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Use this thread to share information about EA-related roles you are looking to fill!
We’d like to help applicants and hiring managers coordinate, so we’ve set up this thread, and another called Who wants to be hired? (we did this last in 2022[1]).
To add your ...
In a recent announcement, Manifold Markets say they will change the exchange rate for your play-money (called "Mana") from 1:100 to 1:1000. Importantly, one of the ways to use this Mana is to do charity donations.
TLDR: The CTA here is to log in to your Manifold account ...
Crosspost of my blog.
You shouldn’t eat animals in normal circumstances. That much is, in my view, quite thoroughly obvious. Animals undergo cruel, hellish conditions that we’d confidently describe as torture if they were inflicted on a human (or even a dog). No hamburger...
Thanks for the follow up, Matthew! Strongly upvoted.
My best guess is also that additional GHG emissions are bad for wild animals, but it has very low resilience, so I do not want to advocate for conservationism. My views on the badness of the factory-farming of birds are much more resilient, so I am happy with people switching from poultry to beef, although I would rather have them switch to plant-based alternatives. Personally, I have been eating plant-based for 5 years.
Moreover, as Clare Palmer argues
Just flagging this link seems broken.
...I think you have
I want to throw in a bit of my philosophy here.
Status note: This comment is written by me and reflects my views. I ran it past the other moderators, but they might have major disagreements with it.
I agree with a lot of Jason’s view here. The EA community is indeed much bigger than the EA Forum, and the Forum would serve its role as an online locus much less well if we used moderation action to police the epistemic practices of its participants.
I don’t actually think this that bad. I think it is a strength of the EA community that it is large enough and has sufficiently many worldviews that any central discussion space is going to be a bit of a mishmash of epistemologies.[1]
Some corresponding ways this viewpoint causes me to be reluctant to apply Habryka’s philosophy:[2]
Something like a judicial process is much more important to me. We try much harder than my read of LessWrong to apply rules consistently. We have the Forum Norms doc and our public history of cases forms something much closer to a legal code + case law than LW has. Obviously we’re far away from what would meet a judicial standard, but I view much of my work through that lens. Also notable is that all nontrivial moderation decisions get one or two moderators to second the proposal.
Related both to the epistemic diversity, and the above, I am much more reluctant to rely on my personal judgement about whether someone is a positive contributor to the discussion. I still do have those opinions, but am much more likely to use my power as a regular user to karma-vote on the content.
Some points of agreement:
Old users are owed explanations, new users are (mostly) not
Agreed. We are much more likely to make judgement calls in cases of new users. And much less likely to invest time in explaining the decision. We are still much less likely to ban new users than LessWrong. (Which, to be clear, I don’t think would have been tenable on LessWrong when they instituted their current policies, which was after the launch of GPT-4 and a giant influx of low quality content.)
I try really hard to not build an ideological echo chamber
Most of the work I do as a moderator is reading reports and recommending no official action. I have the internal experience of mostly fighting others to keep the Forum an open platform. Obviously that is a compatible experience with overmoderating the Forum into an echo chamber, but I will at least bring this up as a strong point of philosophical agreement.
Final points:
I do think we could potentially give more “near-ban” rate limits, such as the 1 comment/3 days. The main benefit of this I see is as allowing the user to write content disagreeing with their ban.
- ^
Controversial point! Maybe if everyone adopted my own epistemic practices the community would be better off. It would certainly gain in the ability to communicate smoothly with itself, and would probably spend less effort pulling in opposite directions as a result, but I think the size constraints and/or deference to authority that would be required would not be worth it.
- ^
Note that Habryka has been a huge influence on me. These disagreements are what remains after his large influence on me.
With the US presidential election coming up this year, some of y’all will probably want to discuss it.[1] I think it’s a good time to restate our politics policy. tl;dr Partisan politics content is allowed, but will be restricted to the Personal Blog category. On-topic policy discussions are still eligible as frontpage material.
- ^
Or the expected UK elections.
The last ten years have witnessed rapid advances in the science of animal cognition and behavior. Striking results have hinted at surprisingly rich inner lives in a wide range of animals, driving renewed debate about animal consciousness.
To highlight these advances...
Is it random that this appeared in the New York Times yesterday, or are the two related?
How Do We Know What Animals Are Really Feeling? - The New York Times (nytimes.com)
Regardless, it is great to see more realisation and communication around this topic. Most people just do not make any mental association between "food" and "animal suffering". One day this will all appear utterly barbaric, the way slavery appears barbaric to us today even though some highly reputed figures throughout history owned slaves.
The more communication we have around animal c...
Consider donating all or most of your Mana on Manifold to charity before May 1.
Manifold is making multiple changes to the way Manifold works. You can read their announcement here. The main reason for donating now is that Mana will be devalued from the current 1 USD:100 ...
Thanks for sharing this on the Forum!
If you (the reader) have donated your mana because of this quick take, I'd love it if you put a react on this comment.
This post is easily the weirdest thing I've ever written. I also consider it the best I've ever written - I hope you give it a chance. If you're not sold by the first section, you can safely skip the rest.
I
Imagine an alternate version of the Effective Altruism movement,...
Great post, and an interesting counterfactual history!
Hooray for moral trade.
Evolutionary debunking arguments feel relevant re the causal history of our beliefes.
Summary
For pandemics that aren’t ‘stealth’ pandemics (particularly globally catastrophic pandemics):
- Reason 1: Not All 'Detections' Are Made Equal: there can be significant variation in the level of information and certainty provided by different detection modalities (e.
Thank you for writing this article! As a complete newcomer to pandemic preparedness at large, I found this extremely useful and a great example of work that surfaces and questions often unstated assumptions.
Although I don't have enough expertise to provide much meaningful feedback, I did want to bring up some thoughts I had regarding your arguments in Reason 2. Your 44 hospitalization threshold in the numerical examples strikes me as reasonable, but it does also seem to me that the metagenomic sequencing of COVID-19 was related, if not a critical precondit...
CEA is hiring for someone to lead the EA Global program. CEA's three flagship EAG conferences facilitate tens of thousands of highly impactful connections each year that help people build professional relationships, apply for jobs, and make other critical career decisions.
This is a role that comes with a large amount of autonomy, and one that plays a key role in shaping a key piece of the effective altruism community’s landscape.
See more details and apply here!