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I'm running a session on 'writing on the EA Forum' at EAG London at this moment, and participants are going to reply to this quick take with ideas for Forum posts.
Please encourage any ideas you'd like to see written up as full posts!
[edit: the forum went down halfway through the activity, there were many more great ideas in the session]
How Human Rights Experience Can Strengthen Animal Advocacy in the Effective Altruism Movement
As someone who transitioned from a career in human rights law to animal advocacy, I’ve seen first-hand how much untapped potential exists at the intersection of these two fields. This post would reflect on that transition, why I made it, what I’ve learned, and how others from similar backgrounds might contribute to improving animal welfare in high-impact ways.
Why this feels important:
The EA community values neglected and cross-cutting cause areas, and I believe the human rights–animal welfare nexus is both. Skills from human rights law, such as litigation, policy reform, and strategic advocacy, are highly relevant to advancing animal interests but are underutilised in current animal advocacy work.
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How to write in a communications / marketing plan into your funding application and know how to attribute your marketing activities to your objectives
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A proposal for a third way for animal advocacy. In animal advocacy I broadly see two groups: (1) people who strongly want to end animal farming, but whose actions are unlikely to make that happen; (2) people who prioritise reducing animal suffering in the short term within existing systems. The interesting thing is, BOTH of these groups want to end animal farming (or at least factory farming), but neither group is going to make that happen. What would happen if more people embodied a third way: Visionary Pragmatism. An approach which starts with our end goal (e.g. end animal farming), and then gets into the hard work of figuring out the incremental steps needed to get there. What could this approach look like?
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The role of guilt and perfectionism in EA, and how EA as an environment focused on efficiency and doing the very best we can can lead to difficult mental hangups, and be more demanding than more traditional ways of doing good. (Traditional ways of doing good are often more focused in feeling good and feeling altruistic, which is useful for the good-doers wellbeing but suboptimal for actual amount of good done.)
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might be good reading to refer to previous contexts
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrupulosity
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Defensive Democracy (democracy that has laws and institutions in place to defend itself against antidemocratic movements), why the idea is great, and why it doesn't work
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Hi from the session! Thank you for running it.
* General idea: people have been asking for my takes on AI alignment topics, and much of what I'm replying has never been written anywhere. That ought to be fixed.
* Specific idea: I consider that the landscape of AI alignment outreach is shifting for a specific reason I'd like to expand on.
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Positivity focused ethics! The inbalance between negativity-biased vs. positively biased versions of utilitarianism, and implications of this on evaluating policy ideas and the medium-term future.
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Probably for the best. Nearly fell off a motorcycle taxi yesterday when a bunch of bublys exploded into my face :D
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To be clear - which some people appreciate:
* I disagree reacted because I don't support you falling off a motorcycle.
* I laugh reacted because that's quite funny.
The RSPCA is holding a "big conversation", culminating in a citizens' assembly. If you have opinions about how animals in the UK are treated (which you probably do), you can contribute your takes here.
A lot of the contributions are very low quality, so I think EA voices have a good chance of standing out and having their opinions shared with a broader audience.
For those among us who want to get straight back to business - I've tagged (I think) all the april fools posts, so you can now filter them out of your frontpage if you prefer by adding the "April Fools' Day" tag under the "Customize feed" button at the top of the frontpage, and changing the filter to hidden.
SummaryBotV2 didn't seem to get more agree reacts than V1, so I'm shutting it down. Apologies for any inconvenience.
Anyone know any Earn-To-Givers who might be interested in participating in an AMA during Giving Season? If a few are interested, it might be fun to experiment with an AMA panel, where Forum users ask questions, and any of the AMA co-authors can respond/ co-authors can disagree.
Why? Giving Season is, in my opinion, a really great time to highlight the earn-to-give work which is ongoing all year, but is generally under-celebrated by the EA community. + Earn-to-givers might have good insights on how to pick donation targets during the donation election, and Giving Season more generally.
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What is an AMA in this context?
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An Ask Me Anything event- sorry for jargon!
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Thanks, Toby!
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Doesn’t CEA know any?
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Didn't realise I might be implying we didn't by posting this- makes sense! Collectively, CEA does have a great network- writing a quick take was a way to cast the net a bit wider, and gauge enthusiasm.
Why should you donate to the Forum’s Donation Election Fund?
- It could change the way you donate, for the better: We all have limited information to decide how we should donate. Giving via the Donation Election Fund let’s you benefit from the collectively held information of the Forum’s users, as well as up to date facts from the marginal funding posts from organisations. If enough users take part in the voting, you won’t have to read all of the marginal funding posts to benefit from the information they contain.
- It could boost engagement in the election, which leads to:
More funding for charities: Last year, the donation election and surrounding events moved a lot of money. In our squiggle model, we get this distribution:
- The headline “$30k raised through the election” does not represent all of the money raised because of the Forum’s events. But giving money to the election fund will likely increase the attention on the Forum, the amount of effort that organisations and individuals put into posts etc… in a way which will increase the amount raised overall.
- Influencing other’s donations for the better: In the EA survey (post coming soon) we saw that t
I've had a couple of organisations ask me to clarify the Donation Election's vote-brigading rules. Understandably, they want to promote the donation election amongst their supporters, but they aren't sure to what extent this is vote-brigading. The answer is- it depends.
We want to avoid the Donation Election being a popularity contest/ favouring the candidates with bigger networks. Neither popularity, nor size of network, is perfectly correlated with impact.
If you'd like to reach out to your audience, feel free, but please don't tell them to vote for you. You can explain the event, and mention that you are a candidate, but we want the votes to inform us of the Forum audience's opinions of marginal impact of money donated to these charities, not to the strength of their networks.
I'm aware this exortation won't do all the work- we will also be looking into voting patterns, and new accounts (made after October 22, when the election was announced) won't be eligible to vote.
I've made a public Forum Events calendar, which you can add to your Gcal. Hopefully, this will give people longer to think about and write for events like Debate Weeks or Theme Weeks. Let me know if you have any issues adding the calendar, or have suggestions for other ways to track Forum events.
If you're at EAG BA this weekend, me and @Sarah Cheng are doing:
- A talk on why you should write on the EA Forum (less useful for people who already have).
- Office hours/ a Forum writing and ideation activity.
- And an extremely online meetup. If you see this, you're in the target audience.
I've also got some 1:1 slots left, and it'd be great to talk to anyone with feedback on the forum experience/ forum events or the EA Newsletter.
FAQ: “Ways the world is getting better” banner
The banner will only be visible on desktop. If you can't see it, try expanding your window. It'll be up for a week.
How do I use the banner?
- Click on an empty space to add an emoji,
- Choose your emoji,
- Write a one-sentence description of the good news you want to share,
- Link an article or forum post that gives more information.
If you’d like to delete your entry, click the cross that appears when you hover over it. It will be deleted for everyone.
What kind of stuff should I write?
Anything that qualifies as good news relevant to the world's most important problems.
For example, Ben West’s recent quick takes (1, 2, 3).
Avoid posting partisan political news, but the passage of relevant bills and policies is on topic.
Will my entry be anonymous?
All submissions are displayed without your Forum name, so they are ~anonymous to users, however, usual moderation norms still apply (additionally, we may remove duplicates or borderline trollish submissions. This is an experiment, so we reserve the right to moderate heavily if necessary).
Ask any other questions you have in the comments below. Feel free t...
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The banner looks lovely. Great work.
FYI, there is at least one bit of false/inaccurate information on the banner. The bit about universal right to vote is referencing a database that considers Chinese people as having the right to vote since the late 1940s. While there is some voting that occurs in China at the local level with candidates that have to be pre-approved by the ruling party, it strikes as pretty inaccurate to claim full adult suffrage for China. It appears to references a dataset from this research paper, and I'm not sure why that dataset has this miscategorization.
(sorry to be nitpicky. I don't want people to read that almost everyone in the world lives in a democracy when in reality about 20% of people don't)
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Just want to say that I love it and it made my day. Awesome idea!
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Thanks Jakub!
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The banner is really nice work!!
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Loved it as well
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Thank you!
A bit of a change for next week's debate week... When you vote on the banner and leave a comment, that comment will appear in a discussion thread. When it does, it'll display your vote, so that readers can put your comment in context, like so:
Let me know if you have any questions - and see you for debate week next week!
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.
We've decided to add another $5000 match for the last stretch of the Donation Election (you can see how much of it is left on the banner). This is in addition to the first $5000, which we already matched. I know that the word shouldn't be used loosely, but this match seems genuinely counter-factual to me- based on the pace of donations so far, I put low odds (20%) on the full match amount being reached. That is, unless potential donors suddenly see the value of Bulbys exploding from Forum buttons.
The Marginal Funding posts were really valuable this year, and it's been great to have so many candidates, and see so much effort going into them. We had some money left in our 2024 events budget, and we wanted to make sure that the event is worthwhile to our candidates, and that they are excited to take part next year.
Thanks to those who have donated, voted, and commented so far!
The Donation Election will end, at a specific yet undisclosed time, on December 3rd.
I'm starting to put together plans for this year's Giving Season events (roughly, start of November to end of December). If you remember the events last year, it'd be cool to know:
1- What was memorable to you from that period?
2- Was anything in particular valuable for you or for your donation decisions?
3- Is there anything you would expect to see this year?
4- What would you hope to see this year?
Thanks!
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I really liked the post on where CEA employee were donating
In late June, the Forum will be holding a debate week (almost definitely) on the topic of digital minds. Like the AI pause debate week, I’ll encourage specific authors who have thoughts on this issue to post, but all interested Forum users are also encouraged to take part. Also, we will have an interactive banner to track Forum user’s opinions and how they change throughout the week.
I’m still formulating the exact debate statement, so I’m very open for input here! I’d like to see people discuss: whether digital minds should be an EA cause area, how bad putting too much or too little effort into digital minds could be, and whether there are any promising avenues for further work in the domain. I’d like a statement which is fairly clear, so that the majority of debate doesn’t end up being semantic.
The debate statement will be a value statement of the form ‘X is the case’ rather than a prediction 'X will happen before Y'. For example, we could discuss how much we agree with the statement ‘Digital minds should be a top 5 EA cause area’-- but this is specific suggestion is uncomfortably vague.
Do you have any suggestions for alternative statements? I’m also open to feedback on the general topic. Feel free to dm rather than comment if you prefer.
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after EAG conversations, my current best guess for the debate statement is "the future will be worse if we create artificial sentience"
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I really like your suggested post-EAG debate statement, Toby!
Other suggested debate topics:
1. Digital Minds will possess sentience or moral status
2. It is a moral obligation to develop protections for digital minds
Listened to this episode of the Dwarkesh podcast yesterday - Dwarkesh mentioned that book reviews are a great way to produce useful content, even when you don't have something to say yourself. I'm mentioning this because I think the Forum could benefit from more book reviews (or paper reviews, or podcast reviews).
Is anyone reading a book they think the Forum audience would benefit from reading? Fancy writing a review of it?
There is still plenty of time to vote in the Donation Election. The group donation pot currently stands at around $30,000. You can nudge that towards the projects you think are most worthwhile (plus, the voting system is fun and might teach you something about your preferences).
Also- you should donate to the Donation Election fund if:
a) You want to encourage thinking about effective donations on the Forum.
b) You want to commit to donating in line with the Forum's preferences.
c) You'd like me to draw you one of these bad animals (or earn one of our other rewards):
NB: I can also draw these animals holding objects of your choice. Or wearing clothes. Anything is possible.
Relatedly, here are some Manifold Markets about whether the Donation Election Fund will reach:
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Voted because of this, thanks for the nudge!
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Thanks for letting me know Kirsten! Good way to start the day :)
Heads up! I'm planning a Draft Amnesty event (like this one). I think the last one went really well, and I'm pretty excited to run this.
The Draft Amnesty event will probably be a week long, around mid-march.
I'll likely post some question threads such as "What posts would you like to see someone write?" (like this one) and "What posts are you thinking of writing?" (like this one), and set up some gather.town co-working/ social opportunities for polishing posts/ writing up drafts in the build up.
I'm also brainstorming ways to make draft amnesty posts appear as a different genre to Forum users (such as a different font for the title, a different page for draft posts, or a visible "draft amnesty" tag that can be seen from the frontpage list view), and let them opt out of seeing them. This should ameliorate concerns about the frontpage being full of lower-standard content (though fwiw I think this is unlikely because of the karma system), and also to take some more pressure off the posters (I don't want people to not post because they worry their draft isn't polished enough!)
I'll put up a proper announcement soon, with more of a plan, but feel free to use the comments ...
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I'd be really interested to see what posts people want to see. I'm happy to devote some time and effort to creating posts if I thought it would be useful to people. Especially if it's in my skillset. Sometimes it can be hard to tell what's useful beyond getting inbox messages after the fact.
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Dear Toby, thank you for this idea!
I have an idea that is burning and makes me loose sleep, but its too big for one person so more eyes on it is better.
The theme is mindful hacking.
A hack is a clever trick, a sort of thing a trickster archetype would do. One thing about tricksters is that it often bites them back, so when hacking one must be mindful about the ethical considerations of their hacks. In particular the recent bestseller A Hacker's Mind: How the Powerful Bend Society's Rules, and How to Bend them Back, suggests several hacks that seem odd - there is nothing wrong with them on the surface but I have a hunch it will come bite back if one would attempt them in the real life. So the work on this piece would be mostly in the above mentioned book critique and coming up with a better representation: one that is easier to read and that highlights the tradeoffs and the dilemmas associated with the non-trivial hacks.
Thank you and let me know what you think!
The Debate Week banner is under construction... get your takes ready for Monday morning!
In the mean time, you can brush up on the reading list in the announcement post, or respond to this post with ideas for posts you'd like to see next week.
On Friday I gave a talk to the APART research fellows, about writing on the EA Forum. The talk included a few tips on writing a banger Forum post. The corresponding section from my handout is below - LMK if any of the advice is useful, or strikes you as wrong:
3 rules for (Forum) writing
Be Engaging
- Write with your reader's limited time and attention in mind.
- Use concrete examples and analogies to illustrate points.
- Be concise and avoid repetition.
Be Honest
- Express uncertainty when you have it.
- Don’t aim to persuade, aim to explain.
- Make your reasoning transparent
There have been a few valid critiques of the debate framing, so I'll make some points to respond to each of them. A general point before I start is that you should feel free to use the discussion thread to outline your opinion, and/or, your interpretation of the debate statement. I.e. "I strongly agree with the debate statement, because I think 5% of EA Funding over the next decade is the right amount to allocate to this cause area".
1- @Jason brings up the ambiguity of the term "unrestricted" in footnote 2. I was thinking of unrestricted funding as all funding which is being allocated according to (roughly) impartial consequentialist reasoning, i.e. (roughly) EA principles. I'm contrasting that to restricted funds, for example, funds from a foundation that supports aid charities which happen to be given to an EA aid charity.
2- @finm makes a very fair point in this comment: over what timescale are we allocating 5% of the EA funds? This seems like an oversight rather than an accidental ambiguity- if I were to write this again, I might have chosen the next decade, or the next year. Given that 340 users have already voted, I won't change something so substantial...
Do you use the Forum Digest more than once a month?
I'd love to know, either in the comments here, in a <30 min user interview (which you can book on this link), or optionally anonymously via this form:
- How you use it. Do you click on every link, or just check it for jobs? Do you read the intro?
- What you like about it. Is there something you get from the Forum Digest that you can't get elsewhere? Does it save you time? Do you enjoy it more than other newsletters?
- What you would improve about it. Is there a part of the Digest that isn't useful to you? Would you like to see more of a certain kind of content?
- Anything else you think I should know.
Thanks!
4[anonymous]
I use it to see if I’ve missed anything significant, esp. since I’ve started looking at lesswrong more (uh, apologies about that? More of a cause specific thing with ai and getting more into rationalism)
I don’t think I click on that many links typically, but I might leave the digest unread in my inbox until I give it a complete read through. I could imagine myself reading through it and seeing some post that makes me go down a rabbit hole and by the time I get back to the email tab I need to just mark unread to review again, for instance. Wouldn’t be surprised if this had occurred, that is.
Idk much more, I like the setup and do actually use it as described above as a sort of, well, I guess newsletter, huh.
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Haha no need to apologise for hanging out on lesswrong!
Thanks for your feedback :)
I've loved seeing all the Draft Amnesty posts on the Forum so far! Some really great stuff has been posted (and I'll highlight that when I write a retrospective)
Posting this quick take as a reminder that people who are considering posting for Draft Amnesty can run a draft past me for quick feedback. Just DM me.
I'm firming up some plans for pledge highlight week (December 16-22) at the moment. These include (multiple) AMAs, but also posts I'd love to see people write.
If you want to help make this week more lively, consider whether you or a friend might like to write about:
- Your experience with pledging/ not pledging
- Arguments for or against taking the giving what we can pledge
- Ideas for making pledging more of a norm (especially in the world, but also in the EA community)
- Or really anything else with "pledge" in the title, with vibes anywhere from celebratory t
If you're currently at EAG London and you still see this quick take, you're exactly the person we'd like to meet:
EAG London Meetup: EA Forum readers and writers | Saturday 5-6pm at Meeting point G
Some members of the EA Forum online team are holding a casual meetup for EA Forum readers and writers to get to know each other (and us). Join us if you'd like to find a co-author, meet someone who can give you feedback on your draft, or make suggestions to the EA Forum team. We'll meet at meeting point G, unless otherwise stated.
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Love this! Unfortunately here in Uganda, have a great meeting ;).
The Draft Amnesty banner, and other tweaks to differentiate the posts, are a bit delayed and should be up later today. There will be in-post banners, and little topic pills that you will be able to see in the frontpage list. This will all be applied retroactively, so feel free to post your Draft Amnesty posts whenever, as long as they are tagged with the Draft Amnesty Week tag.
I'm interviewing Rob Mather, founder and CEO of AMF this evening at 6pm UTC. I'm asking him the questions from the comments on this AMA post.
Let me know, on that post or here, if you have any questions which you'd like to ask him.
You'll be able to watch the event live (on a link I'll post here and on the AMA post before the event at 6pm UTC), or as a recording before the end of the week.
[Edit: It will not be before the end of the week. Sorry about that! Happy Holidays everyone, expect this in the new year].
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Link for our live call at 6pm UTC is here.
Just a reminder that AI Welfare Debate Week on the EA Forum is next week! If you're writing a post and want some feedback, dm me. If you have feedback on the event, or any questions about how it will work, comment here (or, again, dm).
Guidelines for new topic tags
Topics (AKA wiki pages[1] or tags[2]) are used to organise Forum posts into useful groupings. They can be used to give readers context on a debate that happens only intermittently (see Time of Perils), collect news and events which might interest people in a certain region (see Greater New York City Area), collect the posts by an organisation, or, perhaps most importantly, collect all the posts on a particular subject (see Prediction Markets).
Any user can submit and begin using a topic. They can do thi...
The Donation Election will close (no more voting or donating) at an undisclosed time today... could be in ten minutes, could be in ten hours... get your final votes in soon just in case!
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Voting has now closed! Thank you to everyone who voted, discussed and donated. And of course to all the organisations who wrote marginal funding posts!
Stay tuned for a post about the winners tomorrow.
With the debate week discussion thread getting so long, it is now a community service (even more than usual) to sort the comments by "new" and upvote/ downvote or comment. Let's not let quality content get buried!
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could we get some way to see people's vote when viewing the discussion thread? Usually you can guess based on the comment roughly where they fall, but it would be nice to have a number/visual to quickly see.
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This was suggested in CEA slack as well- It'll be on the list of possible improvements (I think it's a good idea).
I can't stop checking the EA forum now....