I think more people should consider leaving more (endorsed) short, nice comments on the Forum + LW when they like a post, especially for newer authors or when someone is posting something “brave” / a bit risky. It’s just so cheap to build this habit and I continue to think that sincere gratitude is underrated in ~all online spaces. I like that @Ben_West🔸 does this frequently :)

Reminder that there is an EA Focusmate group, where you can do 50 minute coworking calls with other EAs. Also, if you're already in the group, please give any feedback on it here or via DM.

Just wanted to share that, in addition to EA Opportunities, the CEA Online Team has also taken on EA Virtual Programs (previously it was part of the CEA Groups Team). Currently this mostly just means that @Cian M has moved over to the Online Team, but we plan to invest more resources into it than before. Keep an eye on the Forum for future updates! :)

Bird flu is probably fine right now. Let's not cry wolf. I've been looking into  H5N1 bird flu and built this dashboard (https://birdflurisk.com) To me the indicators suggest it's likely gonna be fine. You can see the forecasts are pretty low and even if these resolve positive it probably won't be a big deal to humans (see note in a sec) I think it's worth becoming well calibrated on risk ie only crying wolf when there is a wolf and right now I see no wolf, so as a community we improve our calibration by saying "bird flu will almost certainly be fine" That said, it probably will involve farms full of chickens being tortured to death if they catch the disease. This is tragic. I suggest it requires a different comms strategy though.  Also there may be inflation with the political ramifications of that.  Let me know what would make the dashboard more useful to you.

The CEA Online Team (which runs this Forum) has finalized our OKRs for the first half-quarter of 2025 — here's a link to the new doc for a new year.