It will do a service to your reader if you choose a title that explains what your post is arguing.

Another relevant comment:

Overall a nice system card for Opus 4! It's a strange choice to contract Apollo to evaluate sabotage, get feedback that "[early snapshot] schemes and deceives at such high rates that we advise against deploying this model...." and then not re-contracting Apollo for final evals

I think we should keep our eye the most important role that online EA (and adjacent) platforms have played historically. Over the last 20 years, there has always been one or two key locations for otherwise isolated EAs and utilitarians to discover like-minds online, get feedback on their ideas, and then become researchers or real-life contributors. Originally, it was (various incarnations of) Felicifia, and then the EA Forum. The rationalist community benefited in similar ways from the extropians mailing list, SL4, Overcoming Bias and LessWrong. The sheer geographical coverage, and the element of in-depth intellectual engagement aren't practically replaceable by other community-building efforts.

I think that fulfilling this role is a lot more important than growing the EA community, and other goals that the EA Forum might have, and that it is worth doing until a better new venue comes along. Currently, I don't think a better venue exists. I don't think r/effectivegiving or LessWrong would be a great successor. You could make a case for Substack+Twitter, but that may flip to something else in a few years time, how people want to connect online can change completely on that kind of timescale. Overall, I think it important to keep things running for the next 5-10 as the future of EA and the future of online discussion declare themselves.

Of course, this role could be performed without a lot of new technology.

The other thing I wonder is: if the online team stopped stewarding the EA Forum's content, would it really turn into a mere bulletin board? I'm not so sure. I can imagine that plenty of people might continue to use the Forum to discuss EA matters and to post original research. If so, then this might be another way to cut costs with less change to the forum's core role, compared to declaring it a bulletin board or moving conversation to a different platform.

Nice, I'll look forward to reading this!

How is EAIF performing in the value proposition that it provides to funding applicants, such as the speed of decisions, responsiveness to applicants' questions, and applicants' reported experiences? Historically your sister fund was pretty bad to applicants, and some were really turned off by the experience.

I guess a lot of these faulty ideas come from the role of morality as a system of rules for putting up boundaries around acceptable behaviour, and for apportioning blameworthiness moreso than praiseworthiness. Similar to how the legal system usually gives individuals freedom so long as they're not doing harm, our moral system mostly speaks to harms (rather than benefits) from actions (rather than inaction). By extension, the basis of the badness of these harms has to be a violation of "rights" (things that people deserve not to have done to them). Insofar as morality serves as a series of heuristics for people to follow, having a negativity-bias and action-bias are not necessarily wrong. It causes problems, however, if it this distorted lens is used to make claims about intrinsic right and wrong, or the idea that non-existence is an ideal.

Another relevant dimension is that the forum (and Groups) are the most targeted to EAs, so they will be most sensitive to fluctuations in the size of the EA community, whereas 80k will be the least sensitive, and Events will be somewhere in-between.

Given this and the sharp decline in applications to events, it seems like the issue is really a decrease in the size of, or enthusiasm in the EA community, rather than anything specific to the forum.

I'm sure I have some thoughts, but to begin with, it would helpful for understanding what's going on if the dashboard would tell us how 2024 went for the events and groups teams.

Worth noting that although high EA salaries increase the risk to EA organisations, they reduce risk to EA individuals, because people can spend less than their full salary, thereby saving for a time when EA funding dries up.