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
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.
Out of interest, did there happen to be a tender offer running since this post came out or is there some other way you can sell the shares?
+1, I do all my budgeting in Monzo and I find it to be really good. In addition to these features I find the budgeting by category very useful, and the fact that it doesnât require copying the data out to somewhere else makes it much easier to stick to.
I personally find it simpler to do it this way because:
Itâs easier to change the amount and where you are donating to
Not all employers offer Payroll Giving, you could probably ask them to set it up but that would be a hassle. Iâm currently employed via Deel, which doesnât offer it as far as Iâm aware
Also I found ringing them up really quite straightforward, it took me maybe 15 mins each time.
Iâm borrowing this example from the Payroll Giving topic page:
You earn ÂŁ60,000 per year (making your marginal tax band 40%). You donate ÂŁ1,200 to a charity after youâve been paid. The charity can claim 25% from the government, giving them ÂŁ1,500. And you can claim a tax rebate of ÂŁ300 (1500 * 0.2), meaning you are only out-of-pocket ÂŁ900.
The way they actually get the ÂŁ300 into your bank account is by adjusting your tax code, which means you pay less tax for the rest of the year.
In a tax code like 1257L, the 1257 means you pay zero tax on the first ÂŁ12,570. Changing this to e.g. 1258L effectively shifts all the tax bands up by ÂŁ10, so if the highest band you were in was 40% this gets you an extra ÂŁ4.
In the above case, they would add ÂŁ750 to the tax-free allowance, to save you . So this would change your tax code from 1257L to 1332L (equal to )
You can use this to check theyâve done the adjustment correctly when you talk to them over the phone. It should be the case that:
I realize that maybe the other people here in the thread have so little trust in the survey designers that theyâre worried that, if they answer with the low-probability, higher-EV option, the survey designers will write takeaways like âmore EAs are in favor of donating to speculative AI risk.â
Iâm one of the people who agreed with @titotalâs comment, and it was because of something like this.
Itâs not that Iâm worried per se that the survey designers will write a takeaway that puts a spin on this question (last time they just reported it neutrally). Itâs more that I expect this question[1] to be taken by other orgs/âpeople as a proxy metric for the EA communityâs support for hits-based interventions. And because of the practicalities of how information is acted on the subtlety of the wording of the question might be lost in the process (e.g. in an organisation someone might raise the issue at some point, but it would eventually end up as a number in a spreadsheet or BOTEC, and there is no principled way to adjust for the issue that titotal describes).
And one other about supporting low-probability/âhigh-impact interventions
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.