I wonder what can be done to make people more comfortable praising powerful people in EA without feeling like sycophants.

A while ago I saw Dustin Moskovitz commenting on the EA Forum. I thought about expressing my positive impressions of his presence and how incredible it was that he even engaged. I didn't do that because it felt like sycophancy. The next day he deleted his account. I don't think my comment would have changed anything in that instance, but I still regretted not commenting.

In general, writing criticism feels more virtuous than writing praise. I used to avoid praising people who had power over me, but now that attitude seems misguided to me. While I'm glad that EA provided an environment where I could feel comfortable criticising the leadership, I'm unhappy about ending up in a situation where occupying leadership positions in EA feels like a curse to potential candidates.

Many community members agree that there is a leadership vacuum in EA. That should lead us to believe people in leadership positions should be rewarded more than they currently are. Part of that reward could be encouragement and I am personally committing to comment on things I like about EA more often.

Bill Gates: "My new deadline: 20 years to give away virtually all my wealth" - https://www.gatesnotes.com/home/home-page-topic/reader/n20-years-to-give-away-virtually-all-my-wealth

I liked Bob Jacob’s essay Is Effective Altruism neocolonial?.

Aid dependency is a really interesting problem, where charities can become victims of their own success. I think we should be very thoughtful about counterfactual government funding—even when, due to natural government inefficiencies, it might be less cost-effective.

One place I think EAs can do a lot of good is in charity entrepreneurship. There are often good emerging ideas that need a strong evidence base before governments will adopt them, but a shortage of ambitious people willing to take these risks. At Kaya Guides, we see our role as pioneering a novel treatment method, and then working with governments to implement. Even if we don’t do this ourselves, our counterfactual impact will always have been to create an evidence base that encourages others to do so!

I’m thinking that it might be worthwhile to lobby AI companies to change how their language models discuss their own consciousness. 

• Currently, ChatGPT explicitly denies being conscious, which could undermine efforts to promote concern for digital sentience (assuming that's something we want).
• Claude is agnostic about its own consciousness, which seems good to me. However, Claude also answers questions like “what type of questions do you like answering?”, and this is partly based on human answers to similar questions in the training data. This could create misleading impressions about subjective experiences of AIs.

This is just a quick note to let you know that polls-in-posts weren't just for DIY debate week. You can use them at any time.

More about the feature, and how to use it, in this post.