Lizka
Bio
I run the non-engineering side of the EA Forum (this platform), run the EA Newsletter, and work on some other content-related tasks at CEA. Please feel free to reach out! You can email me. [More about my job.]
Some of my favorite of my own posts:
- Disentangling "Improving Institutional Decision-Making"
- [Book rec] The War with the Newts as “EA fiction”
- Native languages in the EA community (and issues with assessing promisingness)
- EA should taboo "EA should"
- Invisible impact loss (and why we can be too error-averse)
I finished my undergraduate studies with a double major in mathematics and comparative literature in 2021. I was a research fellow at Rethink Priorities in the summer of 2021 and was then hired by the Events Team at CEA. I've since switched to the Online Team. In the past, I've also done some (math) research and worked at Canada/USA Mathcamp.
Some links I think people should see more frequently:
Posts 147
Comments504
Topic Contributions249
Hi! Sorry for the delay in my response here:
- Unfortunately, we could only list organizations from here as candidates in the Donation Election this year (largely due to vetting capacity and the current system we’re using for the election). I tried to make this clear in the announcement posts, but I think it ended up being confusing.
- However, we can add your project in the Giving Portal here if you send us a logo,[1] a link to a fundraiser or your donation page (which ideally also shares some information about what you do and why people should consider donating), and a link to a description of your work (your website probably works). We might also add a page in the Election Portal (and elsewhere) that highlights projects we couldn’t feature but which people should consider donating to (and which have been active on the Forum this Giving Season), so we’d use the logo/links there, too.
- @Bruno Sterenberg and @Joy Bittner - please let me know if you’re interested (feel free to email or DM me via the Forum), and apologies once again for the delay and confusion!
- ^
PNG or JPEG, ideally somewhat square-ish (although we can just add extra white space around non-square logos)
FYI — lots of relevant links collected here: OpenAI: The Battle of the Board and OpenAI: Facts from a Weekend
There was an earlier post from lots of people at CEA, including me: Here’s where CEA staff are donating in 2023
Quick summary of my section: I donated to the Donation Election Fund for the reasons described here, to someone's political campaign[1], and in some cases I didn't take compensation I was supposed to get from organizations I'd happily donate to.
- ^
I feel weird donating to political campaigns (I grew up ~avoiding politics and still have a lot of the same beliefs and intuitions). But I talked to some people I know about the value of this campaign and tried to estimate the cost-effectiveness of the donation (my conclusion was that it was very close to donating to the LTFF, even when I was ignoring impact that might come from animal welfare improvements, which is important to me), and was compelled by the consideration that I had an unusual ability to donate to the campaign as a US citizen. (I'm interested in hearing people's thoughts about this, but will probably not actively participate in public discussions about the decision.)
I guess the framing of the post is pretty relevant: these projects would be over the bar if the LTFF got more donations. (Although I appreciate it being important to avoid discouraging people.)
I might also flag that I don't think getting rejected generally has costs besides the time you put in and your motivation (someone from LTFF could correct me if I'm wrong). So applying is often worth it even if you think it's pretty likely that you'll get rejected. This isn't to say that rejection is hard; here's a thread with tips and others' experiences. But it seems that "Don't think, just apply (usually)!" is pretty good advice.
Thanks for engaging! Quick thoughts:
- Yeah, I don't expect to be passing on a nontrivial inheritance to kids. Pledging to do something specific here currently seems unfeasible, though; I have no idea what the world will be like when I'm in my 70s. Examples of weirdness (even setting aside AI developments): maybe we've made serious medical breakthroughs and I'm still expecting to work for a long time, maybe money works in seriously different ways, etc. I haven't thought about this much, though, and it might be worth thinking about (e.g. maybe there's a nicely operationalized pledge that could work).[1]
- Thanks!
- I think I fairly strongly disagree here, and might have been unclear in the original post. My runway-helps-epistemics point was not meant as a security measure for myself/personal protection against hardship, but rather as a point about potentially dangerous biases. My broad argument here is something like this:
- (A) Organizations sometimes turn sour/I might discover things about organizations that employ or fund me that are not ok (at least according to me)
- (Note that I don't think readers should infer things about my current employers and funders from this comment. I'm still at CEA for a reason! But I've heard stories that make me aware of this problem.)
- (B) If I'm extremely financially dependent on my employers/funders, I will be afraid to do things like the following:
- Quit in order to voice protest or speak more freely, if I find out something very bad
- Do things that might upset my employers/funders (over which they might fire me), like asking questions they might not want asked, etc.
- Actually investigate worries I have, knowing that I might discover things that mean I can no longer endorse continuing my current work
- Etc.
- (C) It seems plausible that I should still do the things above even if I'm extremely financially dependent on my employers/funders. But it's very scary, and it might make me mentally flinch away from considering actions like this. I.e. it might make me biased against doing the above in worlds where I should. I think this is quite bad.
- What Elizabeth says here resonates with me/seems reasonable: getting yourself into a position where virtue is cheap is an underrated strategy
- This section of a recent post is probably also relevant, as well as this one.
- (A) Organizations sometimes turn sour/I might discover things about organizations that employ or fund me that are not ok (at least according to me)
- ^
While we're talking about alternative pledges; I've considered taking a more general pledge to use some significant portion of the resources I have (and will have) for impartially altruistic purposes, with some carve-outs for other important values (like supporting family if something happens). I'd obviously need to operationalize it a lot better, and I haven't dedicated much time to thinking about it yet, but this seems more plausible to me right now.
I guess that if I were to prioritize thinking about this, I'd probably want to first think through the main goals of pledges and make sure a pledge like this is actually accomplishing something I think is important, instead of just allowing me to say something when pledges come up, etc. E.g. maybe the main benefit of a donation pledge is its public+memetic quality -- it encourages others to donate more. Or maybe it's about value drift, or something else, etc.
Update:
I’ve talked with the other moderators and looked at KArax’s other Forum activity. Based on this comment, their oldest comment (which is somewhat violent/aggressive), and KArax’s other content, we’ve decided to issue KArax a 6-month ban.
Because KArax's early Forum doesn't seem promising to me, I'd like to see a significant change if they come back to the Forum after the ban has passed. This means comments, posts, etc. should be civil, (reliably) on topic, and honest (without exaggerations). I expect that we'd ban KArax indefinitely if we saw more of this kind of off-topic/overstated/aggressive content.
As a reminder, bans affect the user, not the account — any other accounts KArax operates are also suspended. If you’d like, you can appeal here.
YouTube link here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WX_vN1QYgmE (it's embedded in the post, as JohnSnow points out — not sure if something is breaking for you?)
Transcript here: https://www.ted.com/talks/liv_boeree_the_dark_side_of_competition_in_ai/transcript
pinkfrog (and their associated account) has been banned for 1 month, because they voted multiple times on the same content (with two accounts), including upvoting pinkfrog's comments with their other account. To be a bit more specific, this happened on one day, and there were 12 cases of double-voting in total (which we’ll remove). This is against our Forum norms on voting and using multiple accounts.
As a reminder, bans affect the user, not the account(s).
If anyone has questions or concerns, please feel free to reach out, and if you think we made a mistake here, you can appeal the decision.
Multiple people on the moderation team have conflicts of interest with pinkfrog, so I wanted to clarify our process for resolving this incident. We uncovered the norm violation after an investigation into suspicious voting patterns, and only revealed the user’s identity to part of the team. The moderators who made decisions about how to proceed aren't aware of pinkfrog's real identity (they only saw anonymized information).