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Brad West🔸Feb 6 2023-6

Strong downvote.

As much as I share appreciation for those helping with community health, this karma magnet post is displacing visibility of posts and doing little to advance the discourse.

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nananana.nananana.heyhey.anonFeb 21 20234

+1 But also, lowering stress for community members is part of advancing the discourse, in my view.

RobBensinger

Feb 7 2023

Hm, this phrasing makes it sound sort of like I think the only reason for EAs to treat each other with kindness, try to make EA a nice place to be, etc., is to prevent "burnout" (which sounds like it's about keeping EAs productive) and protect the quality of our epistemics. So, to be clear: I also endorse EAs being nice because niceness is good in its own right. EAs deserve happiness too, and I just plain endorse human beings flourishing and having good lives. (I think the underlying generators/attitudes/perspectives behind this are good by scope-insensitive consequentialist lights (given how humans actually work in real life), but I don't think every local act of kindness needs to be justified by explicitly consequentialist reasoning.)

21[anonymous]Feb 6 2023

Strong agree. I had a few calls with the OP last year and they came across as having an incredibly sweet and authentic character.

See in context

Thank you so much to everyone who helps with our community's health and forum.

by Arvin

Feb 4 20231 min read 13

330

Building effective altruismCommunityCommunity infrastructureEffective Altruism Forum

Frontpage

Overflowing with gratefulness thinking about the crucial work they do while going through so many hard times. I'm emotional and loss for words so all I can say is thank you, thank you, thank you so much for your efforts Julia Wise, Catherine Low, Chana Messinger, Eve McCormick, Nicole Ross, Lorenzo Buonanno, Ryan Fugate, Amber Dawn, Edo Arad, Aaron Gertler, Lizka Vaintrob, Ben West, JP Addison and everyone else who helps with our forum^[1]. You folks work insanely hard through recent crazy circumstances. I'm so grateful our community has all of you. Thank you, thank you.

^{^}
(Edited out "at CEA" in my title)

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PeterSlatteryFeb 4 202370

I have been thinking something similar so I will take this as chance to say that I really appreciate all your work and commitment. I also really sympathise about the stress that recent events have probably caused. It feels a bit trite and empty to say but I really mean it. I really hope that things calm down soon.

MeganNelson 🔸Feb 5 202338

I agree! Thank you to the Forum mods and the CEA Community Health Team for doing the hard jobs that make our community possible.

That said, I'd like to suggest that the absolute best way to thank them is to please not make their jobs any harder.

Even if you're "one of the good guys", think about how you can extend and expand that goodness through the community by promoting norms and values that steer us away from future problems. We all have a part to play in supporting a healthy EA community.

Lorenzo Buonanno🔸Feb 5 202327

Thank you for the kind words! I would just like to clarify that Amber Dawn, Edo Arad, Aaron Gertler and I are not part of CEA.^[1]

I fully share your gratefulness, especially for the community health and online teams at CEA.

^{^}
I'm sure about me, 99% confident about the other three, and Aaron Gertler used to be at CEA.

ArvinFeb 5 2023-1

I created this at like 4 am so haha ops. Thank you for the clarification as well!

Jeffrey LadishFeb 6 202316

Really appreciate you! It's felt stressful sometimes as just someone in the community and it's hard to imagine how stressful it would feel for me in your shoes. Really appreciate your hard work, and I think the EA movement is significantly improved through your hard work maintaining and improving and moderating the forum, and all the mostly-unseen-but-important work mitigating conflicts & potential harm in the community.

RobBensingerFeb 5 20237

+1!

Brad West🔸Feb 6 2023-6

Strong downvote.

As much as I share appreciation for those helping with community health, this karma magnet post is displacing visibility of posts and doing little to advance the discourse.

RobBensingerFeb 6 202354

I do think that EA is made of human beings, and injections of positivity can help humans avoid burning out or getting so stressed that the quality of our reasoning and arguments declines.

Seeing some human kindness directed at other EAs made me feel less stress on the Forum, and I wasn't even the target of the kindness!

Like, I think reasonable people can disagree about the right ways to inject that positivity, how much is needed, etc. I think this post was good, but I could imagine seeing evidence that would change my mind about that.

But I think "karma magnet" is probably factually wrong about the main motivation behind this post (and I think it's a bit rude to single this post out when I suspect karma is a non-small motivation for the more-substantive posts too!). And if you think that there's never a useful social function served by things like gratitude posts, then I flatly disagree.

RobBensingerFeb 7 202321

I do think that EA is made of human beings, and injections of positivity can help humans avoid burning out or getting so stressed that the quality of our reasoning and arguments declines.

So, to be clear: I also endorse EAs being nice because niceness is good in its own right. EAs deserve happiness too, and I just plain endorse human beings flourishing and having good lives.

(I think the underlying generators/attitudes/perspectives behind this are good by scope-insensitive consequentialist lights (given how humans actually work in real life), but I don't think every local act of kindness needs to be justified by explicitly consequentialist reasoning.)

[anonymous]Feb 6 202321

But I think "karma magnet" is probably factually wrong about the main motivation behind this post

Strong agree. I had a few calls with the OP last year and they came across as having an incredibly sweet and authentic character.

Brad West🔸Feb 6 20230

Karma magnet was intended as a statement of its effect, not the author's intent.

I have no doubts as to the good motivations of its author.

I simply think such gratitude can be expressed without displacing potential object-level posts for days.

SanjayFeb 6 202331

Posts can achieve goals other than advancing the discourse, and I'm OK with that.

nananana.nananana.heyhey.anonFeb 21 20234

+1 But also, lowering stress for community members is part of advancing the discourse, in my view.