A pattern I've recently encountered twice in different contexts is that I would recommend a more junior (but with relevant expertise) staff for a talk and I've been asked if I could not recommend a more "senior" profile instead.

I thought it was with the best of intentions, but it still rubbed me the wrong way. First, this diminishes the expertise of my staff, who have demonstrated mastery over their subject matter. Second, this systematically denies young people of valuable experience and exposure. You cannot become a "senior" profile without access to these speaking opportunities!

Please give speaking opportunities to less experienced professionals too!

It's really hard to say.

I am concerned that many projects are being set up in a way that does not follow good governance practices and leaves their members exposed to conflict and unpleasant situations. I would want to encourage people to try to embed themselves in a more formal structure with better resources and HR management. For example, I would be excited about community builders over the world setting a non-profit governance structure, where they are granted explicit rights as workers that encompass mental healthcare and a competent HR department to handle interpersonal conflict. This would arguably be an improvement over the current grant systems, that offers very little job security and care for workers.

Relatedly, I have updated very negatively on the ability of the EA community to solve interpersonal conflict and harassment. This means that I am now recommending aggravated community members to resort to external counsel and support, including psychologists and the police, than to resort to internal resources like the CEA Community Health team.

What is more, these past few months I have understood very viscerally that many people, specially women, are uncomfortable talking publicly about situations that have affected them. This is exacerbated in the case where they are applying for EA jobs or funding. And it hides the magnitude of the community problems.

Before motivating growth in the Spanish-speaking community I would like to see these problems addressed or at least considered. Major obstacles are that 1) there isn't currently anyone I trust who has availability to take on that project and 2) there isn't a lot of buy in at the moment for more organized efforts within the community. So I think we will likely just default to the current state of affairs, where we work as an ecosystem of related projects.

I'm pretty into the idea of putting more effort into concrete areas.

I think the biggest reason for is one which is not in your list: it is too easy to bikeshed EA as an abstract concept and fool yourself into thinking that you are doing something good.

Working on object level issues helps build expertise and makes you more cognizant of reality. Tight feedback loops are important to not delude yourself.

I mean rankings like https://www.metaculus.com/rankings/?question_status=resolved&timeframe=3month

I agree that the potential for this exists, and if it was an extended practice it would be concerning. Have you seen people who claim to have a good forecasting record engage with pseudonym exploitation though?

My understanding is that most people who claim this have proof records associated to a single pseudonym user in select platforms (eg Metaculus), which evades the problem you suggest.

Ranking the risks is outside the scope of our work. Interpreting the metaculus questions sounds interesting, though it is not obvious how to disentangle the scenarios that forecasters had in mind. I think the Forecasting Research Institute is doing some related work, surveying forecasters on different risks.

Forum style most definitely

I basically agree with the core message. I'll go one step further and say that existential risk has unnecessary baggage - as pointed out by Carl Shulman and Elliot Thornley the Global Catastrophic Risk and CBA framing rescues most of the implications without resorting to fraught assumptions about the long term future of humanity.

Double-checking research seems really important and neglected. This can be valuable even if you don't rerun the experiments and just try to replicate the analyses.

A couple of years ago, I was hired to review seven econometric papers, and even as an outsider to the field it was easy to contribute to find flaws and assess the strength of the papers.

Writing these reviews seems like a great activity, especially for junior researchers who want to learn good research practices while making a substantial contribution.

Donor lotteries have died out? RCG got its seed funding from a donor lottery last December.