Iâm a software engineer on the CEA Online team, mostly working on the EA Forum. We are currently interested in working with impactful projects as contractors/âconsultants, please fill in this form if you think you might be a good fit for this.
You can contact me at will.howard@centreforeffectivealtruism.org
Draft comments
You can now save comments as permanent drafts:
After saving, the draft will appear for you to edit:
1. In-place if itâs a reply to another comment (as above)
2. In a âDraft commentsâ section under the comment box on the post
3. In the drafts section of your profile
The reasons we think this will be useful:
For writing long, substantive comments (and quick takes!). We think these are the some of the most valuable comments on the forum, and want to encourage more of them
For starting a comment on mobile and then later continuing on desktop
To lower the barrier to starting writing a comment, since you know you can always throw it in drafts and then never look at it again
Polls in comments
We recently added the ability to put polls in posts, and this was fairly well received, so weâre adding it to comments (⊠and quick takes!) as well.
You can add a poll from the toolbar, you just need to highlight a bit of text to make the toolbar appear:
And the poll will look like this...
You may be aware of this already, but you can set values other than 50% by using the âOtherâ field:
Itâs still a bit from-the-hip, but we donât have a way of specifically favouring variety unfortunately
Iâm not quite as convinced of the much greater cost of âbad criticismâ over âgood criticismâ. Iâm optimistic that discussions on the forum tend to come to a reflective equilibrium that agrees with valid criticism and disregards invalid criticism. Iâll give some examples (but pre-committing to not rehashing these too much):
I think HLI is a good example of long-discussion-that-ends-up-agreeing-with-valid-criticism, and as discussed by other people in this thread this probably led to capital + mind share being allocated more efficiently.
I think the recent back and forth between VettedCauses and Sinergia is a good example of the other side. Setting aside the remaining points of contention, I think commenters on the original post did a good job of clocking the fact that there was room for the reported flaws to have a harmless explanation. And then Carolina from Sinergia did a good job of providing a concrete explanation of most of the supposed issues[1].
Itâs possible that HLI and Sinergia came away equally discouraged, but if so I think that would be a misapprehension on Sinergiaâs part. Personally I went from having no preconceptions about them to having mildly positive sentiment towards them.
Perhaps we could do some work to promote the meme that âreasonably-successfully defending yourself against criticism is generally good for your reputation not badâ.
(Stopped writing here to post something rather than nothing, I may respond to some other points later)
You could also argue that not everyone has time to read through the details of these discussions, and so people go away with a negative impression. I donât think thatâs right because on a quick skim you can sort of pick up the sentiment of the comment section, and most things like this donât escape the confines of the forum.
When we launched the first iteration of this slider feature for a forum-wide event, it was anonymous. We later decided to make it non-anonymous because we thought it would make people more bought into the poll (because they would be interested to see the opinions of people they recognise, and would take their own vote more seriously because it was public).
I think broadly speaking this worked, and people were more bought in to later polls. Letting people add comments was also intended to move further in the direction of âprompt for individuals to stake out their positionsâ (as opposed to âtool for aggregating preferencesâ).
I wouldnât want to add the option of voting anonymously because I would guess people would use it just because itâs the lowest effort thing to do, even when thereâs no real downside to having people see their vote. If people do want to vote anonymously they can always create an anonymous account, so a high-friction version of the option does exist.
(and: on the point about anon-voting being potentially hackable/âknown to CEA, fully anonymous accounts are the simplest way round this too).
I donât think itâs obvious that less chance of criticism implies a higher chance of starting a project. There are many things in the world that are prestigious precisely because they have a high quality bar.
Some invitees to the Meta Coordination Forum (maybe like 3 out of the ~30) should be âindependentâ EAs
This is an interesting idea that Iâve never heard articulated before. Seems good in principle to have some people with fewer (or at least different to looking-after-their-org) vested interests.
Good shout @Will Aldred , Iâve changed it to not allow submitting only the quoted text
Good idea, I hadnât thought of that! Iâve changed it to 10 like you suggested (will be deployed in ~10 mins at time of writing)
Update: The poll feature is now out!
We recently discovered that the âPosts added to tags Iâm subscribed toâ notification type was generating way too many notifications (as previously noted in this post).
This is partly because the signup flow used to nudge people to subscribe to these notifications. Weâve changed this now. I have also just gone in and reversed any subscriptions that were already created this way, as my guess is that the vast majority of people wouldnât want them.
If you did like getting these notifications, you can resubscribe by going to the topic page and checking âNotify me of new postsâ in the subscribe dropdown. You can also see which for which tags you have notifications turn on in this page under âNotification of New Posts with Tagsâ (the heading wonât appear if you donât have any):
These are the topics affected (that are shown in the signup flow):
Can we keep that please?
Good news, this is a permanent feature, as careful followers of our donation election should already be well aware.
Thanks for flagging this @Bella! There was a bug which made it update everyoneâs comment whenever anyone changed their vote đ€Šââïž. This is fixed now
PSA: The CEA dashboard is now up to date again[1]! It had been stale since June 2024 due to some issues in the recent data which needed cleaning up. We are planning to (as before) update this approximately once a month.
Apart from a couple of sections which are flagged in the dashboard
Iâm curating this post. I was impressed by level of the detail on how ISO 26000 is put into practice, and I found the diagnosis of gaps in the AI safety ecosystem to be plausible. I know this was written as an academic exercise, but I found it to be more through through than many papers on AI governance from policy organisations.
Tickets are ÂŁ120 per person which includes accommodation and food. Thatâs the at-cost price.
This is incredible for a 4 day event!
Iâm curating this post. Itâs concise and uses a straightforward methodology, and I think the takeaway finding is an important idea to spread awareness of (that people are quite resistant to stopping eating meat).
Iâm curating this post. It makes a good case on purely price, taste, and convenience grounds for why alt proteins are still trailing behind animal products.
For a counterpoint people may be interested in reading Price-, Taste-, and Convenience-Competitive Plant-Based Meat Would Not Currently Replace Meat.
@Jeff Kaufman đž it would be possible, weâre currently using a library that claims to use heuristics based on the userâs timezone and locale, but this doesnât seem to work very well. For the forum we use IP geolocation which is more reliable, so we can switch to that.
@Ian Turner unfortunately we do get some value out of non-GDPR-compatible analytics, and we want to try and optimise the site as a top-of-funnel intro to EA over time, so we think the banner is worth it for now.