Quick takes

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] 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."

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: Rate your agreement over the plausibility of existing methods: Comparing this to another prominent approach (rate your agreement)

Mini Forum update: Draft comments, and polls in comments Draft comments You can now save comments as permanent drafts: After saving, the draft will appear for you to edit: 1. In-place if it's a reply to another comment (as above) 2. In a "Draft comments" section under the comment box on the post 3. In the drafts section of your profile The reasons we think this will be useful: * For writing long, substantive comments (and quick takes!). We think these are the some of the most valuable comments on the forum, and want to encourage more of them * For starting a comment on mobile and then later continuing on desktop * To lower the barrier to starting writing a comment, since you know you can always throw it in drafts and then never look at it again ---------------------------------------- Polls in comments We recently added the ability to put polls in posts, and this was fairly well received, so we're adding it to comments (... and quick takes!) as well. You can add a poll from the toolbar, you just need to highlight a bit of text to make the toolbar appear: And the poll will look like this...  

  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] ---------------------------------------- Action If…Not if… Strong upvote * Reading this will help people do good * You learned something important * You think many more people might benefit from seeing it * You want to signal that this sort of behavior adds a lot of value “I agree and want others to see this opinion first.”   (but do feel free to agree-vote) Upvote * You think it adds something to the conversation, or you found it useful * People should imitate some aspect of the behavior in the future * You want others to see it * You just generally like it “Oh, I like the author, they’re cool.” Downvote * There’s a relevant error * The comment or post didn’t add to the conversation, and maybe actually distracted “There are grammatical errors in this comment.” Strong downvote * It contains many factual errors and bad reasoning * It’s manipulative or breaks o

Meta: I’m seeing lots of blank comments in response to the DIY polls. Perhaps people are thinking that they need to click ‘Comment’ in order for their vote to count? If so, PSA: your vote counted as soon as you dropped your slider. You can simply close the pop-up box that follows if you don’t also mean to leave a comment. Happy voting!

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