestion Chris! I’d be really excited for the Forum (or for EA.org) to have a nice page like that, and I think others at CEA agree. We did a quick experiment in the past by adding the “Take action” sidebar link that goes to the Opportunities to take action topic page, and the link got very few clicks. We try not to add clutter to the site without good reason so we removed that link for logged in users (it’s still visible for logged out users since they’re more likely to get value from it). Since then we’ve generally deprioritized it. I would like us to pick it back up at some point, though first we’d need to decide where it should live (EA.org or here) and what it should look like, design-wise.
For now, I recommend people make updates to the Opportunities to take action wiki text to help keep it up-to-date! I’ve done so myself a couple times but I think it would be better as a team effort. :)

Sarah Cheng

EA Fo­rum up­date (Oct 2024)

EA Forum update (Oct 2024)