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This is a crosspost from the new Animal Welfare Alignment Newsletter by Anima International. You can subscribe on Substack if you are interested in following these efforts. Audio reading also available on Substack.
The goals of this post are to:
1. Raise a question I see as crucially important to the goal of aligning AI to animal welfare...
“How long have you been v*g*n?”
This is one of the most common icebreakers at animal protection events. It’s a baseline assumption, and it mostly holds true: if you’re out advocating for animals not to be tortured or abused, realistically these days you are v**n, or close. And it makes for good conversation. It seems fairly safe to assume when you meet strangers.
But this assumption is hurting the movement in a way which we don’t always notice: someone new comes into the sp...
Summary
Back in November 2023 I posted here to launch Spiro and raise our first $198k. Two and a half years later this is an update and a fundraiser for the next step.
The short version: we've now reached over-5,900 people with TB preventive medicine, including over 3,000 children under five years old. Our early results have held up well an...
Recent opportunities to take action
I wrote a post on “Charity” as a conflationary alliance term. You can read it on LessWrong, but I'm also happy to discuss it here.
If wondering why not post it here: Originally posted it here with a LW cross-post. It was immediately slapped with the "Community" tag, despite not being about community, but about different ways people try to do good, talk about charity & ensuing confusions. It is about the space of ideas, not about the actual people or orgs.
With posts like OP announcements about details of EA group funding or EAG admissions bar not being marked as community, I find it increasingly hard to believe the "Community" tag is driven by the stated principe marking "Posts about the EA community and projects that focus on the EA community" and not by other motives, like e.g. forum mods expressing the view "we want people to think less about this / this may be controversial / we prefer someone new to not read this".
My impression this moves substantial debates about ideas to the side, which is a state I don't want to cooperate on by just leaving it as it is -> moved the post on LessWrong and replaced by this comment.
Hi Jan, my apologies for the frustrating experience. The Forum team has reduced both our FTEs and moderation/facilitator capacity over the past year — in particular, currently the categorization of "Community" posts is done mostly by LLM judgement with a bit of human oversight. I personally think that this system makes too many mistakes, but I have not found time to prioritize fixing it.
In the meantime, if you ever encounter any issues (such as miscategorized posts) or if you have any questions for the Forum team, I encourage you to contact us, or you can message myself or @Toby Tremlett🔹 directly via the Forum. We're happy to work with you to resolve any issues.
For what it's worth, here is my (lightly-held) opinion based on the current definition[1] of "Community" posts:
I agree that the two posts about uni group funding are "Community" posts because they are "irrelevant to someone who was interested in doing good effectively, but NOT interested in the effective altruism community". I've tagged them as such.
I would say that the EAG application bar post is a borderline case[2], but I lean towards agreeing that it's "Community" because it's mostly addressed towards people in the community. I've tagged it as such.
I skimmed your post on LW and I think it was categorized as "Community" because it arguably "concerns an ongoing conversation, scandal or discourse that would not be relevant to someone who doesn't care about the EA community" (as the post references past criticisms of EA, which someone who wasn't involved in the community wouldn't have context on). I think this is not a clear cut case. Often the "Community" tag requires some judgement calls. If you wanted to post it on the Forum again, I could read it more carefully and make a decision on it myself — let me know if so.
To be clear, I haven't put enough thought into this definition to feel confident agreeing or disagreeing with it. I'm just going to apply it as written for now. I expect that our team will revisit this within the next few months.
Partly because I believe the intended audience is people who are not really involved with the EA community but would be valuable additions to an EA Global conference (and also I think you don't need to know anything about the EA community to find that post valuable), and so the post doesn't 100% fit any of the four criteria.
First, I want to say thanks for this explanation. It was both timely and insightful (I had no idea about the LLM screening, for instance). So wanted to give that a big 👍
I think something Jan is pointing to (and correct me if I'm wrong @Jan_Kulveit) is that because the default Community tag does downweight the visibility and coverage of a post, it could be implicitly used to deter engagement from certain posts. Indeed, my understanding was that this was pretty much exactly the case, and was driven by a desire to reduce Forum engagement on 'Community' issues in the wake of FTX. See for example:
Now, it is also true that I think the Forum was broadly supportive about this at the time. People were exhausted by FTX, and there seemed like there was a new devasting EA scandal every week, and being able to downweight these discussions and focus on 'real' EA causes was understandably very popular.[1] So it wasn't even necessarily a nefarious change, it was responding to user demand.
Nevertheless I think, especially since criticisms of EA also come with the 'Community' tag attached,[2] it has also had the effect of somewhat reducing criticism and community sense-making. In retrospect, I still feel like the damage wrought by FTX hasn't had a full accounting, and the change to down-weight Community posts was trying to solve the 'symptoms' rather than the underling issues.
I think reading the most popular comments on the linked posts supports this.
Willing to change my mind on this is there's much less of an overlap between the two than other major categories, for instance
Interesting- for what it's worth, I often make frontpage vs community decisions and I don't think of community as relegating content. Often, there is less community content each day, so community posts stick around for longer than frontpage posts. In some cases, I'd assume it would be better for engagement to be tagged community. I haven't looked at the stats on this, so I don't know for sure if my impression is correct.
I agree that I don't think it's in-practice relegating content. Many of the highest karma posts are still "Community" posts. I've heard a user tell me that they just scroll down to the "Community" section when they come to the Forum (possibly a joke but this feels like a joke that has some truth to it). I think it does mean that newcomers to the site will be less likely to see those posts, but that is intentional (we think those posts are less relevant to newcomers).
I also agree that the intention was to essentially "correct" how much attention these kinds of posts were getting, because using only karma (plus recency) for sorting meant that they were overweighted. I believe the "Community" section is still valuable for essentially the same reasons as before (for example, I think it would be a mistake to assume that there will not be major drama/scandals discussed here in the future, and I think that would be worse without a "Community" section).
However, I don't have a strong opinion about the definition of "Community", nor even if this section should remain "Community" or if it should have some totally different criteria. I'm quite supportive of criticism so I could see the case for updating this system to put more criticism of EA in the Frontpage. It's likely our team will revisit this in the next few months.
This seems not straightforwardly true to me - or at least it shouldn't be? Criticisms of the EA community should be community-tagged, but criticisms of EA ideas should not be.
Yeah I could have worded this better. What I mean to say is that I expect that the tags 'Criticism of EA' and 'Community' probably co-occur in posts a lot more than two randomly drawn tags, and probably rank quite high on the pairwise ranking. I don't mean to say that it's a necessary connection or should always be the case, but it does mean that downweighting Community posts will disproportionately downweight Criticism posts.
If I'm right, that is! I can probably scrape the data from 23-24 on the Forum to actually answer this question.
Thanks for explanation. My guess is this decision should not be delegated to LLMs but mostly to authors (possibly with some emphasis on correct classification in the UI).
I think the "the post concerns an ongoing conversation, scandal or discourse that would not be relevant to someone who doesn't care about the EA community" should not be interpreted extensively, otherwise it can easily mean "any controversy or criticism". I will repost it without the links to current discussions - these are non-central, similar points are raised repeatedly over the years and it is easy to find dozens of texts making them.
Quick update: I read your post more closely and I actually still feel undecided, so I let my colleague break the tie and they voted not community, so I've removed the tag. :)
To clarify: I tried hard to apply the current definition. I expect we will revisit this definition and system in the near future.