Sarah Cheng 🔸

Karma: 3,240

I worked as a software/product engineer at the Centre for Effective Altruism for three years before becoming the EA Forum Project Lead. I’m also the EA Forum’s head moderator. 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 🔸 30 Jan 2026 16:26 UTC
4 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: NickLaing’s comment on: Sarah Cheng’s Quick takes
The surprise is what kind of sweet! ^^

Sarah Cheng 🔸 29 Jan 2026 23:45 UTC
11 points
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on: Sarah Cheng’s Quick takes
@Toby Tremlett🔹 and I will be repping the EA Forum Team at EAG SF in mid-Feb — stop by our office hours to ask questions, give us your hottest Forum takes, or just say hi and come get a surprise sweet! :)
Reminder: applications for EAG SF close soon (this Sunday!)

Sarah Cheng 🔸 16 Jan 2026 0:44 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: Ben_West🔸’s comment on: Sarah Cheng’s Quick takes
Thanks for the question Ben! The main reason that this is a priority is to help EA Funds (which is now part of CEA) grow and diversify their donations, by making it easier to gather info from donors^[1] and build relationships with them, and giving us more freedom to optimize the UX of the donation flow. AWF in particular has ambitious 2026 plans and a significant funding gap, and we’d be excited to help them reach their donation goal for this year! :)
1. ^
  GWWC, the primary platform EA Funds has used historically, defaults to opt-out for donor data sharing. As far as I understand, this prevents us from being able to contact the majority of donors. We recently added the option of donating via every.org as well, which is opt-in by default so that’s improved the situation.

Sarah Cheng 🔸 15 Jan 2026 15:33 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: JP Addison🔸’s comment on: New Forum License: Creative Commons
Thanks JP — that’s right that we originally showed it at the top of the post editor for first-time authors (and it wouldn’t appear anymore after the user checked the box). Now I believe, because we moved the checkbox to the new user onboarding flow, it doesn’t appear on the post page anymore.

Sarah Cheng 🔸 9 Jan 2026 20:48 UTC
10 points
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on: Sarah Cheng’s Quick takes
For those who are interested in what the CEA Online Team^[1] is up to, I’ve set up a new OKRs doc for 2026 and summarized our Q1 2026 plans.
1. ^
  Our team runs this Forum

Sarah Cheng 🔸 23 Dec 2025 16:46 UTC
6 points
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on: Sarah Cheng’s Quick takes
Quick note: Forum support coverage will be lighter than usual this week and next as people are off on holiday, so you may encounter some process delays (for example, things may take longer than usual to get approved). We expect to be back to normal on Monday Jan 5.
Hope you all get to enjoy some relaxing time off as well! :)

Sarah Cheng 🔸 26 Nov 2025 20:33 UTC
4 points
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on: Sarah Cheng’s Quick takes
I’ve updated the public doc that summarizes the CEA Online Team’s OKRs to add Q4.2, which takes us to the end of the year.
Posting a bit late since I just got back from a long holiday — here’s a bonus photo from my trip! :)

Sarah Cheng 🔸 8 Oct 2025 16:24 UTC
3 points
0 ∶ 0
on: EA Handbook Audio Reading?
Hey, thanks for asking! I’m not sure if there’s a specific reason — it’s likely that simply no one prioritized doing it. Note that I think many of the posts in the EA Handbook besides the first one do have audio, it’s just not consistent.
The Forum Team has manually enabled audio on all the posts, but some of them will require additional work from Type III Audio (who provides the AI narration), so it may take some time for them to appear on the site.
In the meantime, you’re welcome to make your own audio or video versions of the posts! I think it would be great for them to reach a wider audience. :)

Sarah Cheng 🔸 1 Oct 2025 19:01 UTC
4 points
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on: Sarah Cheng’s Quick takes
I’ve updated the public doc that summarizes the CEA Online Team’s OKRs to add Q4.1 (the next six weeks).

Sarah Cheng 🔸 23 Sep 2025 15:51 UTC
8 points
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on: Sarah Cheng’s Quick takes
Quick warning: crossposting from here to LessWrong is currently buggy, due to some ongoing infrastructure changes on their side. If you run into any issues saving or publishing your post with “Crosspost to LessWrong” checked, that may be the reason.
We’re working with LW to resolve any bugs, but they have higher priority issues right now so I’m unsure how long it will take to fix. In the meantime, you can try unchecking that box and manually posting in both places. You can help us diagnose the issue by reporting any bugs you see.

Sarah Cheng 🔸 16 Sep 2025 18:14 UTC
4 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Michael St Jules 🔸’s comment on: antimonyanthony’s Shortform
There should be a little x if you hover over your icon, clicking that should remove your vote.

Sarah Cheng 🔸 21 Aug 2025 23:19 UTC
4 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Sarah Cheng’s Quick takes
I’ve updated the public doc that summarizes the CEA Online Team’s OKRs to add Q3.2 (the next six weeks).

Sarah Cheng 🔸 13 Aug 2025 19:47 UTC
7 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Sarah Cheng’s Quick takes
During last year’s Giving Season, I started up an EA Forum Instagram account as an experiment to see if the Forum Team could help spread important ideas outside of the Forum. In particular, I think there’s interesting and nuanced discussion on the Forum that is representative of EA in a way that other popular media does not capture about EA. I mostly ran it myself, and while it was fun, it took up more of my time than I could justify, so I stopped updating it earlier this year.
Now that the CEA Comms Team is larger and has hired a Marketing Manager, they’ve renamed the account to effectivealtruismofficial and will be taking it from here. They’ll be using it as part of broader plans to share high-quality EA content across multiple platforms to grow the EA movement and brand. They’re happy to hear your questions and collaboration ideas — you can reach out to the CEA Comms Team via email comms@centreforeffectivealtruism.org.

Sarah Cheng 🔸 12 Aug 2025 18:14 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: Jason’s comment on: Sarah Cheng’s Quick takes
Thanks for sharing your thoughts Jason! We’ll take this into account when we review the rate limits, after we have a bit more data on its effects in practice.

Sarah Cheng 🔸 6 Aug 2025 16:34 UTC
10 points
1 ∶ 1
on: Sarah Cheng’s Quick takes
The EA Forum moderation team has decided to enable the same automatic rate limits here as on LessWrong (see this post from the LW team for more info and reasoning).
Previously we had a couple automatic rate limits, and we’ve simply replaced those. Our codebase is open source, so you can see all the current automatic rate limits described in this file. Broadly they affect users who have low karma, or whose most recent content got downvoted by many others. In particular, we’ve noticed more new users who post a lot of lower-quality AI-generated content, so we hope that these automatic rate limits help to maintain a higher signal:noise ratio on the site.
Personally I think there’s a good chance that we’ll want to tweak the exact limits/criteria for our site, so we plan to monitor how often people hit the rate limits. Feel free to share your thoughts, concerns, and suggestions with me! :)

Sarah Cheng 🔸 16 Jul 2025 14:59 UTC
33 points
1 ∶ 0
on: Sarah Cheng’s Quick takes
Mini EA Forum Update
We’ve added two new kinds of notifications that have been requested multiple times before:
1. Notifications when someone links to your post, comment, or quick take
  1. These are turned on by default — you can edit your notifications settings via the Account Settings page.
2. Keyword alerts
  1. You can manage your keyword alerts here, which you can get to via your Account Settings or by clicking the notification bell and then the three dots icon.
  2. You can quickly add an alert by clicking “Get notified” on the search page. (Note that the alerts only use the keyword, not any search filters.)
  3. You get alerted when the keyword appears in a newly published post, comment, or quick take (so this doesn’t include, for example, new topics).
  4. You can also edit the frequency of both the on-site and email versions of these alerts independently via the Account Settings page (at the bottom of the Notifications list).
  5. See more details in the PR
I hope you find these useful! 😊 Feel free to reply if you have any feedback or questions.

Sarah Cheng 🔸 16 Jul 2025 1:39 UTC
2 points
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on: Sarah Cheng’s Quick takes
I’ve updated the public doc that summarizes the CEA Online Team’s OKRs to add Q3.1 (sorry this is a bit late, I just forgot! 😅).

Sarah Cheng 🔸 25 Jun 2025 18:19 UTC
6 points
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in reply to: Will Aldred’s comment on: Debate: Morality is Objective
Ugh I agree yeah, thanks for flagging this! I re-opened the poll by manually updating it in the db, and we should increase the default duration of polls.

Sarah Cheng 🔸 18 Jun 2025 16:13 UTC
7 points
4 ∶ 0
in reply to: barkbellowroar’s comment on: What’s your experience with elitism in EA? [Survey]
None of the EA Forum reacts (including agree/disagree) have a strong version, so those would just be the individual number of users.

Sarah Cheng 🔸 17 Jun 2025 0:22 UTC
36 points
15 ∶ 1
in reply to: Holly Elmore ⏸️ 🔸’s comment on: Holly_Elmore’s Shortform
Hey Holly, it sounds like you’re frustrated by how people in EA are engaging with the idea of a pause. I’m sure that’s really hard, and I’m sure I don’t know even a fraction of what you’ve gone through. I know you’re doing this advocacy work because you care a lot, and I really appreciate that. You know that I personally support your work.
However, I’m worried that this thread is becoming unproductive, and risks making the Forum feel like less of a safe space^[1].
In particular, my concern is that you are criticizing @Denkenberger🔸 directly in a way that appears to come from nowhere. @Denkenberger🔸 doesn’t say anything about their personal views on a pause before you respond with:
But honestly all I hear are excuses. You wouldn’t want to help me if Carl said it was the right thing to do or you’d have already realized what I said yourself. You wouldn’t be waiting for Carl’s permission or anyone else’s. What you’re looking for is permission to stay on this corrupt be-the-problem strategy and it shows.
In my opinion, this sort of accusation without evidence erodes the Forum’s ability to be a safe community space for important discussions. If it’s the case that I’m missing some context and you have personal beef with @Denkenberger🔸, then I don’t think the Forum is the appropriate place to hash that out.
To be clear, I think the following are broadly fine and often good (assuming adherence to our Forum norms):
1. Criticizing ideas or actions that you disagree with, or see flaws in
2. Accusing a person or org of doing harm when you have some evidence to back that up
3. Sharing your feelings, including feelings of hurt and frustration
4. Holding those in power accountable
5. Flagging issues about the EA community, especially those that you think others are too afraid to flag
6. Flagging when someone is potentially not being truth-seeking, or is otherwise not following Forum norms (ideally in a kind way because our norms are unusual compared to the rest of the internet)
So I’d like to suggest that you take a step back from this thread. If you find yourself getting frustrated at others on the Forum elsewhere, I’d suggest taking a break from those as well.
You’ve written some of the best posts on this Forum, and the Forum Team greatly values your contributions. At the same time, I also think it’s important that the Forum continues to be a productive discussion space.
1. ^
  A relevant quote from our “Moderation principles” post:
  The Forum should be a great and safe space: we’re working on hard problems, and the internet can be rough! We don’t want arbitrary barriers to keep people from joining discussions on the Forum, we don’t want people to be miserable on the Forum, and we want to promote excellent discussions and content.
  Civility and charitable discussion—the Forum should feel like a breath of fresh air and a refuge of sanity. When you join a discussion on the Forum, you should be able to reasonably expect that the other people won’t twist your words, won’t call you names, etc.
  Safety—if users feel unsafe on the Forum — they’re being threatened, or they’re worried that if they post, they’ll have to fend off trolls on their own, etc. — that’s our problem. We need to prevent this.

Sarah Cheng 🔸

Mini EA Forum Update