Sarah Cheng

• Sarah ChengMar 12, 2025, 4:56 PM

  21 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Sarah Cheng’s Quick takes

  We’ve set up a Substack mirror for the Forum digest! 😊

  1. Please share and help us promote it! The primary reason we’ve set it up is to help with EA comms work and expand the reach of valuable Forum content.

  2. Please give us feedback — I’m not much of a Substack user myself, so any suggestions you have for improving it would be appreciated!

  3. We’re still running the existing EA Forum Digest newsletter (via Mailchimp) for various reasons, including the fact that it’s cleaner to integrate with the Forum itself. You can edit your subscription to that via the account settings page. (For example, if you prefer to read the Substack version, you can unsubscribe to the Mailchimp one.)

  You can read more about this decision in Will’s quick take here.

[Cross­post] Some Very Im­por­tant Things (That I Won’t Be Work­ing On This Year)

• Sarah ChengMar 4, 2025, 5:03 PM

  8 points

  3 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Rohin Shah’s comment on: Habryka’s Quick takes

  I appreciate you sharing your views on this! I agree that as a whole, this is suboptimal.

  I don’t currently feel confident enough about the take that “shallow criticism often gets valorized” to prioritize tackling it, though I am spending some time thinking about moderation and managing user-generated content and I expect that the mod team (including myself) will discuss how we’d like to handle critical comments, so this will probably come up in our discussions.

  I’m kind of worried that there’s not necessarily an objective truth to how shallow/​low-quality any particular criticism is, and I personally would prefer to err on the side of allowing more criticism. So it’s possible that not much changes in the public discourse, and any interventions we do may need to be behind the scenes (such as our team spending more time talking with people who get criticized).

• Sarah ChengMar 3, 2025, 9:37 PM

  50 points

  4 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Habryka [Deactivated]’s comment on: Habryka’s Quick takes

  Habryka, just wanted to say thank you for your contributions to the Forum. Overall I’ve appreciated them a lot! I’m happy that we’ll continue to collaborate behind the scenes, at least because I think there’s still plenty I can learn from you. I think we agree that running the Forum is a big responsibility, so I hope you feel free to share your honest thoughts with me.

  I do think we disagree on some points. For example, you seem significantly more negative about CEA than I am (I’m probably biased because I work there, though I certainly don’t think it’s perfect). I also think that the discussions on the Forum do affect real change, though of course it’s hard to know how much with any real confidence. I know of at least two specific cases when a person in a position with some power (in the real world, not in the EA community) has taken action based on something they read on the Forum, and my impression is that many people who have power within the EA community continue to read the Forum even if they don’t make time to write here. Of course, it’s true that they could ignore serious criticism is they wanted to, but my sense is that people actually quite often feel unable to ignore criticism. So I guess I am more optimistic that the Forum, as an extremely public community space, can continue to provide value by playing this role.

  By the way, I personally care a lot about EA reaching its future potential for doing the most good. Habryka, I don’t know the details of what you went through when trying to make things better, but I’m sorry to hear that it felt so bad. I’ll just say that, if anyone feels like they are trying to make things better in EA and are unable to do so, you’re welcome to reach out to me directly (you can message me via the Forum). I will at least hear you out and give you my thoughts, and perhaps you can convince me to help.

• Sarah ChengFeb 28, 2025, 6:41 PM

  8 points

  3 ∶ 0

  on: EA Sur­vey 2024: Demographics

  I’m excited to see an increase in the percentage of respondents doing earning to give! :) A lot of important work still needs funding, and I think effective giving is the most impactful option for many people.

• Sarah ChengFeb 28, 2025, 6:17 PM

  15 points

  3 ∶ 0

  on: Sarah Cheng’s Quick takes

  Mini EA Forum Update

  We’ve updated the user menu in the site header! 🎉 I’m really excited, since I think it looks way better and is much easier to use.

  We’ve pulled out all the “New ___” items to a submenu, except for “New question” which you can still do from the “New post” page (it’s still a tab there, as is linkpost). And you can see your quick takes via your profile page. See more discussion in the relevant PR.

  Let us know what you think! 😊

  

  Bonus: we’ve also added Bluesky to the list of profile links, feel free to add yours!

  

• Sarah ChengFeb 21, 2025, 8:44 AM

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Sarah Cheng’s comment on: Sarah Cheng’s Quick takes

  I’ve just updated the doc with a summary of the CEA Online Team’s Q1.2 OKRs.

• Sarah ChengFeb 10, 2025, 6:29 PM

  3 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Milan Weibel🔹’s comment on: Milan Weibel’s Quick takes

  Thanks for the suggestion! This should be relatively quick to add so I’ll see if we can do it soon. :) I was also thinking of setting up a bluesky bot account similar to our twitter account. Do you know how active the EA-ish bluesky community is?

• Sarah ChengFeb 4, 2025, 8:50 PM

  8 points

  6 ∶ 0

  in reply to: NickLaing’s comment on: Against Ad­dress­ing Root Causes

  I appreciate you saying this Nick — I totally agree with you and couldn’t have said it better myself.

• Sarah ChengFeb 4, 2025, 6:41 PM

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Cornelis Dirk Haupt’s comment on: EA Fo­rum fea­ture sug­ges­tion thread

  Thanks for the suggestion! It’s cool to see that people use the vote history feature, since I made it as a random hackathon project. 😄 I like the idea of filtering by reaction! I’ll add this to our backlog.

• Sarah ChengJan 31, 2025, 4:45 AM

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: James-Hartree-Law’s comment on: Fel­low­ships and internships

  Thanks for flagging! It looks like they took the board down so I’ve removed the link. (For future reference, I believe anyone who has earned any karma can edit topic descriptions, so I think you could also remove any broken links directly.)

• Sarah ChengJan 31, 2025, 12:48 AM

  8 points

  2 ∶ 0

  in reply to: harfe’s comment on: Cli­mate Change Is Worse Than Fac­tory Farming

  Thanks! I basically landed on using my personal account since most people seem to prefer that. I suppose I’ll accept the karma if that’s what everyone else wants! :P

  Honestly I think it’s somewhat misleading for me to post with my account because I am posting this in my capacity as part of the Forum Team, even though I’m still an individual making a judgement. It’s like when I get a marketing email signed by “Liz” — probably this is a real person writing the email, but it’s still more the voice of the company than of an individual, so it feels a bit misleading to say it’s from “Liz”. On the other hand, I guess all my Forum content has been in my capacity as part of the Forum Team so no reason to change that now! :)

  (I also agree with your points about “LinkpostBot” feeling like it should be an automation, and that having a team account for linkposting runs the risk of making those seem privileged.)

• Sarah ChengJan 29, 2025, 6:30 PM

  7 points

  1 ∶ 1

  in reply to: harfe’s comment on: Cli­mate Change Is Worse Than Fac­tory Farming

  Interesting, why’s that? :)

  For context: I want the Forum team to be able to do more active crossposting in the future, so it seems reasonable to have a sort of “placeholder” account for when the author of the original piece doesn’t have a Forum account. Personally when I see a linkpost, I generally assume that the author here is also the original author (outside of obvious cases like a NYT article link), and it’s kinda confusing when that’s not the case (I’m more used to this now but it was extra confusing when I was a new user). I also personally feel kinda weird getting karma for just linking to someone else’s work, and probably don’t want my Forum profile to mostly be links to other articles.

  On the other hand, I do want users to feel free to linkpost external articles that they didn’t write, especially if they add their own commentary, or even just make some editorial decisions on which parts to quote. (That’s why I was fine with crossposting this using my own account, for example.)

• Sarah ChengJan 29, 2025, 12:53 AM

  2 points

  2 ∶ 1

  in reply to: Seth Ariel Green 🔸’s comment on: Cli­mate Change Is Worse Than Fac­tory Farming

  Gosh yeah that’s reasonable. I was hoping to avoid making another team account to do this kind of crossposting but that’s probably the best solution. I guess it’s time for SummaryBot to get a sibling, maybe LinkpostBot?

• Sarah ChengJan 28, 2025, 10:11 PM

  7 points

  4 ∶ 0

  on: Cli­mate Change Is Worse Than Fac­tory Farming

  I crossposted this because it was an interesting read, and it makes an argument that I’ve never heard before. I’d be curious if anyone with more expertise has takes on this! :)

[Cross­post] Cli­mate Change Is Worse Than Fac­tory Farming

• Sarah ChengJan 28, 2025, 9:36 PM

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Milan Griffes’s comment on: What are we do­ing about the EA Fo­rum? (Jan 2025)

  I think the dip in ~May 2022 is most likely simply a data issue, if that’s what you’re referring to. Probably the real usage data is smoother.

It is now 89 sec­onds to midnight

• Sarah ChengJan 22, 2025, 12:57 AM

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Simon Holm’s comment on: What are we do­ing about the EA Fo­rum? (Jan 2025)

  There’s a lot I could say here, but I’ll try to keep it brief, so this is a bit of a disorganized list. :)

  Pros:

  • I think the Forum UX takes bits from other platforms, which enables a bunch of different kinds of interactions (like Question posts, quick takes, longform posts, and reacts).

  • In general we are able to build the UX in such a way that respects users more than most other platforms (like we don’t have paid ads and we are not optimizing for clicks or engagement hours).

  • I think separating out karma voting from agree/​disagree is important for enabling productive discussions and disagreements.

  • I value openness and accessibility and I appreciate that the Forum is extremely open by default (for example, relative to slack).

    • I think this is also good for “Writing on the Forum is so high quality and relevant that it often gets republished and quoted elsewhere”.

  • The fact that discussions here are less transient than say, Twitter, means that we’re better able to build common knowledge, and I think it makes discussions feel more like they matter (so people are more willing to put effort into their writing and adhere to high standards).

  • Personally, I think it’s good to keep the Forum broadly a unified space (rather than having channels or subreddits for cause areas) because I want the project of EA to be open to new ideas, and I would worry that too much structured separation would encourage silos.

  Cons:

  • Not much of the Forum UX updates in realtime, which to me makes it feel a bit old-fashioned or something, but it’s hard to say if that matters.

  • I think it’s good to keep the Forum broadly a unified space, but this can be confusing for users, and can cause content that has a niche audience to be overlooked.

  • I think optimizing for engagement/​fun would potentially build more community here, but at the cost of our actual goals (something like, “being the version of the Forum that most improves the world”).

  • There’s probably more we can to do make the Forum UX feel delightful and immediately satisfying without harming users.

• Sarah ChengJan 22, 2025, 12:07 AM

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: ben.smith’s comment on: What are we do­ing about the EA Fo­rum? (Jan 2025)

  Thanks for the suggestions!

  • I agree that emailing users more often will probably get them to return to the site more often.

  • I’m less confident than you [sound] that this will have a major effect.

  • Since our team has been focused on software/​product for a while and haven’t noticeably increased MAUs, I am skeptical that further work in this space will be the magic bullet. For example, we made significant improvements in site speed and didn’t see metrics improve as much as we expected.

  • Our team has been more willing to email users recently (for example, about Forum events) and I want to be careful about going too far and annoying users/​causing unsubscribes.

    • Honestly I’m not totally sure why basically none of the default notifications include an email, which makes me somewhat nervous to significantly change this. My guess is that you are a bit unusual in finding lots of email notifications fun, and probably more people would find that overwhelming or annoying.

  • That said, we do plan to test out making our default notification settings more in line with other sites (for example, making karma notifications realtime by default instead of batched daily) and sending a delayed email to new users explaining how they can customize their notification settings.

    • We’ll certainly consider changing other notification default settings, but again I want to be careful with this, not just because some people would dislike it, but also because ultimately our goal is not to increase usage. I want people to have a healthy relationship with the Forum, and only use it to the extent that they think is worthwhile.

  • I feel like changing the notification settings for existing users is probably crossing a line.