Yes, sorry I meant the university. Thanks for including the charts, I always love to see the data! 

That's great Eevee! Forethought has shifted to focusing on AGI (so yes, I'm sure they need support, but it isn't doing work like GPI, just to be clear). There is a list at the bottom of the page of other organizations but none of them work directly on the philosophical approach to cause and resource prioritization - which is what made GPI so valuable to the movement. My best recommendation would be to broadly support groups like Givewell, Giving What We Can and the Life You Can Save since they do some level of research (really all groups do). You could also follow specific researchers work and reach out directly to see if they need support. 

Forethought appears to have spun out and become a separate organization, Oxford Martin AIGI does have a handful of people who were affiliated with the former Future of Humanity Institute, but the OM AIGI itself is not directly affiliated with EA. Yes the college chapter EA Oxford is still running, but I meant professional working groups (sorry if that wasn't clear). 

the Global Priorities Institute at Oxford University has shut down as of July. More information, publication list and additional groups on website. Surprised this hasn't been brought up given how important GPI was in establishing EA as a legitimate academic research space. By my count, barring Trajan House, it now appears that EA has officially been annexed from Oxford University. This feels like a significant change post-FTX - I see pros and cons to not being tied to one university. Thoughts?

edited: to clarify I meant the university not the city

It's been a minute since I've been on the forum so my recollection of Karma voting is rusty. Does the agree-disagree function follow the same rules as strong voting? For example, the first question has 35 agree / 56 disagree - are those votes saying 56 individual users or could it be a few users who strongly disagreed with it? Just trying to figure out the actual number of people answering the poll. Thanks!

Love to see this! I read Marina's book senior year of high school and it was hauntingly beautiful. (Her essays were collected posthumous by family). Worth checking out! 

Hi David,

I’m intrigued by what you are trying to do with this LLM project. Prompt-engineering is very much a trial and error process - here’s what I got from walking through it a few times. 

To clarify my understanding of your objective here is: 

• Given the 80,000 hours podcast episodes
• Identify the episodes discussing quantitative social sciences, economics and policy
• Within those episodes identify questions brought up in conversation
• Filter those questions by if they are specific and measurable (operationalizable)
• From there, identify the questions that would impact a donor’s decision-making in deciding whether or not to fund further research
• (gleaning from your examples) add a direct quote and link to relevant literature

Does that sound right? If so here, here’s what I got (a few different threads) (top to bottom)

1st attempt: 

• Make a research agenda for one specific episode
• identify donor relevant funding questions

2nd attempt: 

• first identify all the relevant podcasts (but 10 seems to be the limit for any kind of listing) 
• I narrowed it to just one (quant social). 
• I then tried using 80k podcast filter to help narrow it but perplexity says it can’t read the filterable listings of the transcripts.

3rd attempt: 

• I asked it to pull all episodes related to economics (caps it at 10)
• Pull questions from each episode (only does it for 3 episodes)
• Identify questions that are measurable and influence donor decision-making
• Asked it to add quotes but it lost the thread I guess and didn’t connect to the above list of questions. 
• So I tried narrowing it down to one episode and filter through again adding a quote and a link to a piece of related research. 

Curious to know if these results are along the lines of what you are trying to achieve? 

My guess for systematizing this would be defining a prompt flow that gets the results you want and then replicating it across each individual podcast episode. You could use a separate thread to get it to create a list of episodes relevant to topics to narrow the amount you have to search through. 

Long-term it would be cool to see 80k have something like tim ferriss’ blogbot given how much content they have (and the information that is buried in each podcast episode). 

Two general notes on UXD: 

1) It could be worth conducting user tests of whether people find the site's landing page being the forum feed overwhelming. It’s hard to get your bearings on that page versus say the “best of the forum” page. People typically like to be guided initially in an experience and get a feel for what’s available, then explore. Or even just a pop-up with “learn about the forum” (it takes a minute to find the link for that page on the sidebar and these days people bounce within seconds). 

2) In the spirit of the intranet comment above, I’d love to see the CRM hidden behind a logged-in view; this could just be my “safety” lens but having a giant list of confirmed EAs in public view seems problematic (sadly, something to consider these days). Maybe ask community health team for their view on it? but when it rolled out I was a little irked to see it created without first asking users if they want to be placed on such a definitive, public listing. 

Thanks for writing this Sarah; nice to have leaders sharing thinking/requesting feedback!

My quick ‘off-the-cuff’ thoughts in response: 

I definitely agree the Forum is critical as a “space” in EA, particularly for those of us who aren’t living in a hub, have access to conferences, nor work directly in an organization. It can often feel at times like being a buoy at sea without that direct connection - the handful of times I’ve drifted from EA over the years it has been the Forum pulling me back in (by helping me get up to speed on what’s going on especially in cases like the FTX stuff … and contests are often one of the few ways I feel I can participate - i.e. open phil’s worldview prize, red teaming, future fund RFP). 

I have at times seen established EAs “punch-down” on the “extremely online” EAs and I’ve felt that to be a shallow judgement of those of us not privy to direct engagement opportunities. It definitely gave me the impression the movement and community are two separate entities not always aligned. I’d like to think the Forum could better blur that distinction to avoid hubs becoming silos with strong views (which I think contributes to the confusion around the public perception of EA). 

That aside, the Forum right now is confusing because it’s providing multiple services in one; a newspaper, an opportunities/classifieds board, a library (the wiki) and a discussion space though not as free flowing as slack/discord. Now with groups and CRM and event tracking it’s becoming a catch-all for EA information. Given this… 

 Has the forum team considered reframing the Forum as an intranet? (Note, the intranet model is often associated with corporations but it’s used in a lot of contexts for brand community sites, colleges and social groups).

 I’m thinking one of the limitations of the Forum is that the name implies one feature, but now the Forum is so much more than that - if we were to shift away from centralizing “the Forum” aspect and make it the “Hub” or “EA Online”... whatever it’s called, the idea is to step back and reframe the online space as more than just a “forum” because that’s what it’s becoming, as evidenced by CEA taking on the EA Hub and the Opps Board recently, it’s clear the goal is for CEA to manage the movement’s digital infrastructure.

I see the intranet design helping resolve issues like low engagement. If people can accomplish multiple things like search/apply for jobs, join topic threads, and chat with each other, complete surveys and more, they may be more likely to login and engage. This can help on the backend with things like surveys, community health team work (ticket system), and maybe down the road a common app or work trials. It also helps draw a boundary around community conversations that don’t need to be as public (which I think is a huge deterrent for engagement right now). 

I’d be happy to discuss more in-depth and share some examples of what I’m visualizing here but I’ve long thought the Forum was heading in the “intranet” direction and could provide a lot of benefit for both members of the movement and those running infrastructure for it. 

Hi David, I'm working on a project that might be relevant to this - sending you a DM.