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I think more people should consider leaving more (endorsed) short, nice comments on the Forum + LW when they like a post, especially for newer authors or when someone is posting something “brave” / a bit risky. It’s just so cheap to build this habit and I continue to think that sincere gratitude is underrated in ~all online spaces. I like that @Ben_West🔸 does this frequently :)

Agree. Nice (truth-tracking) comments seem high-leverage for boosting morale + reducing excessive aversion to forum-posting + countering the phenomenon where commenters are more critical than the average reader (which warps what authors think about their readers).

IMO these two actions have different purposes, and we could use more of both here. :) In particular, I think it's more valuable than one might expect to leave a short comment that includes a bit of gratitude. Even short comments often communicate something that reacts cannot. For example, the last comment in Angelina's screenshot helps enforce good norms in the community.

Agree the bottom comment is significantly more complex than reactions. The top 2 could be reactions 

I agree and am guilty of not doing this myself; I mostly only leave comments when I want to question or critique something. So after reading this I went back and left two positive comments on two posts I read today. (Plus also this comment.) Thanks for the explanation and nudge!

This is so heart-warming! Thanks for sharing Jamie!

Do you think that it would be better to just add a helpful or heart emoji to the post instead? I used to leave the same sorts of comments as Ben. These got downvoted occasionally. I interpreted this pattern as being due to people not appreciating these sorts of 'thank you comments'. When emoji react were added, I therefore switched to emoji reacting, as I felt that this would achieve the same outcomes without creating the 'noise' of a 'thank you comment'. However, I could go back to leaving comments if that seems like a better approach.

Agreed, I try to do that since it encourages authors to continue doing good work (and it's generally nice). 

Thinking something nice about someone's work and not saying it is like wrapping a gift and not giving it. 

Some Alfred workflows (productivity tools)

Alfred is a pretty powerful Mac app which lets you set hotkeys for a lot of things. Here are some workflows I use very frequently that I would recommend others try out. If you have favorite Alfred workflows, I'd love to hear about them in the comments!

For the record, my Alfred app thinks that I have used a hotkey or Alfred expansion on average 9.3 times per day since March 2022.

Kill

I frequently get distracted or overwhelmed by having too many windows / tabs open, and losing track of what I was supposed to be doing. Whenever I notice that I am getting sidetracked, it’s extremely useful for me to have a ‘kill switch’, which just closes down all of my tabs and lets me start over.

I now have a ‘kill’ Alfred hotkey set up to forcibly quit Chrome, Slack, Microsoft suite products, various programming apps, etc., so that I can start again from a blank slate. I use this hotkey multiple times a day on average while working. In theory, if I need to find a Chrome tab again, I can always go into my history / ‘recently closed tabs’ section — but I don’t ever recall needing to do this since installing this hotkey over a year ago. 

I used to be the person with 1,000 Chrome tabs open at all times. I now think this is extremely damaging to my attention span and would lightly recommend other people who rely heavily on tabs in their workflow to try out a tab-limiting policy to see if it helps.

Tz

I work on a distributed team and have family around the world, so knowing the current time in a few key timezones is often extremely helpful for coordination purposes. The tz workflow is really nice for this.

I added a ‘tzdetail’ hotkey, which opens up a URL to an external website, displaying the time across the day in major cities in all the timezones I frequently care about. I often use this before booking meetings with colleagues in other timezones, and having it at my fingertips is super useful.

Curl

Sometimes I want to read paywalled articles. I set up a workflow to do this using the ‘curl’ Terminal command which is good for some newspapers. (I do pay for some subscriptions, and am not sure I 100% endorse this, but it is a very valuable service in my life).

Snippets

Alfred also has decent text expander functionality (called ‘snippets’: General > Snippets). I have a bunch of snippets set up to auto-fill my email/s, number, and some generic email responses.

One snippet I use very frequently is ‘date’, which just pastes the current date formatted as YYYY.MM.DD. I use this extremely frequently, to label my Google doc titles with the current date, to jot down the current date in my meeting documents, to comment the date when modifying files, etc. The setup is pretty simple (see screenshot).

Sidebar: I think this format of date is the best for distributed teams, since it is unambiguous worldwide and makes your filenames sortable alphabetically (amongst other reasons).

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If you have a Mac and don’t mind editing some Bash / osascript code, here’s some of the workflows I use that you can try downloading and playing with (I don’t have capacity to help you debug, sorry!):

Personal scripts (probably needs tweaking to work for you).alfredworkflow

Quick PSA:

  1. CEA has a public dashboard which contains metrics on most of our projects!
  2. We’ve just launched a few updates:
    1. The EA Forum, EAG, and EAGx data now refresh daily.
      1. This is most relevant for the Forum data, to help answer questions like “what is happening with the Forum ~right now”.
      2. All other sections are updated on a ~monthly cadence.
    2. We’ve added data on our community building grants program to the Groups section.

Feedback is appreciated as always!

PSA: Based on requests from users (e.g. this), we’ve added a link to a data access request form to the public CEA dashboard (which we update every month).

The form is meant to be a lightweight way for us to understand who is interested in exploring our data further, and we expect to approve almost all requests.

As always, feedback is welcome!

One of my current favorite substacks: this author just takes a random selection of Weibo posts every day and translates them to English, including providing copies of all the videos. Weibo is sort of like "Chinese Twitter".

One of my most consistently read newsletters! H/T to @JS Denain for recommending this newsletter to me a while ago :)

You might like https://www.whatsonweibo.com/ (although it is popular enough you may have already encountered it). If I remember correctly, it is mainly just run by one woman, an academic from... some European country (I can't remember off the top of my head).

DC
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How do they find posts? Is it literally randomized from the entire set of posts or is there some kind of selection bias?

(Edit: I read a few posts and it seems like a lot of it is the author inserting their own commentary, with a general focus on hot-button issues, so I'm hesitant to subscribe, though I like the concept)

I don't think there's a lot of author exposition? Maybe you clicked on the pinned post, which on a quick skim seems more exposition heavy than the others? e.g. scrolling through this quickly, it's mostly direct quotes.

I'm sure there's some bias in terms of which posts get selected + which follow up comments get highlighted, and I haven't investigated the author at all. I have no idea how the posts are getting selected, I wouldn't assume this is an unbiased learning-focused news source. This is mostly for fun for me :)

FYI: We've just updated CEA's public dashboard (link) to report on how our programs did in July. Moving forwards, we'll plan to update this data ~monthly.

You can read more about the dashboard and what our programs have been up to in our most recent updates post.

Curated and popular this week
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At the last EAG Bay Area, I gave a workshop on navigating a difficult job market, which I repeated days ago at EAG London. A few people have asked for my notes and slides, so I’ve decided to share them here.  This is the slide deck I used.   Below is a low-effort loose transcript, minus the interactive bits (you can see these on the slides in the form of reflection and discussion prompts with a timer). In my opinion, some interactive elements were rushed because I stubbornly wanted to pack too much into the session. If you’re going to re-use them, I recommend you allow for more time than I did if you can (and if you can’t, I empathise with the struggle of making difficult trade-offs due to time constraints).  One of the benefits of written communication over spoken communication is that you can be very precise and comprehensive. I’m sorry that those benefits are wasted on this post. Ideally, I’d have turned my speaker notes from the session into a more nuanced written post that would include a hundred extra points that I wanted to make and caveats that I wanted to add. Unfortunately, I’m a busy person, and I’ve come to accept that such a post will never exist. So I’m sharing this instead as a MVP that I believe can still be valuable –certainly more valuable than nothing!  Introduction 80,000 Hours’ whole thing is asking: Have you considered using your career to have an impact? As an advisor, I now speak with lots of people who have indeed considered it and very much want it – they don't need persuading. What they need is help navigating a tough job market. I want to use this session to spread some messages I keep repeating in these calls and create common knowledge about the job landscape.  But first, a couple of caveats: 1. Oh my, I wonder if volunteering to run this session was a terrible idea. Giving advice to one person is difficult; giving advice to many people simultaneously is impossible. You all have different skill sets, are at different points in
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Thank you to Arepo and Eli Lifland for looking over this article for errors.  I am sorry that this article is so long. Every time I thought I was done with it I ran into more issues with the model, and I wanted to be as thorough as I could. I’m not going to blame anyone for skimming parts of this article.  Note that the majority of this article was written before Eli’s updated model was released (the site was updated june 8th). His new model improves on some of my objections, but the majority still stand.   Introduction: AI 2027 is an article written by the “AI futures team”. The primary piece is a short story penned by Scott Alexander, depicting a month by month scenario of a near-future where AI becomes superintelligent in 2027,proceeding to automate the entire economy in only a year or two and then either kills us all or does not kill us all, depending on government policies.  What makes AI 2027 different from other similar short stories is that it is presented as a forecast based on rigorous modelling and data analysis from forecasting experts. It is accompanied by five appendices of “detailed research supporting these predictions” and a codebase for simulations. They state that “hundreds” of people reviewed the text, including AI expert Yoshua Bengio, although some of these reviewers only saw bits of it. The scenario in the short story is not the median forecast for any AI futures author, and none of the AI2027 authors actually believe that 2027 is the median year for a singularity to happen. But the argument they make is that 2027 is a plausible year, and they back it up with images of sophisticated looking modelling like the following: This combination of compelling short story and seemingly-rigorous research may have been the secret sauce that let the article to go viral and be treated as a serious project:To quote the authors themselves: It’s been a crazy few weeks here at the AI Futures Project. Almost a million people visited our webpage; 166,00
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Authors: Joel McGuire (analysis, drafts) and Lily Ottinger (editing)  Formosa: Fulcrum of the Future? An invasion of Taiwan is uncomfortably likely and potentially catastrophic. We should research better ways to avoid it.   TLDR: I forecast that an invasion of Taiwan increases all the anthropogenic risks by ~1.5% (percentage points) of a catastrophe killing 10% or more of the population by 2100 (nuclear risk by 0.9%, AI + Biorisk by 0.6%). This would imply it constitutes a sizable share of the total catastrophic risk burden expected over the rest of this century by skilled and knowledgeable forecasters (8% of the total risk of 20% according to domain experts and 17% of the total risk of 9% according to superforecasters). I think this means that we should research ways to cost-effectively decrease the likelihood that China invades Taiwan. This could mean exploring the prospect of advocating that Taiwan increase its deterrence by investing in cheap but lethal weapons platforms like mines, first-person view drones, or signaling that mobilized reserves would resist an invasion. Disclaimer I read about and forecast on topics related to conflict as a hobby (4th out of 3,909 on the Metaculus Ukraine conflict forecasting competition, 73 out of 42,326 in general on Metaculus), but I claim no expertise on the topic. I probably spent something like ~40 hours on this over the course of a few months. Some of the numbers I use may be slightly outdated, but this is one of those things that if I kept fiddling with it I'd never publish it.  Acknowledgements: I heartily thank Lily Ottinger, Jeremy Garrison, Maggie Moss and my sister for providing valuable feedback on previous drafts. Part 0: Background The Chinese Civil War (1927–1949) ended with the victorious communists establishing the People's Republic of China (PRC) on the mainland. The defeated Kuomintang (KMT[1]) retreated to Taiwan in 1949 and formed the Republic of China (ROC). A dictatorship during the cold war, T