The reason this is not 'right back where we started' is I think most people find it much easier to evaluate a single human (a task we practice all our lives at, and did in the ancestral environment) than to evaluate large organisations (a much more difficult skill, with worse feedback mechanisms, that did not exist in the ancestral environment).

Sure, that seems reasonable. Another point is that large groups may have competing internal factions, which could create a source of variability in their decision-making which makes their decisions harder to understand and predict.

Lower variability with the CEO approach should mean a smaller sample size is required to get a bead on their decision-making style.

BTW, did you get the private message I sent you regarding a typo in your original comment? Wondering if private messages are working properly.

As weird as it sounds, I think the downvote button should make you a bit less concerned with contribution quality. If it's obviously bad, people will downvote and read it less. If it's wrong without being obviously bad, then others likely share the same misconception, and hopefully someone steps in to correct it.

In practice, the failure mode for the forum seems to be devoting too much attention to topics that don't deserve it. If your topic deserves more attention, I wouldn't worry a ton about accidentally repeating known info? For one thing, it could be valuable spaced repetition. For another, discussions over time can help turn something over and look at it from various angles. So I suppose the main risk is making subject matter experts bored?

In some sense you could consider the signal/noise question separate from the epistemic hygiene question. If you express uncertainty properly, then in theory, you can avoid harming collective epistemics even for a topic you know very little about.

On the current margin, I actually suspect EAs should be deferring less and asking dumb questions more. Specific example: In a world where EA was more willing to entertain dumb questions, perhaps we could've discovered AI Pause without Katja Grace having to write a megapost. We don't want to create "emperor has no clothes" type situations. Right now, "EA is a cult" seems to be a more common outsider critique than "EAs are ignorant and uneducated".

I do think governance is very important, as EA's recent history has illustrated, and deserves way more discussion.

Outsiders cannot easily evaluate the morass of internal wikipedia discussions, but they could evaluate Jimbo

I'm skeptical of this argument, but I'm trying to steelman. Is the idea that I can form an opinion of Jimbo's character based on e.g. his tweets, and once I trust his character, I can trust him to adjudicate internal Wikipedia disputes?

Because if I'm forming my opinion of Jimbo by reading internal Wikipedia disputes -- which honestly seems like the best method -- we might be back where we started.

Wikipedia does run ArbCom elections, but you need a certain number of edits to vote. Presumably that additional context helps voters evaluate candidates. (EDIT: It could also worsen self-selection/organizational drift issues. I'm tempted to say self-selection is the main problem with controversial online discussion.)

EDIT: I suppose Larks' argument could also work if you simply empower the existing ArbCom with a broad mandate.

The other day I watched this heartbreaking video about Burundi, the world's poorest country. Have you thought about doing some sort of giveaway there?

GiveDirectly doesn't seem to operate in Burundi, so you might have to get creative. But getting creative could also make the video more interesting for your audience :-)

For example, instead of cash, perhaps you could offer "your choice out of the following X items". That would preserve the spirit of recipient-directed giving, collect interesting data, and make for an interesting Youtube video.

More generally, are you interested in video suggestions from people in the EA community, and if so what's the best way to get in touch? If you're interested, perhaps we could do a dedicated Beast Philanthropy video brainstorming thread here on the Forum :-)

This could lead to behaviour analogous to conscious behaviour in humans, but with a very different mechanism or purpose, which does not actually produce qualia. I do not know how we would be able to tell the difference, even in theory.

How about: Remove all text of humans discussing their conscious experiences (or even the existence of consciousness) from the AI's training set. See if it still claims to have internal experiences.

I don't think this is a perfect method:

• If it still talks about internal experiences, maybe it was able to extrapolate the ability to discuss internal experiences from text that wasn't removed.

• If it doesn't talk about internal experiences, maybe it has them and just lacks the ability to talk about them. Some animals are probably like this.

Finally, in principle I can imagine that ingesting text related to internal experiences is actually what causes an AI to learn to have them.

Weird idea: What if some forum members were chosen as "jurors", and their job is to read everything written during the debate week, possibly ask questions, and try to come to a conclusion?

I'm not that interested in AI welfare myself, but I might become interested if such "jurors" who recorded their opinion before and after made a big update in favor of paying attention to it.

To keep the jury relatively neutral, I would offer people the chance to sign up to "be a juror during the first week of August", before the topic for the first week of August is actually known.

How about the ratio of community age (or exp(community age)) to national population? See this comment

Instead of trying to identify a founding date for every country's EA community, maybe you could look at the year when it surpassed, say, 20 people in the survey. That data should be easier to find, and could also help address the issue of early false starts.

BTW I happened to see this comment which gives some interesting thoughts regarding why attrition in LMICs with small EA communities could be high. So my overall hypothesis at this point would be something like: the more EAs in your city, and the more EA funding that is available, the easier and more fun it gets to find out about EA and participate. If the circumstances are right, you can get exponential growth.

Yeah, given the GDP-per-capita graph shared by William the Kiwi, and Estonia being the home of one of EA's most generous donors, I suspect that availability of philanthropic funds may be the bottleneck for local EA growth.

It wouldn't surprise me if low-GDP countries have many stories like this one or this one, of motivated people struggling to obtain funding due to lack of connections with philanthropists. If true, that would be an unfortunate situation -- lower GDP per capita often goes with a lower cost of living, meaning you get more bang for your philanthropic buck, all else equal.

Maybe we need a new sort of "digital nomad EtG/grantmaker EA" who travels around, networking with EAs in the developing world to identify great giving opportunities. This could go well with a cause area like AI alignment which can be done anywhere and could benefit from fresh thinking:

Alignment researchers’ general models of the field are well-calibrated, but the fact that they don’t think the field is on track to solve alignment suggests that additional approaches should be pursued beyond what is currently being undertaken—a view which was also echoed continuously throughout alignment researchers’ free responses. We think this results lends additional credence to pursuing neglected approaches to alignment.

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/eToqPAyB4GxDBrrrf/key-takeaways-from-our-ea-and-alignment-research-surveys

Yeah this sounds right to me -- I suspect in many cases a high number will be a result of a few awesome and motivated organizers in that particular country.

[Edit: I've become less certain]

If I was on the CEA community-building team, I would be using data to try and identify top local EA organizers, then interview them and try to figure out what they are doing which works so well, then put together a guide based on that.