Suggestion: Add an "Effective Jobs" subforum - where people can discuss the impact of working at different orgs.
For example, I considered working at Zzapp Malaria, it would be nice if others could comment on this idea in some way that would be lower friction than writing a detailed post.
Or maybe someone's considering working at Tesla, or Solar Edge.
I think there are lots of advantages to having the discussion public and inviting for anyone to ask (or answer), including the org itself, as opposed to having every person do their own research alone. It's especially bad when people new-to-EA ask where they can work to help and all we have to say is "here are materials on how to evaluate impact" but "we have almost no suggestions for concrete jobs in your area".
I have lots of thoughts on why this could be great (like these), but I'll leave it here for now.
wdyt?
Effective giving subforum and other updates (bonus Forum update November 2022)
TL;DR: We’ve launched an “effective giving” subforum — the banner will be up for a couple of days. We’re announcing this and a couple other updates.
More detailed summary:
We’ve launched the effective giving subforum and are working on our other test subforums ⬇️
Narrated versions of some posts will be available soon ⬇️
We’re testing targeted advertising for high-impact jobs ⬇️
We’ve fixed some bugs for pasting from a Google Document ⬇️
This is a short announcement post — we mostly wanted to give more context about the subforum. It’s also an opportunity for you to comment and share feedback, which we’d really appreciate (and you can always suggest new features here).
Explore discussions and content about the subforum’s topic
Start discussions — including more casual threads — that will be visible only to people who have joined or are exploring the subforum
Keep up to date with news and ideas that are most relevant to them
We’ve made significant changes to the subforums since the first ones launched, and expect to make more (we’re aware of some bugs), so all your feedback is really valuable. You can pass that on by commenting on this post or emailing us at [email protected].
Other things to know about joining a subforum
Joining the subforum will automatically subscribe you to the related topic, meaning that posts with the relevant tag will stay on the Frontpage for longer for you (as if they had 25 extra karma points). You can change that by clicking on the bell icon on the subforum page and setting your preferences accordingly (e.g. by removing “upweight on frontpage”).
For now, joining will also add a tag to your profile. We plan to set up a way for users to opt out of this (and we might change the default settings), but it’s currently not possible. Note that you can also add more topics you’re interested in (whether or not they have associated subforums) by going to your profile and clicking “edit public profile” and finding the “My Activity” section.
Audio narrations of some Forum posts
There will likely be a proper announcement about this sometime soon, but, in addition to the Nonlinear Library, some EA Forum posts will get human narrations (that will be accessible in podcast apps and on the post pages themselves). This will be a collaboration with TYPE III AUDIO.
Testing targeted advertisements for impactful jobs
Some of you might have seen an advertisement for an open position at Metaculus (likely because you had interacted with the “software engineering” topic). We’ll be testing different types of job advertisements over the next month or so. As always, feedback is appreciated.
Bugs fixed for pasting from Google Documents
In some situations, images in posts that had been copy-pasted from Google Documents were broken. Some links were also failing. The major bugs here have been fixed.
Unfortunately, copy-pasting internal headers automatically (say, if you have a document with a table of contents that links to other sections in the document, and you want to copy-paste that into a Forum draft such that the table of contents links to sections in the Forum post) is currently not possible, and we might never make it work. The easiest way to create internal links to sections is outlined here.
This is the third in a sequence of posts taken from my recent report: Why Did Environmentalism Become Partisan?
Summary
Rising partisanship did not make environmentalism more popular or politically effective. Instead, it saw flat or falling overall public opinion, fewer major legislative achievements, and fluctuating executive actions.
Public Opinion...
I think right now EAs might be making a significant mistake by paying insufficient attention to the political realm. As EAs we tend to figure out what’s most impactful for us to work on and focus hard. That’s great! But there are various actions that are ‘non-delegatable’ - the extent to which an individual can do the action is limited (like voting, going to a protest, making hard money contributions to particular campaigns). It might be useful if we were all more in the habit of doing variou...
This post presents the executive summary from Giving What We Can’s impact evaluation for 2025. At the end of this post we share links to more information, including the full report and...
Really excited to see progress on subforums. They could be pretty key for scaling the EA Forum.
This might be obvious, but I wonder if all of the FTX discussion could be pushed into a certain subforum.
There is already a topic for the FTX discussion which you can add a filter for on the frontpage to reduce how much you see it: