To be clear, I am very uncertain that referring to a program as a "seminar" or "reading group" is better than "fellowship". No one has ever mentioned this to me without prompting.
I suspect the exact name doesn't matter because the thoughtful sorts of people who will actually participate in EA programming will almost always read past the title anyways, and the rest of the description you provide will be the main thing that shapes their impression.
I agree with your broader point, and am pretty confused as to why any small org would now spend serious money on a website (although I do like And-Now’s work, I figure it is firmly outside the price range of small orgs).
But I’m sympathetic to the top-level comment, and to the downvoters, because the vibecoded look does have a decent cost, and this cost is higher than the cost of usual faddish web design, because even faddish web design used to be gated by a decent price tag. The average obviously vibecoded website is a thrown together side project, and this fact reflects poorly on serious organizations that share the style.
And this could all be a moot point, since the cost savings are so large and maybe it’s hard to cheaply fix the vibecoded look. But in fact it’s very easy to make a vibecoded website look more normal! I’m not sure I can accurately describe the full process, but the first step is to remove the extraneous elements and switch fonts. After that, it only takes a couple of hours and a few honest conversations with your peers! Just do it! Please!
Many people are bearish about EA/AIS university organizing in short timelines worlds. (less than 3 years?) I think this is directionally correct, and the simple story where most students are many years from substantial impact and so are less useful in short timelines is true.
However, I think people should be a bit less bearish on the margin. The first reason for this is that students seem to have a unique advantage in some types of political campaigning and communication, and this will be quite useful in many short timelines worlds.
Outside of EA/AIS, student political organizing has been fairly important, and the limited historical evidence from inside EA/AIS suggests this is equally true here.
I also suspect that people are overly bearish on students because they have a habit of rounding small amounts of personal impact to 0, rather than some small number. In Shapley value calculations, less important players still get some credit, and the whole category of “less important players” can often get a fair amount of credit. If a class of people is relatively less important to EA/AIS, you might be tempted to have a impercise estimate of their (low) value, biased downwards. This could be fine in a vacuum, but it's troublesome when neglectedness means that you could influence things quite a bit in this category, and the exact payoff is now sensitive to your particular low estimate.
I think it would very likely be good on net if you published the posts you decided to keep private. I’m at a disadvantage in arguing for this, since I don’t know what they are, and so all I can say is that there is some high chance they are net positive to make public. The rest of this comment will try to make a general argument as to why people should be less afraid to post.
I think you and I both agree that the quality and volume of serious discussion on the Forum has been impactful for the growth and development of many EAs. Personally, I think my community-building takes and models are 3-6 months ahead of where they would be without the public writing on the subject.
For those that are less sure, I think there are a large number of people outside of your immediate professional circle who can benefit by reading what you write. As EA grows, this number will probably increase. One of the great things about EA is that it’s possible to learn so much by just being online. Keeping this true will mean that serious engagement with EA is possible for many more people from many more places, rather than just those people who are already knowledgeable and well connected enough to set up the right conversations and calls.
I think the downsides of public posting are minimal for the vast majority of people, which probably includes animal welfare researchers. I believe pretty much everything posted on the Forum has pretty much no capacity to harm EA as a whole.
In order for a Forum post to harm EA by being public, one of two things have to happen. 1. People who dislike EA or parts of it are active on the Forum, read it, and dislike EA more.
2. The post goes viral or gets spread around, and many non-Forum users read it and dislike EA.
My very rough impression is that there aren’t many people hate reading the Forum, and that EA Forum posts really don’t go viral among anti-EA audiences. I imagine the exceptions to this lack of vitality are scandals and purposefully inflammatory posts (see much of Bentham’s Bulldog’s output).
And this is to be expected, because even if you dislike EA, or would dislike EA if you learned more about it, this just probably isn’t that much of priority for you. EA dislikers are going to spend much less time engaging with and thinking about EA than the EAs themselves. If this doesn’t feel true, I have an exercise:
The first thing to note is that there is so much summarization happening. So many parts of EA don’t receive a mention at all, and those that do are not explained in depth.
But reading this as an EA, you might still feel like the article has a lot of informational power amd valence, even a dangerous amount. If you think this, I don’t think you’re entirely wrong, but I suspect you’re overstating things, since you already care a great deal about EA in general and can connect every sentence you read in the article to something you already know and care about. The average skeptical reader can not do this, and so their experience of the article is much diminished compared to yours.
The Economist article is just one piece about EA, and it is notably more detailed and less emotionally charged than some other pieces, but I think the same points about summarization and how much less the average audience cares hold true in a variety of cases.
And I’m sort of guessing why Jo_ in particular is not interested in posting publicly, and it’s possible I guessed wrong, or that the arguments I’m presenting are missing the point for many people. Still, it seems likely that people post publicly less than they should because the barriers to public posting are high to start with, they underestimate the benefits, and their model of the harms is vague and overstates the risks.
I don’t want to have a public debate on the specifics of this case, but I think it’s useful for posterity to note the following:
1. The organizing team was willing to pay for rental car transportation if more than one person wanted to go. 2. We did not have reason to believe this was the case in the run-up to the retreat. 3. Communication with university groups was broadly not as good as it could have been, and this is something we will look to improve on for future retreats.
Sorry, I probably should’ve included this in the post. The groups were UChicago, Purdue, UIUC, Wisconsin, WashU, Northwestern, amd Indiana. There was also a student from UC Berkeley and a student from Yale.
My understanding is that they were trying to sell in a hurry, and the number of buyers for properties like these is very small. Ironically, if they weren’t so desperate to rid themselves of the negative PR around having spent lots of money on a “castle”, they could have saved a great deal of money by waiting to sell it.
Edit: The last sentence is missing some qualifiers, but I think the broader point about PR skittishness and impatience leading to negative outcomes is correct, even if the monetary loss caused by this in particular is uncertain or even zero.
I may just be dense, but can you describe what this would look like in more detail? The bar chart by default is giving totals by year, but I suspect you have something else in mind.
While I like the potential incentive alignment, I suspect finder’s fees are unworkable. It’s much easier to promise impartiality and fairness in a single game as opposed to an iterated one, and I suspect participants relying on the fees for income would become very sensitive to the nuances of previous decisions rather than the ultimate value of their critiques.
Ultimately, I don’t think there are many shortcuts in changing the philosophy of a movement. If something is worth challenging, than people strongly believe it and there will have to be a process of contested diffusion from the outside in. You can encourage this in individual cases, but systemizing it seems difficult.
Without a strongly supportive faculty member, I feel like you would struggle to make a group last longer than 2 years, since the succession and turnover dynamics of uni groups would be amplified.
Could still be worthwhile even with the lack of sustainability.
To be clear, I am very uncertain that referring to a program as a "seminar" or "reading group" is better than "fellowship". No one has ever mentioned this to me without prompting.
I suspect the exact name doesn't matter because the thoughtful sorts of people who will actually participate in EA programming will almost always read past the title anyways, and the rest of the description you provide will be the main thing that shapes their impression.
I agree with your broader point, and am pretty confused as to why any small org would now spend serious money on a website (although I do like And-Now’s work, I figure it is firmly outside the price range of small orgs).
But I’m sympathetic to the top-level comment, and to the downvoters, because the vibecoded look does have a decent cost, and this cost is higher than the cost of usual faddish web design, because even faddish web design used to be gated by a decent price tag. The average obviously vibecoded website is a thrown together side project, and this fact reflects poorly on serious organizations that share the style.
And this could all be a moot point, since the cost savings are so large and maybe it’s hard to cheaply fix the vibecoded look. But in fact it’s very easy to make a vibecoded website look more normal! I’m not sure I can accurately describe the full process, but the first step is to remove the extraneous elements and switch fonts. After that, it only takes a couple of hours and a few honest conversations with your peers! Just do it! Please!
Many people are bearish about EA/AIS university organizing in short timelines worlds. (less than 3 years?) I think this is directionally correct, and the simple story where most students are many years from substantial impact and so are less useful in short timelines is true.
However, I think people should be a bit less bearish on the margin. The first reason for this is that students seem to have a unique advantage in some types of political campaigning and communication, and this will be quite useful in many short timelines worlds.
Outside of EA/AIS, student political organizing has been fairly important, and the limited historical evidence from inside EA/AIS suggests this is equally true here.
I also suspect that people are overly bearish on students because they have a habit of rounding small amounts of personal impact to 0, rather than some small number. In Shapley value calculations, less important players still get some credit, and the whole category of “less important players” can often get a fair amount of credit. If a class of people is relatively less important to EA/AIS, you might be tempted to have a impercise estimate of their (low) value, biased downwards. This could be fine in a vacuum, but it's troublesome when neglectedness means that you could influence things quite a bit in this category, and the exact payoff is now sensitive to your particular low estimate.
I think it would very likely be good on net if you published the posts you decided to keep private. I’m at a disadvantage in arguing for this, since I don’t know what they are, and so all I can say is that there is some high chance they are net positive to make public. The rest of this comment will try to make a general argument as to why people should be less afraid to post.
I think you and I both agree that the quality and volume of serious discussion on the Forum has been impactful for the growth and development of many EAs. Personally, I think my community-building takes and models are 3-6 months ahead of where they would be without the public writing on the subject.
For those that are less sure, I think there are a large number of people outside of your immediate professional circle who can benefit by reading what you write. As EA grows, this number will probably increase. One of the great things about EA is that it’s possible to learn so much by just being online. Keeping this true will mean that serious engagement with EA is possible for many more people from many more places, rather than just those people who are already knowledgeable and well connected enough to set up the right conversations and calls.
I think the downsides of public posting are minimal for the vast majority of people, which probably includes animal welfare researchers. I believe pretty much everything posted on the Forum has pretty much no capacity to harm EA as a whole.
In order for a Forum post to harm EA by being public, one of two things have to happen.
1. People who dislike EA or parts of it are active on the Forum, read it, and dislike EA more.
2. The post goes viral or gets spread around, and many non-Forum users read it and dislike EA.
My very rough impression is that there aren’t many people hate reading the Forum, and that EA Forum posts really don’t go viral among anti-EA audiences. I imagine the exceptions to this lack of vitality are scandals and purposefully inflammatory posts (see much of Bentham’s Bulldog’s output).
And this is to be expected, because even if you dislike EA, or would dislike EA if you learned more about it, this just probably isn’t that much of priority for you. EA dislikers are going to spend much less time engaging with and thinking about EA than the EAs themselves. If this doesn’t feel true, I have an exercise:
Read this piece in the Economist.
The first thing to note is that there is so much summarization happening. So many parts of EA don’t receive a mention at all, and those that do are not explained in depth.
But reading this as an EA, you might still feel like the article has a lot of informational power amd valence, even a dangerous amount. If you think this, I don’t think you’re entirely wrong, but I suspect you’re overstating things, since you already care a great deal about EA in general and can connect every sentence you read in the article to something you already know and care about. The average skeptical reader can not do this, and so their experience of the article is much diminished compared to yours.
The Economist article is just one piece about EA, and it is notably more detailed and less emotionally charged than some other pieces, but I think the same points about summarization and how much less the average audience cares hold true in a variety of cases.
And I’m sort of guessing why Jo_ in particular is not interested in posting publicly, and it’s possible I guessed wrong, or that the arguments I’m presenting are missing the point for many people. Still, it seems likely that people post publicly less than they should because the barriers to public posting are high to start with, they underestimate the benefits, and their model of the harms is vague and overstates the risks.
I don’t want to have a public debate on the specifics of this case, but I think it’s useful for posterity to note the following:
1. The organizing team was willing to pay for rental car transportation if more than one person wanted to go.
2. We did not have reason to believe this was the case in the run-up to the retreat.
3. Communication with university groups was broadly not as good as it could have been, and this is something we will look to improve on for future retreats.
Sorry, I probably should’ve included this in the post. The groups were UChicago, Purdue, UIUC, Wisconsin, WashU, Northwestern, amd Indiana. There was also a student from UC Berkeley and a student from Yale.
My understanding is that they were trying to sell in a hurry, and the number of buyers for properties like these is very small. Ironically, if they weren’t so desperate to rid themselves of the negative PR around having spent lots of money on a “castle”, they could have saved a great deal of money by waiting to sell it.
Edit: The last sentence is missing some qualifiers, but I think the broader point about PR skittishness and impatience leading to negative outcomes is correct, even if the monetary loss caused by this in particular is uncertain or even zero.
I may just be dense, but can you describe what this would look like in more detail? The bar chart by default is giving totals by year, but I suspect you have something else in mind.
While I like the potential incentive alignment, I suspect finder’s fees are unworkable. It’s much easier to promise impartiality and fairness in a single game as opposed to an iterated one, and I suspect participants relying on the fees for income would become very sensitive to the nuances of previous decisions rather than the ultimate value of their critiques.
Ultimately, I don’t think there are many shortcuts in changing the philosophy of a movement. If something is worth challenging, than people strongly believe it and there will have to be a process of contested diffusion from the outside in. You can encourage this in individual cases, but systemizing it seems difficult.
Without a strongly supportive faculty member, I feel like you would struggle to make a group last longer than 2 years, since the succession and turnover dynamics of uni groups would be amplified.
Could still be worthwhile even with the lack of sustainability.