The EA Forum Digest might be biased toward posts made on certain days. Had an LLM gather dates for the posts inside Digest #298 through #302, and compare their weekday frequencies against EA Forum posts made within the same window. Probably not enough data (n=50 for Recommended; n=86 for all Digest Posts) to be meaningful.
(Got the idea to check because I was imagining if I was responsible for writing the Digest and thought, "hmmm I feel like if I were sending out emails every Wed, I would be biased toward posts made on certain days because of the availability heuristic and/or the configuration of my weekly reading/writing schedule")
a couple hundred EA University groups around the world
Fair, I couldn't find a map/list of the current active ones (outside NEST's). I was looking for something like the one made by the AI Safety Seeding Initiative. Thanks for correcting my laziness haha. However, I'd like to push back on "couple hundred"; if I counted correctly, https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/groups shows 284 EA groups (I excluded alignment/AIS/ACX groups). A portion of those are uni groups and a smaller portion are active. Not sure what those two filters would yield but my hunch is that it'd be <100.
It may be better to describe the tradeoff explicitly when it comes up, rather than handwave like, this was easy to automate and there's no slop effect.
100% agree. I think the "personal plea" part is what I lose out on when I do this, so I do share the best opportunities manually as a result. Also agree with thinking about both the magnitude and liklihood of an error. Thanks for your reply!
That'd be amazing. I personally attempted to find people to start EA groups at Drexel, Haverford, Bryn Mawr, & Swarthmore... and failed. If you can do that I'd be really grateful!
Worst case is they have a good reason to not use LLMs, and you might want to worry about that reason to.
Could be true, yes. I was hoping I'd get some pushback/feedback here or elsewhere if this is true (which it could be), so thanks for your comment!
On the risk of privacy leak, you can bound what your LLM can do via permissions. Personally, I do not let it send emails without my manual approval, which allows me to glance review all outbound comms (takes a couple seconds, helps avoid errors). For what it's worth, I've never caught a privacy leak. Worst thing I've caught is an overly-long email subject line.
On the erasure of data, version control and trash bins mitigate this risk. Choosing perms is useful here, too -- I personally do not permit my LLMs to delete any files. If an edit is destructive, I'd simply revert that edit via version control (again, for what it's worth, I've never had an LLM "go haywire" and commit destructive edits).
Other problem: are your sure your AI writing isn't coming across as slop?
Could be. I do not mind simple reminders to be "sloppy" -- here is something I glanced reviewed and thought it looked good (after which it was schedule-sent):
Hi everyone,
A quick reminder that our EA Summer Fellowship meeting is tonight/today (depending on your timezone), Wednesday, July 22, at 9:00 PM ET.
Before the meeting, please complete the core materials for Week 2: The Effectiveness Mindset in the syllabus.
For sharing opportunities on Slack, it looks something like this (copy-pasted from Penn EA's #opportunities):
Longview Philanthropy is funding research on digital minds (AI sentience, consciousness, and how society should handle the associated risks). Three opportunities:
Research fellowships: $55K-$150K/year for 1-2 years, for those with a terminal degree in CS, neuroscience, law, philosophy, econ, poli sci, or related.
Career development fellowships for people pivoting into the field.
Grants for applied work: seed funding for new orgs, programs, applied research.
Priority areas: empirical tests of AI consciousness/cognition, legal and governance frameworks, agent interactions and trade, field-building.
I personally think that for sending reminders, updates, or opportunities, you're just trying to share some information in a concise manner, and LLMs do that well (based on my personal experience).
Am I missing out on strengthening personal connections because, I don't know, I could've done the same but with my tone (and humor or something)? Maybe. But I'd trade off that small benefit for saving hours. Plus, I think there are more effective ways of strengthening personal connections than having my personal tone in reminders or #opportunities messages.
Edit to add:
Your example with forwarding the recommendation was lossy - the LLM did not forward your reason for thinking it was good for the group, it made up a new one.
Actually it didn't! Because I didn't ask it to include a reason; I told it to share it, and so it did. Personally, when I share opportunities via Slack, I normally don't include reasons for why they're good. When something excites me or if I want to share the reason for why something is good, I just write the message. Also, setting reasonable perms / glance-reviewing would help you avoid an LLM passionately arguing for an opportunity or something. (And again for what it's worth I've never experienced that)
I think I'd want EA to be more active but not as one centralized entity (CEA or else). I personally think EA is too apolitical; I agree that who gets to speak, what gets funded, etc. are already semi-political choices. I also dislike the Forum removing political posts from the Frontpage (LW doesn't).
I sometimes envy the AIS community for how active they are lol. The coordination/activity around the pause movement, in particular, is unlike anything I've seen within EA.
I think I found a bug that's related to the migration. When I try to cross-post my EA Forum post to LessWrong via the "Crosspost to LessWrong" option, I click the login button only to get:
On Brave (both normal and incognito):
Error: Unexpected token '<', "<!DOCTYPE "... is not valid JSON
On Portable Firefox:
Error: JSON.parse: unexpected character at line 1 column 1 of the JSON data
I asked GPT-5.6 Sol to investigate (I was trying to get it to work, assuming the error was on my side), and it said the following. Following text is generated by it:
That endpoint currently returns an HTTP 404 HTML page beginning with <!DOCTYPE html>, instead of JSON. The equivalent LessWrong endpoint returns valid JSON normally.
The request therefore appears to be intercepted by the new site instead of reaching the legacy ForumMagnum site. ForumMagnum then tries to parse the HTML 404 page as JSON, causing both errors above.
As a check, I sent the same request with prefer_ea_forum_v3=false, which made the endpoint return valid JSON. This seems to confirm that the migration proxy is causing the issue. My suggested fix is to add /^\/api\/v2\/crosspost\// to oldSitePatterns.
EA intro fellowships should include a "consider community-building" CTA in their syllabus.
I looked at multiple syllabi and only found one that does this explicitly (shout out Yale EA!). The last section in an IF syllabus (titled "Putting It Into Practice" or "Taking Action" or something) often focuses on careers and doesn't prompt students to seriously consider organizing the group as a valid option.
I think career decisions take time (even small ones like "I should start rethinking my major"), and unpreparedness to Take Big Action sometimes results in no action at all. Community-building is a valid high-value plan that sharpens thinking and leads to the other things the Take Action section of every intro fellowship syllabus is trying to optimize for.
Also, meta EA isn't what people new to EA imagine when they think about what "doing good" looks like. That's not because they don't view it as such, but because they often don't see that framing (which is fair; it's an intro, you shouldn't be talking about the talking). But I feel like by the end of a 5-8 week fellowship they should think about meta EA and learn why it's so important (based on the EA principles they learend), the same way they learned about animals, AI, and biosecurity as "cause areas" they can do good in.
The EA Forum Digest might be biased toward posts made on certain days. Had an LLM gather dates for the posts inside Digest #298 through #302, and compare their weekday frequencies against EA Forum posts made within the same window. Probably not enough data (n=50 for Recommended; n=86 for all Digest Posts) to be meaningful.
(Got the idea to check because I was imagining if I was responsible for writing the Digest and thought, "hmmm I feel like if I were sending out emails every Wed, I would be biased toward posts made on certain days because of the availability heuristic and/or the configuration of my weekly reading/writing schedule")
Hi Catherine, thanks for your comment!
Fair, I couldn't find a map/list of the current active ones (outside NEST's). I was looking for something like the one made by the AI Safety Seeding Initiative. Thanks for correcting my laziness haha. However, I'd like to push back on "couple hundred"; if I counted correctly, https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/groups shows 284 EA groups (I excluded alignment/AIS/ACX groups). A portion of those are uni groups and a smaller portion are active. Not sure what those two filters would yield but my hunch is that it'd be <100.
100% agree. I think the "personal plea" part is what I lose out on when I do this, so I do share the best opportunities manually as a result. Also agree with thinking about both the magnitude and liklihood of an error. Thanks for your reply!
That'd be amazing. I personally attempted to find people to start EA groups at Drexel, Haverford, Bryn Mawr, & Swarthmore... and failed. If you can do that I'd be really grateful!
Could be true, yes. I was hoping I'd get some pushback/feedback here or elsewhere if this is true (which it could be), so thanks for your comment!
On the risk of privacy leak, you can bound what your LLM can do via permissions. Personally, I do not let it send emails without my manual approval, which allows me to glance review all outbound comms (takes a couple seconds, helps avoid errors). For what it's worth, I've never caught a privacy leak. Worst thing I've caught is an overly-long email subject line.
On the erasure of data, version control and trash bins mitigate this risk. Choosing perms is useful here, too -- I personally do not permit my LLMs to delete any files. If an edit is destructive, I'd simply revert that edit via version control (again, for what it's worth, I've never had an LLM "go haywire" and commit destructive edits).
Could be. I do not mind simple reminders to be "sloppy" -- here is something I glanced reviewed and thought it looked good (after which it was schedule-sent):
For sharing opportunities on Slack, it looks something like this (copy-pasted from Penn EA's #opportunities):
Does either of these come off as slop to you?
I personally think that for sending reminders, updates, or opportunities, you're just trying to share some information in a concise manner, and LLMs do that well (based on my personal experience).
Am I missing out on strengthening personal connections because, I don't know, I could've done the same but with my tone (and humor or something)? Maybe. But I'd trade off that small benefit for saving hours. Plus, I think there are more effective ways of strengthening personal connections than having my personal tone in reminders or #opportunities messages.
Edit to add:
Actually it didn't! Because I didn't ask it to include a reason; I told it to share it, and so it did. Personally, when I share opportunities via Slack, I normally don't include reasons for why they're good. When something excites me or if I want to share the reason for why something is good, I just write the message. Also, setting reasonable perms / glance-reviewing would help you avoid an LLM passionately arguing for an opportunity or something. (And again for what it's worth I've never experienced that)
Sorry for the late response, got busy :/
I think I'd want EA to be more active but not as one centralized entity (CEA or else). I personally think EA is too apolitical; I agree that who gets to speak, what gets funded, etc. are already semi-political choices. I also dislike the Forum removing political posts from the Frontpage (LW doesn't).
I sometimes envy the AIS community for how active they are lol. The coordination/activity around the pause movement, in particular, is unlike anything I've seen within EA.
I think I found a bug that's related to the migration. When I try to cross-post my EA Forum post to LessWrong via the "Crosspost to LessWrong" option, I click the login button only to get:
On Brave (both normal and incognito):
Error: Unexpected token '<', "<!DOCTYPE "... is not valid JSONOn Portable Firefox:
Error: JSON.parse: unexpected character at line 1 column 1 of the JSON dataI asked GPT-5.6 Sol to investigate (I was trying to get it to work, assuming the error was on my side), and it said the following. Following text is generated by it:
/api/v2/crosspost/generateTokenendpoint.<!DOCTYPE html>, instead of JSON. The equivalent LessWrong endpoint returns valid JSON normally./api/*requests to the new codebase unless they are explicitly listed as old-site routes. However, the new codebase doesn't implement the crossposting API, while ForumMagnum still implements that endpoint.As a check, I sent the same request with
prefer_ea_forum_v3=false, which made the endpoint return valid JSON. This seems to confirm that the migration proxy is causing the issue. My suggested fix is to add/^\/api\/v2\/crosspost\//tooldSitePatterns.YES! It doesn't affect anything but it annoys me so much
EA intro fellowships should include a "consider community-building" CTA in their syllabus.
I looked at multiple syllabi and only found one that does this explicitly (shout out Yale EA!). The last section in an IF syllabus (titled "Putting It Into Practice" or "Taking Action" or something) often focuses on careers and doesn't prompt students to seriously consider organizing the group as a valid option.
I think career decisions take time (even small ones like "I should start rethinking my major"), and unpreparedness to Take Big Action sometimes results in no action at all. Community-building is a valid high-value plan that sharpens thinking and leads to the other things the Take Action section of every intro fellowship syllabus is trying to optimize for.
Also, meta EA isn't what people new to EA imagine when they think about what "doing good" looks like. That's not because they don't view it as such, but because they often don't see that framing (which is fair; it's an intro, you shouldn't be talking about the talking). But I feel like by the end of a 5-8 week fellowship they should think about meta EA and learn why it's so important (based on the EA principles they learend), the same way they learned about animals, AI, and biosecurity as "cause areas" they can do good in.
You can run a 5 or 6-week one. Also, you can plan it so that students do the readings together, in-person, then discuss.
Good luck!