I think if I end up writing something that's particularly EA-aligned, e.g. a cost-benefit analysis of some intervention, I'd do that. as is I'm happy to err on the side of not annoying people when promoting my stuff 😃 

Hi Sarah, 

In general I'm grateful that you've put a lot of thought into this, I think it shows in a high-quality forum experience. A few observations:

1. I agree that changing the default Karma settings is fine, in part because it's easy for users to revert.^[1]
2. As to churned forum users who forget the forum exists -- EA is not for everyone. It's ultimately some pretty serious questions and it attracts serious people. I know it's your job to worry about this, but for my money, I do not think that such folks were likely to have generated the kind of content we're looking for.
   1. We face an unavoidable sensitivity/specificity tradeoff in terms of attracting users. Right now things are slanted towards specificity rather than sensitivity. I like that because I am unapologetically picky about how I spend my time. I'd be less likely to contribute to a forum with a wider reach but a lower average quality of conversation. 

1. ^{^}

   Also I unironically like that you've changed the default but preserved the "Warning: Immediate karma updates may lead to over-updating on tiny amounts of feedback, and to checking the site frequently when you'd rather be doing something else."

I was just writing an email to a colleague about the difference between one-offs and repeated exposure. Just speculating here, but documentaries kind of are one-offs -- who in the world is going to watch Dominion a second time -- but op-eds, EA forum posts, etc. are more a a "repeated, spaced exposure" model of behavioral change. And that's going to mean a very different evaluation strategy.

As to personal connection to the material, you might enjoy 

Which basically tells people how much meat they're eating in comparison to a norm, and then gives them a 😃 or a :( depending on whether they're above or below average. So that's kind of an attempt to get people personally connected to the broader mission.

For more on this literature in general, see Meaningfully reducing meat consumption is an unsolved problem: meta-analysis 

👋 I have joined the modern world and am writing a Substack about research on ending factory farming 😃

Here's a post on a strong study about the effects of watching an especially upsetting documentary.

👋 thanks for all you do!

Regarding “There are various ways that the EA Forum falls short of other sites that better engage users, like Substack, Reddit, and Twitter” — I for one much prefer the forum to any of those platforms, and when you say “engage,” I hear “try to elicit compulsive behavior from.” I know that’s not what you mean, but for twitter and Reddit in particular, engagement looks like addiction for a lot of folks, as well as a profit model driven by outrage & slop. I would not like to see the forum imitate them.

Put differently, a lot of platforms are designed at the outset for specialists & connoisseurs, and when they get (pressured to become) big, they lose what’s special about them and just end up shoving short-form video content in an endless scroll in front of an undifferentiated mass of users. I don’t think folks generally want this when they start platforms, but it seems to happen when they heed the siren’s call of engagement. I like that the forum is still for a small, specialized group. (Likewise I hope the forum doesn’t move to Reddit.)

I see this issue as:

1. you're trying to gain traction among EAs
2. EAs have a norm of reaching out to groups for comment before publishing criticism of them
3. By not following that norm, you are alienating yourself from the community you're trying to woo

As to whether this norm is good or not, that ultimately boils down to the assumption of good faith. EAs tend to make that assumption about people who talk the talk, sometimes to our discredit.  I'd be interested in more discussion of this assumption, which I think is part of the "implicit curriculum" of joining the community. But adopting a more adversarial stance, and expecting the community to get onboard without actually litigating the underlying point, seems unlikely to succeed and therefore inconsistent with your goals.

Another thought: I also object to the maximalist marketing that nonprofits often adopt when they solicit donations. But from their POV, it's a total prisoners' dilemma: everyone else is pushing the boundaries, so if you don't, you get left behind. I don't see how criticizing one group, or even a handful of them, is going to change that dynamic. It would require culture change, which is a hard problem.

I think for the purposes of this comparison, non-profit and charity are probably not interchangeable, in the sense that a marginal donor with 5K to spend is almost certainly not going to donate that to Kaiser Permanente (although $1M does get you naming rights at a smaller chain!). So I guess whatever we're defining the average charity as, the distribution should probably exclude these big institutions that are nonprofit for a bunch of tax code reasons but in reality are just providing goods and services to clients in exchange for money. 

(colleges are an edge case here)

What is the average charity? I don't have a good intuition for what it looks like, is, how big it is, what it works on etc.^[1] I think pinning this down will help make the comparison clearer. Will, how do you think about this? 

1. ^{^}

   Sidenote: At least in the US, I would be open to the argument that the average charity -- defined as being the midpoint of some multidimensional array of size, cause area, staffing, location, etc. -- produces literally zero charitable benefit on net, and might even be doing harm. You might not share this intuition, but we have a long list of mostly null effects for pro-social interventions once they're evaluated rigorously (enterprise zones in California, medicaid enrollment in oregon, head start, etc. -- any of which you might take issue with but I think the broader point is defensible that on average, interventions don't work.) If the average social utility gain of a given nonprofit America is zero, then I don't know how we're going to say some other cause is X or Y times "better" than that. The seeing eye dog vs curing blindness comparison is a lot more coherent, I think.

    

Anyone else get a pig butchering scam attempt lately via DM on the forun? 

I just got the following message 

> Happy day to you, I am [X] i saw your profile today and i like it very much,which makes me to write to you to let you know that i am interested in you,therefore i will like you to write me back so that i will tell you further about myself and send you also my picture for you to know me physically. 

[EMAIL]

I reported the user on their profile and opened a support request but just FYI

I think that's a good idea -- or just post as yourself (?)

(Ofc I think I and others understand that things are in flux and this is all NBD)