Polls

I wanted to make this poll to see how the community views the speed/x-risk tradeoff. I'm personally 99% x-risk and 1% speed, so I would hard agree. My prediction is most people will agree, maybe a 70/30 split, but I'm curious to see.

• Re the new 2024 Rethink Cause Prio survey: "The EA community should defer to mainstream experts on most topics, rather than embrace contrarian views. [“Defer to experts”]" 3% strongly agree, 18% somewhat agree, 35% somewhat disagree, 15% strongly disagree.
  • This seems pretty bad to me, especially for a group that frames itself as recognizing intellectual humility/we (base rate for an intellectual movement) are so often wrong.
  • (Charitable interpretation) It's also just the case that EAs tend to have lots of views that they're being contrarian about because they're trying to maximize the the expected value of information (often justified with something like: "usually contrarians are wrong, but if they are right, they are often more valuable for information than average person who just agrees").
    • If this is the case, though, I fear that some of us are confusing the norm of being contrarian instrumental reasons and for "being correct" reasons. 

Tho lmk if you disagree. 

People in effective altruism or adjacent to it should make some public predictions or forecasts about whether AI is in a bubble. 

Since the timeline of any bubble is extremely hard to predict and isn’t the core issue, the time horizon for the bubble prediction could be quite long, say, 5 years. The point would not be to worry about the exact timeline but to get at the question of whether there is a bubble that will pop (say, before January 1, 2031). 

For those who know more about forecasting than me, and especially for those who can think of good ways to financially operationalize such a prediction, I would encourage you to make a post about this.

[Edited on Nov. 17, 2025 at 3:35 PM Eastern to add: I wrote a full-fledged post about the AI bubble that can prompt a richer discussion. It doesn’t attempt to operationalize the bubble question, but gets into the expert opinions and evidence. I also do my own analysis.]

For now, an informal poll:
 

Poll: What effect have protests calling for a  pause / stop / deceleration on the development of AI had on the world?

a) Net positive
b) None / Negligible
c) Net negative

This poll will be used to resolve this prediction market.

Vote by agree reacting to one of my comments below. Only vote once!

Poll: Is this one of your cruxes for cluelessness?

There's a cluster of responses to arguments for cluelessness I've encountered, which I'm not yet sure I understand but maybe is important. Here's my attempted summary:^[1]

Sure, maybe assigning each action a precise EV feels arbitrary. But that feeling merely reflects the psychological difficulty of generating principled numbers, for non-ideal agents like us. It's not a problem for the view that even non-ideal agents should, ultimately, evaluate actions as more or less rational based on precise EV.

If you're skeptical of cluelessness, I'd find it super helpful if you'd agree-vote if you agree with the above response or something very similar to it, and disagree-vote otherwise. ETA: added a poll widget below, please use that instead (thanks to Toby Tremlett for suggesting this). (Please don't vote if you aren't skeptical of cluelessness.) And feel free to comment with some different version of the above you'd agree with, if that difference is important for you. Thanks!

1. ^{^}

   Some examples of sentiments that, IIUC, this summary encapsulates (emphasis mine):
   * Greaves: "I think most of us feel like we’re really just making up arbitrary numbers, but that’s really uncomfortable because precisely which arbitrary numbers we make up seems to make a difference to what we ended up doing." See also Greaves' discussion of the "decision discomfort" involved in complex cluelessness.
   * Soares: "Now, I agree that this scenario is ridiculous. And that it sucks. And I agree that picking a precise minute feels uncomfortable. And I agree that this is demanding way more precision than you are able to generate. But if you find yourself in the game, you'd best pick the minute as well as you can. When the gun is pressed against your temple, you cash out your credences."

If EA had a pokemon, which would it be? Evee, right? as in EV?

I added some quick polls to this post. I'd love to get some feedback to get a sense of whether we're on the right track and foster discussion. I think the polls also highlight some of the key issues and implications.

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/3Eh8MbqLwFBsD7GK2/how-much-do-plant-based-products-substitute-for-animal

State a probability for the underlying policy question:

What's the probability that investing in improving and promoting plant-based ~meat is the most effective farmed animal welfare intervention (at current margins)?

Rate your agreement over the plausibility of existing methods:

Survey and hypothetical choice-experiments are useful for helping us understand whether plant-based meat substitutes for animal products

Demand estimation from supermarket data is useful for helping us understand whether plant-based meat substitutes for animal products

Comparing this to another prominent approach (rate your agreement)

Plant-based meat is more promising than cell-cultured meat for animal welfare

The Forum moderation team (which includes myself) is revisiting thinking about this forum’s norms. One thing we’ve noticed is that we’re unsure to what extent users are actually aware of the norms. (It’s all well and good writing up some great norms, but if users don’t follow them, then we have failed at our job.)

Our voting guidelines are of particular concern,^[1] hence this poll. We’d really appreciate you all taking part, especially if you don’t usually take part in polls but do take part in voting. (We worry that the ‘silent majority’ of our users—i.e., those who vote, and thus shape this forum’s incentive landscape, but don’t generally engage beyond voting—may be less in tune with our norms than our most visibly engaged users. Therefore, we would love to see this demographic represented in the poll above.)

Depending on the poll’s results, we may take action up to and including building new features into the forum’s UI, to help remind users of the guidelines.^[2]

For reference, the tl;dr version of our voting guidelines is pasted below. You can find the full version here.^[3]

1. ^{^}

   Firstly, these guidelines are kind of buried deep within our canonical ‘Guide to the norms’ post. Secondly, one doesn’t receive feedback in response to an ‘incorrect’ vote (i.e., a vote that’s not in line with our voting guidelines) in the same way one receives feedback to an incorrect post or comment (via downvotes and replies). And so, it’s possible to continue voting in the same incorrect way, oblivious to the fact that one is voting incorrectly.

2. ^{^}

   H/t @Ebenezer Dukakis for nudging us down this path of thinking.

3. ^{^}

   What I’ve been calling ‘guidelines’ in this quick take are technically ‘suggestions’ in our published voting norms as of right now. But this is something we are revisiting; we think ‘guidelines’ is more accurate. (We are similarly revisiting ‘rules’ versus ‘norms’—h/t @leillustrations and @richard_ngo for calling us out, here, and sorry it’s taken us so long to address the concern.)