OscarD's Quick takes

Three Claude Code skills I find helpful:

• Urgent-watch: allows me to close Slack and email, and have Claude run a loop in the background to check every 30 mins if there is anything time-sensitive that means I should exit deep work and reply to things.
• Gdoc2md: I work mainly in Google Docs, often with many comments, and the native ‘download as markdown’ feature loses the comments. So I have a skill that take a doc url and downloads it as a word file, which Claude can parse to extract the comments and format them as footnotes in a clean md file for other Claudes to read and edit.
• Memo: When I want Claude to do some macrostrategy research/writing, it reads a detailed summary of my org’s beliefs, values, plans, etc. The summary links to many more markdown files with detailed takes on relevant topics. Interestingly, telling Claude to read all the memos and then write something on a new topic produces worse results than just reading the summary and the few most relevant memos.

Idea for thinking about the future of EAGs and whether to keep them cause-neutral or have separate cause-themed events:

• Get (anonymised) swapcard data and look at who had meetings with whom to work out how strong the clustering is. If there are clear groups that had lots of meetings within the group, but few meetings with people from other groups, that is a sign that there should just be a separate event for that group. Whereas if there is no group that can be cleanly split into its own event, that is a sign to keep it together.
• One simple metric for this could be: if you split EAG in two (e.g. longtermist vs neartermist or whatever) how many fewer total connections would there be.

(Maybe this analysis already happens!)

I am pre-registering my forecasts for the amount of prize money each essay will win. In brief, I expect that these three essays will win just over half the prize money: 

• Utilitarians Should Accept that Some Suffering Cannot be “Offset”
• Are longtermist ideas getting harder to find?
• Discussions of Longtermism should focus on the problem of Unawareness

I didn't spend much time on these forecasts though - mainly it is based on karma with an adjustment based on my subjective judgement of the essay's title/summary.