Propose and vote on potential EA Wiki entries

Hi Jasper,

I agree that this would be a valuable Wiki article, and if you are willing to write it, that would be fantastic.

The content of the old EA Concepts page is now part of the cost-effectiveness entry. However, it may be worth creating a separate entry on distribution of cost-effectivenss and moving that content there. I'll do that tomorrow if no one objects by then.

Agree we should have such an entry (I had it in my list of planned articles).

I'd be in favor of all of those tags, except "pandemic preparedness" which I currently think is too overlapping with "Biosecurity".

I'd say "scientific research" is probably covered by Scientific Progress, Research Methods, and tags about specific areas scientific research can be done in?

I think I'm in favour of a Cost-Effectiveness Evaluation tag. (Or maybe Cost-Effectiveness Analysis? I think that's the more common term?) 

That seems similar to Impact Assessment (a tag I made last month), so some of my thoughts on that tag might also be relevant. But I think Cost-Effectiveness Analysis is probably different enough from existing tags to be worth having.

I agree that it would be good to describe this distinction in the Wiki. Possibly it could be part of the Epistemic deference entry, though I don't have a strong view on that.

How about something like beliefs vs. impressions?

Makes sense; I'll create it.

By the way, we should probably start a new thread for new Wiki entries. This one has so many comments that it takes a long time to load.

Yes! Will create this later today.

Yeah, makes sense. I just created the new article and renamed the existing one. There is no content for now, but I'll try to add something later.

What about posts that discuss personal career choice processes (like this)?

Yeah, this seems worth having! And I appreciate you advocating for people to write these and for us to have a way to collect them, for similar reasons to those given in this earlier shortform of mine.

I think career profiles is a better term for this than job posts, partly because:

• The latter sounds like it might be job ads or job postings
• Some of these posts might not really be on "jobs" but rather things like being a semi-professional blogger, doing volunteering, having some formalised unpaid advisory role to some institution, etc.

OTOH, career profiles also sounds somewhat similar to 80k's career reviews. This could be good or bad, depending on whether it's important to distinguish what you have in mind from the career review format. (I don't have a stance on that, as I haven't read your post yet.)

Yeah, I made a note to create an entry on this topic soon after Luke published his post. Feel free to create it, and I'll try to expand it next week (I'm a bit busy right now).

I like it. Impact Certificates is more recognizable, but Markets for Altruism is more general. I think I agree with your favoring it.

At first glance, I'd prefer to have Effective altruism on social media, or maybe actually just Social media, rather than the more fine-grained ones. (Also, I do think something in this vicinity is indeed worth having.) Reasoning:

• I'm not sure if any of the specific platforms warrant an entry
• If we have entries for the specific platforms, then what about posts relevant to effective altruism on some other platform?
  • We shouldn't just create an entry for every other platform there's at least one post relevant to, nor should we put them all under one of the other single-platform-focused tags.
  • But having an entry for Facebook, another for Twitter, and another for social media as a whole seems like too much?
• Regarding dropping "Effective altruism on" and just saying "Social media":
  • Presumably there are also posts on things like the effects of social media, the future trajectory of it, or ways to use it for good or intervene in it that aren't just about writing about EA on it?
    • E.g., https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/842uRXWoS76wxYG9C/incentivizing-forecasting-via-social-media
    • And it seems like it'd be good to capture those posts under the same entry?
    • Though maybe an entry for social media and an entry for effective altruism on social media are both warranted?

Though also note that there's already a tag for effective altruism in the media, which has substantial overlap with this. But I think that's probably ok - social media seems a sufficiently notable subset of "the media" to warrant its own entry.

(Btw, for the sake of interpreting the upvotes as evidence: I upvoted your comment, though as I noted I disagree a bit on the best name/scope.)

I'm overall in favor.

I wonder if we should take a more systematic approach to entries about individual disciplines. It seems that, from an EA perspective, a discipline may be relevant in a number of distinct ways, e.g. because it is a discipline in which young EAs may want to pursue a career,  because conducting research in that discipline is of high value, because that discipline poses serious risks, or because findings in that discipline should inform EA thinking. I'm not sure how to translate this observation into something actionable for the Wiki, though, so I'm just registering it here in case others have thoughts along these lines.

I agree that humanities disciplines tend to be less EA-relevant than the social sciences. But I think that the humanities are quite heterogeneous, so it feels more natural to me to have entries for particular humanities disciplines, than humanities as a whole.

But I'm not sure any such entries are warranted; it depends on how much has been written.

New issue: How do we deal with name changes ? (E.g. EAF became CLR, .impact became rethink charity)

I think it's nice to have a single tag (the new name) for continuity but sometimes an org had a different focus or projects associated with the old name.

Maybe it's enough to mention in the tag description "previously called X"?

Update: I've now made tags for Rethink Priorities, Future of Humanity Institute, and Global Priorities Institute. I believe I've tagged all RP posts. I wasn't very thorough in tagging FHI or GPI posts. Other people can tag additional FHI and GPI posts, and/or add tags for other orgs. 

I think something like this would be a good idea :) 

Some thoughts:

• One downside could be that we might end up with quite a few of these tags, which then clutter up the tags page.
  • Maybe it'd be best if the Forum team can set it up so there's a separate, collapsable part of the tags page just for all the organisation tags?
    • That might also make it easier for someone who's looking for org tags in general (without knowing what specific orgs might have tags) to find them.
• Most EA organisations probably already have pages on their site where you can find all/most their research outputs. E.g., Rethink Priorities' publications page.
• But one thing tags allows you to do is (from the home page of the forum) filter by multiple tags at once. So you could e.g. filter by both the Rethink Priorities tag  and the Wild Animal Welfare tag, to find all of Rethink's posts related to that topic.
  • That said, I've never actually used the approach of filtering by multiple tags myself.
  • And the lists of publications on an org's site may often be organised by broad topic area anyway. Though this could still be useful if you want to see if an org wrote something related to a concept/topic they probably wouldn't organise their pages by (perhaps because it's cross-cutting, slightly obscure, or wasn't the main focus of the post) - e.g., if you want to see whether Rethink has written anything related to patient altruism.
• I think tags might be better than sequences for this purpose. One reason is the above-mentioned benefit of allowing for filtering by both org and some tag. Another reason is that these posts usually won't really be sequences in the usual sense - it won't be the case that the order of publication is the most natural order of reading, and that one gains a lot from reading them all together. (Though some subset of each org's posts may be a sequence, e.g. Rethink's nuclear risk stuff.)
• A complexity might be deciding which orgs should have tags - in particular, should orgs which aren't especially prominent or don't post often have tags?
  • Maybe some forum users can just make tags for orgs they want there to be tags for, and then orgs can make tags for themselves if they want, and we can see what results.

(It happens to be that I'll be working at Rethink soon, but this comment was just my own opinion, and I only used them as an example because Vaidehi did.)

A possibility would be to add the organization as a coauthor for all official posts.

Yes, good idea. Feel free to create them, otherwise I'll do it myself later today or tomorrow.

I think the overlap would be a if say, in the field of survey methodology, someone discovers a new way to measure bias in surveys - this would be a meta-science improvement but also scientific progress in the field of survey methodology

Agreed. I think people creating tags should probably always add those descriptions/definitions.

One thing I'd note is that anyone can add descriptions/definitions for tags, even if they didn't create them. This could be hard if you're not sure what the scope was meant to be, but if you think you know what the scope was meant to be, you could consider adding a description/definition yourself.

Michael is correct that the inclusion criteria for entries of individual people hasn't been made explicit. In deciding whether a person was a fit subject for an article, I haven't followed any conscious procedure, but merely relied on my subjective sense of whether the person deserved a dedicated article. Looking at the list of people I ended up including, a few clusters emerge:

1. people who have had an extraordinary positive impact, and that are often discussed in EA circles (Arkhipov, Zhdanov, etc.)
2. people who have attained eminence in their fields and who are connected to EA to a significant degree (Pinker, Hassabis, Boeree, etc.)
3. academics who have conducted research of clear EA relevance (Ng, Duflo, Parfit, Tetlock, etc.)
4. historical figures that may be regarded as proto-EAs or that are seen as having inspired the EA movement (Bentham, Mill, Russell, etc.)
5. "core figures" in the EA community (Shulman, Christiano, Tomasik, etc.)

Some people, such Bostrom, MacAskill, Ord, fit into more than one of these clusters. My sense is that David Pearce doesn't fit into any of the clusters. It seems relatively uncontroversial that he doesn't fit into clusters 1-4, so the relevant question—at least if one broadly agrees with the approach I've taken—is whether he is sufficiently close to the "core" to merit inclusion as part of cluster 5.

As someone who has been involved with EA since its inception and who has (I believe) a reasonably good sense of how central to the movement different people have been, my impression is that Pearce isn't central enough. If others have different (or similar) impressions, I would encourage them to post them here. We could, alternatively, try to go beyond impressionistic evidence and look at more objective measures, such as citation counts (broadly construed to include not just academic citations but links from the EA Forum and EA Blogs), though conducting that kind of analysis might be time consuming and may not be fully conclusive. Do others have thoughts on how to operationalize the relevant criteria?

For those who may want to see the deleted entry, I'm posting it below:

David Pearce is a philosopher and writer best known for his 1995 manifesto The Hedonistic Imperative and the associated ideas about abolishing suffering for all sentient life using biotechnology and other technologies.

Pearce argues that it is "technically feasible" and ethically rational to abolish suffering on the planet by replacing Darwinian suffering-based motivational systems with minds animated by "information-sensitive gradients of intelligent bliss" (as opposed to indiscriminate maxed-out bliss). He stresses that this "abolitionist project" is compatible with a diverse set of values and "intentional objects" (i.e. what one is happy "about").

In 1998 together with Nick Bostrom, Pearce co-founded the World Transhumanist Association, today known as Humanity+.

Pearce is the director of bioethics of Invincible Wellbeing and is on the advisory boards of the Organisation for the Prevention of Intense Suffering and since 2021 the Qualia Research Institute. He is also a fellow of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies and is on the futurist advisory board of the Lifeboat Foundation.

Thanks again, nil, for taking the time to create this entry and outline your reasoning. After reviewing the discussion, and seeing that no new comments have been posted in the past five days, I've decided to delete the article, for the reasons I outlined previously.

Please do not let this dissuade you from posting further content to the Wiki, and if you have any feedback, feel free to leave it below or to message me privately.

To add to arguments for inclusion, here’s an excerpt from an EA Forum post about key figures in the animal suffering focus area.

“Major inspirations for those in this focus area include Peter Singer, David Pearce, and Brian Tomasik.”

Four focus areas of effective altruism by Luke_Muehlhauser, 8th Jul 2013

David Pearce’s work on suffering and biotechnology would be more relevant now than in 2013 due to developments in genome editing and gene drives.

I'm roughly neutral on this, since I don't have a very clear sense of what the criteria and "bars" are for deciding whether to make an entry about a given person. I think it would be good to have a discussion/policy regarding that. 

I think some people like Nick Bostrom and Will MacAskill clearly warrant and entry, and some people like me clearly don't, and there's a big space in between - with Pearce included in it - where I could be convinced either way. (This has to do with relevance and notability in the context of the EA Forum Wiki, not like an overall judgement of these people or a popularity contest.)

Some other people who are perhaps in that ambiguous space:

• Nick Beckstead (no entry atm)
• Elie Hassenfeld (no entry atm, but an entry for GiveWell)
• Max Tegmark (no entry atm, but an entry for FLI)
• Brian Tomasik (has an entry)
• Stuart Russell (has an entry)
• Hilary Greaves (has an entry)

(I think I'd lean towards each of them having an entry except Hassenfeld and maybe Tegmark. I think the reason for The Hassenfeld Exception is that, as far as I'm aware, the vast majority of his work has been very connected with GiveWell. So it's very important and notable, but doesn't need a distinct entry. Somewhat similar with Tegmark inasmuch as he relates to EA, though he's of course notable in the physics community for non-FLI-related reasons. But I'm very tentative with all those views.)

As the head of the Forum, I'll second Pablo in thanking you for creating the entry. While I defer to Pablo on deciding what articles belong in the wiki, I thought Pearce was a reasonable candidate. I appreciate the time you took to write out your reasoning (and to acknowledge arguments against including him).

I think this would be a valuable article. Perhaps the title could be refined, but at the moment I can't think of any alternatives I like. So feel free to create it, and we can consider possible name variants in the future.

Makes sense. I created it (no content yet).